The latest offering from Allan King headlines a half-dozen Canadian feature docs making their world premieres at TIFF2006, up from four last year. A total of 10 Canuck feature docs will unspool at the fest.

‘I think you’re going to see that documentaries have a bigger prominence than ever before,’ says TIFF international documentary programmer Thom Powers.

Forty-five docs from around the world will screen at TIFF this year – 34 in Real to Reel and the rest peppered throughout other programs, including, for the first time in 14 years, a couple of Gala Presentations. These are, from the U.S., Dixie Chicks – Shut Up and Sing by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck and the polar bear doc The White Planet by Thierry Piantanida and Thierry Ragobert, a France/Canada copro, both of which make their world premieres.

Revered docmaker King’s EMPz 4 Life screens in Masters, as did his Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company last year. King, celebrating 50 years making docs, has won a slew of awards over that time, including the Prix d’art et d’essai at Cannes and Hot Docs’ Lifetime Achievement Award.

King found the title for his most recent doc scrawled on a wall in East Toronto, where the story unfolds. The graffiti has since been covered by a developer’s wall, but its artist and three other black teens from the ‘Emps’ suburb form the subjects of the director’s latest work.

In EMPz 4 Life, King, aged 76, explores racism, an issue he says he’s been thinking about since he was five.

‘Racism is unbearable,’ he says. ‘The object of the film is to enable people to break free of the stereotypes with which they view racism.’

For 12 weeks beginning in March, King captured the experiences of the four teenagers and their interaction with Brian Henry, a man who spent two years in prison and who now works to help youth living in the Emps find a better life.

Gaining their trust was central to making the film, an achievement King attributes to actor and playwright Joseph Jomo Pierre, who acts as consulting director and appears in the film.

‘I knew that, as a white man, it would be very hard for me to earn the trust of the young people in particular and their families,’ King says.

As with many of King’s films, how the doc’s narrative and drama would unfold was not a question he could answer until filming was completed, much to the chagrin of commissioning editors who heard his pitch at the Toronto Documentary Forum earlier this year. The film was backed by TVO.

Throughout the course of the film, the teenagers, who had been expelled or dropped out of school, meet playwright and mathematician John Mighton, who helps them discover that they are all actually very able at math, with some even demonstrating brilliance.

King tries as much as possible to leave names of places out of the film, as he doesn’t want audiences to draw conclusions about the film’s subjects because of preconceptions about the Scarborough neighborhood where they live.

City names were also omitted from the doc Radiant City, which examines suburban living and premieres in Real to Reel. The National Film Board film, originally titled Perfect, uses both scripted and more traditional doc elements. It is written and directed by journalist Jim Brown and feature filmmaker Gary Burns, and is produced by Shirley Vercruysse and Bonnie Thompson. CBC has the first broadcast window.

‘At no time in the film do we identify any of the cities. The idea is that the suburbs are so generic and so much the same no matter where you go, that it doesn’t really matter what city you’re in,’ says Brown.

Radiant City critiques the ‘new suburbs’ – sprawling and increasingly isolated housing developments being built with great speed and abandon further and further from city centers.

Burns (Kitchen Party, waydowntown) says the biggest difference between working on a feature and a doc is in the edit suite. About 80 hours of footage collected over eight weeks took nearly four months to piece together with editor Jonathan Baltrusaitis.

Having too much footage was not a problem for Ron Mann (Grass, Go Further) on Tales of the Rat Fink, his latest doc, which makes its Canadian premiere in Real to Reel. In fact, a distinct lack of footage of the film’s protagonist, artist Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, ended up defining the character of this almost entirely animated documentary.

Roth, the subject of Tom Wolfe’s essay The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, defined the hot rod culture of the early ’60s.

Mann first contacted Roth about doing a documentary on his life in 2000. The two met and started filming in the fall of that year. Six months later, Roth died and Mann put the film away.

The catalyst for resurrecting the project in 2003 was Mike Roberts, a ‘car guy’ and animator fresh out of Sheridan College. Mann and Roberts used archives of Roth’s photographs and his autobiography, Confessions of a Rat Fink, to bring his story to life.

‘It’s not a traditional documentary, but I don’t think anyone expects that from me,’ says Mann. ‘Ed’s cars are basically the characters in the film. It’s a very weird movie.’

The film features the voices of ‘Big Daddy’ enthusiasts, including Wolfe, actor John Goodman, and Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson.

Rat Fink, made with funding from CHUM, opens commercially on Sept. 22, and Shout Factory will release the DVD in November, but promotion and distribution strategies are as unique as the film itself. It is being released theatrically at drive-ins, and Mann says one of the major purchasers of the DVD will be an auto-parts chain with 6,000 stores in the U.S. Canadian distribution is through Mann’s own Filmswelike boutique.

Meanwhile, director Jennifer Baichwal hopes to secure international distribution for her film Manufactured Landscapes at TIFF. The feature doc makes its world premiere as a Special Presentation. Distrib Mongrel Media will release the film in Toronto Sept. 29 and in Vancouver Oct. 20, with additional cities to be added throughout the fall.

The film is about the work of well-known Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. In April 2005, Baichwal and cinematographer Peter Mettler, who is also the subject of TIFF’s Canadian Retrospective (see story, p. T26), spent three weeks in China with Burtynsky as he photographed industrial settings, including one of the world’s largest aluminium recycling plants.

According to Baichwal, Burtynsky’s photographs present environmental issues in a non-didactic way, and while the film is more about the work than the man, Burtynsky is present throughout the doc and acts as narrator.

‘The film is not a conventional ‘artist-at-work’ film,’ says Baichwal. ‘It takes the photographs as a departure point and then tries to follow the narrative streams that are inherent in those photographs.’

Similarly using a photographer as its main subject is Catherine Martin’s first feature doc, L’Esprit des Lieux, which follows Hungarian-Quebecois Gabor Szilasi as he returns to the rural Quebec region of Charlevoix, which he last photographed in 1970. L’Espirit is one of two features Martin has at TIFF, with the drama Dans les villes making its world premiere in the Visions program.

Also making its world premiere is Martin Lavut’s doc Remembering Arthur, on the life of overlooked Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett, who took his life in 1986 at age 49. Lipsett was nominated for an Academy Award for best short film in 1962 for the NFB production Very Nice, Very Nice.