In 1999, a farmer in the tiny French village of Pozieres hooked the belt of an Australian soldier, buried since 1916, with his plow and lifted the skeletal remains right out of the ground. In fact, such was the devastation clustered about the hamlet during the First World War that unexploded munitions and uniformed bodies still surface regularly.

‘This tiny little village became extremely important to capture, so for an area the size of a large suburban shopping centre, 23,000 Australians were killed or maimed,’ says Australian filmmaker Wain Fimeri. ‘It’s one of those great unknown Australian stories. It’s a unique Australian story about a 20th century tragedy, even though it’s touching to people all over the world.’

It’s fitting then that Fimeri’s documentary, Pozieres, will be among the featured Australian films at Hot Docs.

The festival, which focuses on a different nation each year, has swung around to the other end of the earth for this year’s National Spotlight Programme, fielding 10 Australian-made documentaries, most of them Canadian premieres. The presentation at Hot Docs is the reciprocation of an exchange of sorts that began last year with 12 Canadian producers and directors attending the Australian International Documentary Conference in Adelaide.

Pozieres is not remembered in the same way that other military disasters – like Gallipoli – are, Fimeri says, because ‘it was so extreme, so insensate and so stupid, there was nothing you could salvage from it. The only reaction to it was grief, which has faded now. It swept Australian society in a way that nothing ever had before.’ In fact, although the battle has faded from contemporary consciousness, the name Pozieres is commemorated in street and town names all over Australia, and as the middle name of Fimeri’s grandmother.

The film, which draws all dialogue from letters and diaries, examines ‘the effect that the village had on Australians at home. It’s as if we put a film crew in a time machine, sent them back to 1916, gathered a whole lot of footage, came back and cut it together,’ says Fimeri, who will be in attendance at the festival.

‘Every time we meet a person in Pozieres, the narrator gives a little precis of his or her life: like, ‘This is Dan Perry, writing in a letter to his wife. He’s a carpenter from Adelaide; he will be killed in five months’; or ‘Here’s a bookbinder from North Sydney; he will survive the war but will lose his left leg.”

Aside from the action on the battleground, life back home in Australia gets a look-in in the form of an examination of the internment of German-Australians and those with German sounding names.

Another Australian offering, Tosca, by Trevor Graham, who will also be in attendance at the festival, takes viewers inside one of the great internationally recognized Australian icons, the Sydney Opera House, for a behind-the-scenes look at the staging of Puccini’s opera. Graham says the film is ‘about people under the stress and strain of a three-week deadline,’ mixed with the human drama just under the surface and the opera itself. Two young men new to opera have lead roles and come up against a highly experienced diva ‘who knows the opera like the back of her hand’ but may be playing her role for the last time. ‘There’s lots of drama, lots of tension, but they’ve got to get this on stage in three weeks – it’s really about how people work together when they’re stressed out. The story of the opera is fantastic, the music is wonderful, there’s great characters and great conflict in the opera – there’s drama in the scenes and drama behind the scenes. The dramatic moments in the opera are interlaced with behind the scene echoes.

‘We were given access to observe people in a moment of crisis,’ Graham continues. ‘The audience appreciates it because they feel like they’re getting let in to a world that they don’t get to see much. We don’t often get to see what’s going on behind the facade.’

Graham, who has been coming to Hot Docs since 1997, raves about the event. ‘It’s a festival that’s grown significantly in the last two years.’

Fimeri concurs, saying the Toronto festival is ‘very highly regarded. If you make a doc, it’s the gig you try for.’