The surging popularity of documentary films has brought slicker and more expensive products onto the market and into fests including the Vancouver International Film Festival, according to Diane Burgess, who programs VIFF’s Canadian Images section.

But there’s no single dominant style or trend. If anything, she says, the doc explosion has emboldened nonfiction filmmakers to try anything from postmodern historical recreations to films in which the filmmaker barely intrudes at all.

‘This year I have noticed a couple of cinema vérité films, which you don’t often see,’ says Burgess, who has programmed a total of 16 Canadian docs, including six features. For vérité, she cites Allan King’s Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company, a study of dementia filmed over four months at a geriatric center; as well as War Hospital, a chronicle of life and death at the Red Cross medical mission in northern Kenya.

Burgess suggests that King’s previous film, Dying at Grace, may have sparked a mini-revival of ‘fly on the wall’ docs by showing how powerful it can be to remove barriers such as narration, so that virtually nothing stands between the viewer and the subject. Burgess sees the appeal for an audience benumbed by the contrivances of reality television.

‘Dying at Grace was an indication of how far reality TV has traveled from that approach,’ says Burgess. ‘It’s powerful to see something where the filmmaker truly isn’t intervening.’

David Christensen, the Calgary filmmaker who made War Hospital with Englishman Damien Lewis, says a vérité approach was envisioned for his project from the outset – back when their idea to film the world’s largest medical refugee camp won a $15,000 pitching prize at the 2001 Banff Television Festival. Japanese broadcaster NHK, which sponsored the prize, became an investor, followed by the National Film Board.

Made for $650,000, War Hospital was shot on HD, and a 90-minute theatrical version was transferred to 35mm film. Christensen says he’s being pressed to cut a 60-minute version for wider broadcast distribution, which may require abandoning the vérité approach and incorporating narration.

‘I guess my heart and soul is in the 90-minute cut,’ he says. ‘That’s the version that fairly represents the experience of being at war in northern Kenya.’

Likewise, Rhombus Media’s Five Days in September, a behind-the-scenes portrait of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, was shot with unobtrusive video cameras and assembled without narration.

‘I’ve never once used it in a documentary,’ says September director Barbara Willis Sweete. ‘Narration tells you what to look at, so you don’t watch for the information in the images.’

Instead, there are chapter titles to heighten the drama, as the formerly tottering orchestra meets its new conductor, Peter Oundjian, and performs with classical music stars including Yo-Yo Ma and Renée Fleming.

Bravo!, which licensed the $450,000 doc, will broadcast it Oct. 15. Willis Sweete doubts there is much appeal for foreign broadcasters, even though Norway bit based on a rough cut. However, with an eye to the international retail market, Rhombus is planning a DVD release.

‘That’s a new thing for us,’ says Willis Sweete. ‘We’re going to try to shepherd that ourselves. We’re in the middle of honing down hours and hours of [footage] that couldn’t fit into the structure of a 72-minute film but will make very good bonus material.’

In terms of style, David McIlwraith’s The Lynching of Louie Sam is almost the opposite of vérité. The Vancouver filmmaker uses historical recreations to tell the true story of an American lynch mob that crossed the border in 1884 to capture and kill a wrongly accused native boy.

But the actors playing the historical characters are interviewed to provide a modern context for relations between Canadian governments and native people. McIlwraith says he’s portraying a pivotal historical period when those relations were more respectful and cooperative.

The 52-minute film was mostly shot on Super 16, with transitions between the recreations and modern-day interviews originated on a Sony DSR-PD150 camcorder.

‘These moments are used to ‘expose the ruse,’ so to speak, showing the film crew and contemporary people standing around watching the historical events,’ explains McIlwraith.

Made for $325,000, the doc’s principal broadcasters are History Television and APTN, though it will also air on CBC Vancouver.

Other high-profile Canadian docs at VIFF include Robin Neinstein’s Souvenir of Canada, a trek through late-century Canadian kitsch inspired by Douglas Coupland’s book and art installation; and Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, codirected by doc subject Sam Dunn. Seville International sold the latter film to both the U.S. and the U.K. at the Toronto fest.

On the international scene, VIFF is touting the world premiere of Banking on Heaven, a U.S. doc that purports to expose child rape, welfare fraud and systematic mind control in a cult of Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints.

A good sign for the state of docs is that VIFF sold 50,000 tickets to its nonfiction offerings last year.

‘The audience is quite savvy about going to see films that don’t have distributors – that will never have a theatrical release,’ says Burgess. ‘They know they can make other choices on any other Friday or Saturday night at the movie theater.’

A number of doc features, including King’s Memory for Max, will compete for the 13th annual NFB Documentary Award.