Two years ago, director Barry Stevens presented the pitch for his film Offspring at the Toronto Documentary Forum, Hot Docs’ flagship market event. Not only did this exercise provide Stevens with a creative boost, it helped the CBC-backed production secure international cofinancing.

While the TDF brought direct funding from VPRO (Dutch Public Television), the interest generated helped make Offspring an award-winning documentary seen worldwide. Many distributors and broadcasters at Stevens’ pitch kept an eye on Offspring’s progress, and the film was sold to various international broadcasters, including BBC, once it was completed the following year.

A personal film about being born through artificial insemination, Offspring, produced by Barna-Alper Productions for CBC’s Witness, documents Stevens’ search for his biological father and half siblings. It won the Audience Award at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam in November 2001 and can be seen at Hot Docs this year.

The TDF is a closed-door, roundtable pitch forum that helps independent producers raise cofinancing, and has garnered producers more than $2.5 million since it began two years ago. Other market events at Hot Docs, which runs April 26 to May 5 at various Toronto venues, include Rendezvous, The Doc Shop and Cyber Pitch.

‘Documentary festivals are the best original marketing device for independent filmmakers,’ says U.S. cinema verite pioneer Frederick Wiseman, who will be presented with the lifetime achievement award at Hot Docs’ closing-night awards presentation,

It was good press at the 1967 New York Film Festival that helped Wiseman find distribution for his first film, the controversial Titicut Follies, which exposed disturbing practices at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Hot Docs’ Canadian Spectrum program kicks off with the world premiere of director Kevin McMahon’s McLuhan’s Wake, which tracks the life and work of communications theorist Marshall McLuhan. The film is one of 30 homegrown documentaries selected from 312 submissions.

The new Focus On section of the program will highlight the work of one Canadian filmmaker; this year it will feature six early works by Nunavut director Zacharias Kunuk, whose Antanarjuat (The Fast Runner) won six Genies.

David MacIntosh, programmer for the Canadian Spectrum, says the number of submissions this year is in keeping with previous festivals, but that more of this year’s Canuck films, about one-third, come from first-time filmmakers. ‘Some of the films are very independent and some have been funded through the standard mechanisms,’ he says. The festival will include 15 documentaries by first-time directors from around the world.

MacIntosh adds that fewer first-person Canadian docs were submitted than he expected. ‘It seems that a lot of people have moved to a variety of formats, either letting the subject speak for themselves or using some form of narration,’ he notes.

But on the global scene, Marc Glassman, programmer for Hot Docs’ International Showcase, was struck by the large number of highly personal, first-person documentaries submitted.

The International Showcase features 43 films from 22 countries. Glassman says there were more than 750 submissions this year, about 150 more than in 2001. ‘The increase is due to the festival’s increasing international reputation,’ he says.

Submissions tend to be highest from regions that have been in Hot Docs’ National Spotlight in previous years – Australia, France and the Nordic countries.

Although Glassman would like to see more films coming from the Middle East, Iran is particularly well represented this year, with three of its 12 submissions included in the showcase.

The National Spotlight focuses on Germany. ‘Germany is the largest market for Canadian documentary programming,’ says Chris McDonald, the festival’s executive director. Hot Docs will feature a total of 11 films by German directors, nine in the National Spotlight.

Overall, the selection of German films is distinguished by high production values. All but one in the National Spotlight were shot on 35mm, compared to fewer than half in the International Showcase.

The festival opens with the Canadian premiere of Blue Vinyl from New York directors Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold, and finishes with the Toronto premiere of Nisha Pahluja’s Bollywood Bound, a National Film Board production that follows young Canadians to Mumbai, India in search of stardom.

The lighter side of the festival returns with Moc Docs, featuring seven absurd shorts – including Shriek of the South Shore Yeti, about a fiddle-playing Sasquatch – selected from a nationwide script contest. The mocumentaries, which were prepped, shot on digital camcorders and edited in under one month, will be screened with feature-length docs before appearing on CBC’s Newsworld Rough Cuts.

Meanwhile, in B.C., DOXA, Vancouver’s first documentary film and video festival, kicks off May 22 and will screen 36 film and video titles over five evenings. The festival features several thematic programs that offer a critical examination of mass media and consumer culture.

-www.hotdocs.ca

-www.vcn.bc.ca/doxa