Reality might seem to be a liability at the Toronto International Film Festival, an international showcase for dramatic features. But the festival has long invited Canadian documentary makers into the tent, and this year is featuring five feature-length documentaries and a handful of homegrown shorts in its Perspective Canada series.

Less is more, insists doc maker Jennifer Baichwal, who argues international distributors are keen to screen documentaries in Toronto precisely because there are so few of them in the overall lineup.

‘At Hot Docs, you’re inundated. In this case, there’s more of a spotlight because there are fewer docs,’ Baichwal says.

In 1998, Baichwal snagged three distribution deals for Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles after it screened that year at the Toronto festival.

‘Toronto is not a market for documentaries. We didn’t expect much to happen, but we got theatrical deals for Japan, the U.S. and Canada. That was a total surprise,’ she adds.

Her latest documentary, The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia, will receive its world premiere in Toronto.

Montreal filmmaker Catherine Martin (Mariages), who is bringing her latest work, the 32-minute Ocean, a film about a train journey between Montreal and Halifax, expresses amazement at how Toronto audiences embrace short documentaries.

She recalls a full house four years ago in Toronto for Les Dames du 9e, (Ladies of the Ninth Floor), a look at waitresses who once worked in the ninth-floor restaurant of the Eaton’s store in downtown Montreal.

‘I was really impressed by the reaction,’ she says. ‘I presented other short films at the [Montreal] World Film Festival, and was disappointed that few people went to see the films.’

Martin insists Toronto audiences have picked up on the notion that documentaries are another way to represent reality, aside from traditional dramas.

Vancouver-based filmmaker Nettie Wild has her latest documentary, FIX: The Story of an Addicted City, about Vancouver heroin addicts, receiving its world premiere at Toronto this year.

Wild recalled the Toronto festival screening of her last documentary, A Place Called Chiapas, a film about the Zapatista movement in Mexico, being helped by the presence of a young Zapatista weaver and revolutionary, 4-foot-8 and all charm, who impressed the Toronto audience.

‘Having a woman from Chiapas with me for the opening helped us poke our nose in with a teeny film because the audience knew the people in the documentary were real, they weren’t made up, and that we were dealing with something so immediate and huge,’ Wild recalls.

Alanis Obomsawin’s Is The Crown At War With Us?, another Canadian social-issue documentary at Toronto, is a National Film Board chronicle of Mi’gmaq fishermen battling federal fisheries officials off Atlantic Canada in the summer of 2000.

Obomsawin, who was last at the festival in 1993 with the award-winning Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, insists unspooling her latest film in Toronto is crucial as the bitterly fought fishing dispute has yet to be resolved.

‘No matter what happens, all people can have a better understanding [of the dispute]. You get to know the people, the courage they have,’ she says.

The documentary makers also note that their films cover many of the subjects and use many of the film techniques that are found in traditional feature films.

Ryan Feldman points out that Folk, his half-hour film about his ill grandmother and his parents’ decision to euthanize their dog that will unspool at the festival, became as much performance as reality.

‘My parents, myself and my grandmother, we all became these characters to me, and when you put those things into one form, they play off each other and you start to see the performance aspect of a documentary,’ Feldman says.

Feldman’s intensely personal film includes a camera dogging his parents and grandmother around, prompting calls to switch the camera off.

All of which points up, as always, the predatory relationship of filmmaker and subject inherent in the documentary format.

This theme of art and accountability is also reflected in Baichwal’s The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adam’s Appalachia, a biopic about famed Kentucky photographer Shelby Lee Adams.

Adams’ photographs of Appalachian locals have invited controversy for apparently perpetuating stereotypes about ‘hillbillies,’ forever seen as violent and in-bred.

Adams defends his work, insisting his camera is capturing real people in real situations, eschewing any manipulation or sensationalism.

This either/or debate is ripe for Baichwal’s own sense of artistic representation: ‘It is problematic, but fascinating and incredible photography,’ she says of Adams’ body of work.

Baichwal adds that she came to respect the Appalachian people for daring to turn their backs on mainstream America, despite their poverty and isolation.

‘I’m fascinated by people who have rejected mainstream American culture. Paul Bowles is one. There’s also the Appalachians, a region that has remained resilient in the face of U.S. popular culture,’ she says.

Then there are the documentaries that defy definition for their stylized, fragmentary narrative, and layered use of archival material and flashbacks.

A case in point is Mike Hoolbloom’s Tom, an experimental film about Tom Chomont, a New York photographer battling AIDS and Parkinson’s Disease and a friend of the director.

Hoolbloom makes full use of found and newly shot footage, archival film and home movies to capture his friend’s life, and looming death, against the backdrop of New York City over the last century.

The filmmaker says Tom began initially from selfish designs. ‘If I would make a film with or about Tom, I could spend time with him.’

Both artists share the same fate – Hoolbloom also has AIDS.

‘When you don’t know when the end is coming, it’s a great motivator,’ he says of his prodigious film career. ‘It’s caused me to make more films than I should have, lending an urgency to expression, producing stories that need to be told.’

A two-time winner of the best short film prize at TIFF, Hoolbloom has seen his career very much propelled forward by the Toronto festival.

‘As a very marginal filmmaker, what’s not possible are extravagant TV deals or selling foreign rights, those things attached to feature film making,’ Hoolbloom says.

‘Those [Toronto] awards were a tremendous boost, more than just peer acknowledgement. Those awards helped cement more career,’ he adds.

In all, Hoolbloom has had 16 films in Toronto, making him the filmmaker with the most features or shorts in the festival, excluding spotlight directors. His work is typical of the crop of factual films in Toronto each year in that they are auteur-driven, rather than profit-driven.

Another case in point is Larry Peloso’s Prom Fight – The Marc Hall Story, the true-life story of a gay teen winning a court battle with his local Catholic school board that enabled him to take his boyfriend to his high school prom.

Peloso recalls in March finding himself suddenly out of work as a creative director and contacting a young Marc Hall, then clashing on principle with the school board.

‘I had no preconceived notion other than to chat, to give him my support,’ he recalls.

Before long, Peloso and a camera were following Hall behind the scenes from school board meetings to courtrooms and eventually his high school prom, with the international media kept at bay.

He adds his aim was to treat the Marc Hall battle as no news story, but as a whole story, despite a media frenzy. ‘I quickly saw that we were getting the story behind the story. I would spend time with Marc and his family, and see the 30-second sound bite on the TV news and know there was so much more to this story.’

Peloso adds that he abandoned any pursuit of objectivity in his film after finding little cooperation from the school board.