VIFF has this year uncovered a goldmine of docs that dig behind the daily headlines of terrorist acts and social injustices to come up with investigative or human stories that inform and inspire.

Festival director Alan Franey says ordinary people need only watch the news to be shocked or saddened by world events. His festival, on the other hand, will screen a slew of documentaries in its popular Nonfiction Features program that resist political agenda and offer answers and sometimes surprising comfort for pressing issues.

‘Many of the featured films are forward-looking and able to open our eyes to the world and to the key issues on the horizon,’ Franey says. ‘They offer nuanced perspectives and insights that are so welcome and necessary in a world increasingly prey to simplistic answers to complex questions.’

Franey insists he has little time for hand-wringing, despairing films.

‘I prefer films that make you think change is possible. They show a lot can be done, and they inspire us with a healthier perspective on events,’ he says.

An example in this year’s lineup is U.S. filmmaker Rob McGann’s American Zeitgeist: Crisis and Conscience in an Age of Terror. The doc assembles a range of experts and pundits on contemporary war and terror to illustrate how apparently unrelated events converge within the course of human history.

McGann says his film presumes most available information and news reports about the war on terror are so heavily biased as to render the phenomenon unfathomable to most people.

‘What we do is show the collision of a whole variety of perspectives, and then leave it up the audience to decide on issues for themselves,’ he explains.

McGann brought his first doc, Oracles & Demons of Ladakh, to Vancouver in 2003. Along the way, he has discovered that liberal audiences on either coast, whether in Vancouver or New York City, may be more knowledgeable about news and current events, but they’re also quicker to judge.

‘It can be dangerous to have a little bit of knowledge about something. Many people fancy themselves informed and don’t know anything about the topic of war and terrorism,’ McGann says.

In the U.S. Midwest, by contrast, he’s found audiences more open to thinking historically and around key issues, and less prone to embracing conspiracy theories.

Other open-minded features that look at world events – and particularly the Middle East – include two Iraq-themed films from the U.S.: Laura Poitras’ My Country, My Country, which unfolds like a narrative drama, and James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments, which uses a cinema vérité style to explore the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

Understanding Muslims is paramount in the Israeli The Smell of Paradise from Mariusz Pilis and Marcin Mamon. And as we pass the fifth anniversary of 9/11, German filmmaker Romuald Karmakar’s Hamburg Lectures recreates lectures that the Hamburg Imam videotaped for three members of his mosque who went on to fly the planes into the World Trade Center.

Toronto filmmaker Nader Davoodi insists his portrait of Iranian theater, 13 and a Half (screening in Canadian Images), uses interviews with actresses in Tehran to illustrate the challenges facing Iranian women today.

‘There’s a contradiction or paradox between the way that the Iranian actresses look and the way they think,’ says Davoodi, who codirected with Abbas Ahmadi. ‘They might look like westernized women, but they think like traditional Iranian women as they struggle for a position in history and political challenges.’

It will be the world premiere of Davoodi’s first doc, which follows his years as a photojournalist in Iran and New York City. Citing Vancouver’s sizable Iranian community, he says he is looking forward to stirring debate at the festival.

Other thoughtful docs booked for Vancouver include Tom Meffert’s The Judge and the Fanatic, in which the German filmmaker travels to Yemen to examine how reason could work to undo radical extremism.

VIFF programmers are also giving Vancouver artist Stan Douglas a world premiere for the six-hour installation piece Klatsassin, a Rashomon-like exploration of time and perception in B.C. history.

Franey says the documentary is noteworthy for using computer software to project constantly shifting time periods on different screens, rather than using multiple projectors.

Also bound for Vancouver is German filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck’s The Net, which examines the legacy of 1960s counterculture in helping pioneer the Internet and also shaping the beliefs of the Unabomber, as Ted Kaczynski, a Harvard-educated mathematician, sought the end of technological control over society.

Other VIFF doc titles include, from the U.S., Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple, which uses archival footage and survivor interviews to tell the bizarre and tragic tale of the Jonestown massacre.