The second annual Toronto Documentary Forum, held as part of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (May 1-6), has come and gone for another year, and although no money has changed hands yet, organizers speak in glowing terms of its success.

Michaelle McLean, director of the TDF, sees the interest in the forum, which brings producers with a project to fund together with broadcasters, as a testament to the changing face of doc funding.

‘International financing is more important to the financing of a project than it was 10 years ago,’ says McLean.

The forum, which only accepts for consideration those projects that already have a broadcaster aboard, included 65 commissioning editors and programming and acquisitions executives from broadcasters in Australia, the U.S., the U.K., Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Finland.

Hot Docs executive director Chris McDonald says this year’s TDF was ‘a marked improvement on last year’s. The feedback we’ve had is that the quality of projects [being pitched] is stronger. Commissioning editors think we’ve set this track record now and it’s a destination that works for broadcasters and that helps in attracting great talent.’

As for reaction from the American attendees and the pitchers TDF organizers made a point of attracting, McDonald says: ‘They’ve been very positive. It’s a unique opportunity for them to work with Canadian and European commissioning editors. The TDF is helping them become more comfortable with the notion of international coproduction and also in acquiring projects in addition to prebuying.’

Norm Bolen, who moderated two of the four sessions, was pleased with both the quality of the attendees and the strength of the material pitched.

‘I thought the projects were pretty high quality, generally. I was quite impressed by them; a number got a very good response from the commissioning editors. I think there was a great turnout [of commissioning editors]. We got all the major players there, including the Americans, the French and the British,’ says Bolen.

He singles out two projects as attracting particular interest: Ghosts of Attica, pitched by Brad Lichtenstein and David Van Taylor of Lumiere Productions, which looks at the fallout, three decades down the line, of the riots at Attica Prison; and Two Towns of Jasper from Marco Williams and Whitney Dow of Two Tone Productions, which examines in turn the world of whites and the world of blacks in the Texas town of Jasper, where James Byrd was dragged behind a pickup truck to his death by three white people.

Adds Bolen: ‘People are getting better at pitching and becoming more familiar with this format. Before, this was a purely European phenomenon, a lot of North Americans haven’t been exposed to it.

‘You can’t survive as an independent producer without working in the international marketplace, and the TDF helps that happen. It’s a business event.’ *