An international flavor pervades this year’s Canadian Spectrum at Hot Docs, running April 22 to May 1 at five screening venues in Toronto.

Nearly one-third of the 26 films in the Canuck program focus on stories that take place outside of Canada. The Middle East is particularly popular, providing the setting for Elle Flanders’ Zero Degrees of Separation, Stephen Marshall’s Battleground: 21 Days on the Empire’s Edge, Eylem Kaftan’s Vendetta Song and Tahani Rached’s Soraida, A Woman of Palestine.

Hot Docs senior programmer David McIntosh says he has been particularly impressed by ‘the way in which Canadian documentarians have taken up this question of their position in the larger world.’

‘[This year’s films show] how Canadians are operating out in the rest of the world, or Canadians who go out into the world and come back,’ he continues. ‘And, in some cases, it involves going to another part of the world and simply looking at issues there from another point of view.’

The timing is interesting with regards to the Canadian Television Fund. Recent CTF rule amendments regarding doc financing see the funder offering licence fee top-ups to projects made by Canadians, regardless of the nationality of the project’s subject matter. But to qualify for more valuable CTF equity investment, docs must be set predominantly in Canada and address ‘Canadian themes and subject matters,’ a source of continuing frustration for many docmakers.

‘I think it’s such an archaic way of understanding how we live in the world,’ says Flanders. Her feature Zero Degrees of Separation, which screened at Berlin, looks at the Middle East conflict through the day-to-day lives of two couples – one gay and one lesbian, and both made up of a Palestinian and an Israeli.

‘While I think it’s so important for us to be supporting Canadian stories, Canadian lives and Canadian subjects, I also think that as Canadians, we are expansive people,’ she says. ‘And to suggest that as Canadians we exist only in this one plane of Canada is nuts.’

Financing the $300,000 doc proved challenging for Flanders, who began with funding from the National Film Board’s Filmmakers Assistance Program and various foundations and arts councils. Toward the end of production, the NFB came on board as a full-fledged coproducer. (It is one of seven docs involving the NFB at Hot Docs.) However, given the international nature of her film’s subject matter, Flanders is confident about securing broadcast sales here and abroad.

Gisèle Gordon’s The Tunguska Project is one of those films McIntosh mentions involving Canadians abroad. In this case, Cree playwright Floyd Favel leaves Saskatchewan for Siberia to investigate a mysterious, massive explosion that occurred there in 1908, and what its effect has been on the native Evenki people there.

Perhaps the film’s not-entirely-Canadian subject matter put up a funding roadblock – it received a CTF licence fee top-up, but not equity. Another factor that made financing a challenge, according to Gordon, was the fact that the film marks her feature directorial debut.

Tunguska’s $194,000 budget was pieced together through a classic jigsaw puzzle of sources, which also included Bravo! (which plans a summer broadcast), the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Council for the Arts, Rogers Documentary Fund, Independent Film Channel, and Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund.

‘[I got] little bits from each place,’ Gordon says. ‘Nobody wanted to take a huge chance. A lot of people just thought it was a crazy idea that would never actually happen.’

But, as is the case with many doc filmmakers, Gordon’s concerns about her film’s marketability took a back seat to her creative desire to get it made.

‘If I had had to remortgage my house and sell everything I owned, I would have done the film that way,’ she says.

Min Sook Lee’s Hogtown: The Politics of Policing touches on themes of diversity – such as the black community’s relations with the police force – but is set entirely in Canada. In fact, the film is limited mostly to Toronto City Hall, as it tracks a pivotal six months behind the scenes at the Toronto Police Services Board.

The $300,000 doc is backed principally by the Toronto 1 Priority Program Fund, meeting that station’s mandate for airing programs of local interest, and likely intended to deflate criticism that its productions are fluffy. With the caster on board and Cancon criteria met, CTF came on board with EIP, with the rest of the budget met through tax credits.

But making a cinema vérité piece for a broadcaster brought with it its own concessions. While Hot Docs audiences will see a 96-minute version of the film produced in fly-on-the-wall style for theatrical release, Lee says she also has a 44-minute cut in the works for Toronto 1.

‘It’s radically different in style and treatment. There is no way that the style of what we cut for the festival would work on television,’ Lee says. ‘Conventional television requires something that’s narrated and more pared down, and we have half the time to tell the story.’

This year’s Canadian Spectrum films were selected from more than 300 submissions by McIntosh and fellow programmer Lynne Fernie. There will be 13 world premieres, two North American preems and three Canadian preems. Of the chosen films, a dozen are feature-length, followed by 10 mid-lengths and four shorts. Scheduling information is available on the Hot Docs website.

-www.hotdocs.ca

-www.zerodegreesofseparation.com