Michael Moore, Judaism and Toronto-haters inspired filmmakers to create some of the Canadian highlights at this year’s Hot Docs. Now, these docmakers can only wait and see how the public and industry respond at North America’s most important documentary festival.

And Manufacturing Dissent (Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine), Kike Like Me (Jamie Kastner) and Let’s All Hate Toronto (Albert Nerenberg and Rob Spence) are only the tip of the iceberg – they are among those that made the cut.

‘We watched over 300 films this year and 200 of them were features,’ wearily reports Canadian Spectrum senior programmer Lynne Fernie. ‘We used to get 50.’

Fernie and her new programming colleague Gisèle Gordon enjoyed viewing the ‘hybrids that test the limits of how much a doc can do; they’re experimental and use fictional devices to some extent.’ Films like the dream-like Dark One and Arthur’s Paradise, which the programmers found to be ‘part documentary but really a fantasy,’ are challenging fare for the festival, but could turn into audience hits.

Themes that impressed the team included cities (the Toronto-set Last Call at the Gladstone Hotel, Calgary’s To Costco and Ikea Without a Car), the search for parents (Chichester’s Choice, The Bodybuilder and I) and old people (Driven by Dreams, Hell’s Grannies). ‘There’s celebration and despair in these films,’ Fernie says.

Filmmakers before they became programmers, Fernie and Gordon recognize the arduous journey that every documentarian has to take in order to make a film.

Take Manufacturing Dissent. Melnyk says that she and collaborator Caine ‘wanted to do something on someone we liked,’ after finishing Citizen Black, about media baron Conrad Black. ‘So we said, ‘Hey, how about Michael Moore?”

Two and a half years and $450,000 later, Caine admits that ‘we had no idea that he had so many skeletons in the closet.’ Their film has turned from a celebration of the director of Fahrenheit 9/11 into a critical assessment of the American Left’s most famous docmaker.

While Manufacturing Dissent is mainly financed through Citytv, with additional support from SBS Australia, Quebec’s Canal D, the Canadian Television Fund and Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund, Melnyk and Caine had to put in $60,000 of their own money to see the project completed. Expectations are high that the film will achieve theatrical distribution, with a number of interested distributors expected to attend the Hot Docs screenings.

Meanwhile, staging Toronto Appreciation Days across Canada was a surefire way of getting compelling footage for the comic doc Let’s All Hate Toronto.

‘We started timing how long it would take for someone to yell out, ‘Toronto Sucks,” comments co-director Nerenberg. ‘We also realized that Toronto really does suck some of the brightest and most efficient people out of every other Canadian city.’

With a $250,000 budget mainly provided by CBC Newsworld, Nerenberg and Spence are going to explore ‘all distribution avenues – direct download, DVD and a certain amount of theatrical.’

Last Call at the Gladstone Hotel by Derreck Roemer and Neil Graham is a personal film financed by grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. Using a Sony PD-150 miniDV camera, a microphone they bought on eBay and Final Cut Pro for editing, the filmmakers documented the five-year renovation of their favorite watering hole. Spurred on by the refurbished Gladstone and nearby Drake Hotel, the area has been immensely transformed.

Roemer sees the completed film as ‘a metaphor for gentrification – not just in Toronto but in any city going through similar changes.’ When TVOntario and Bravo! came in at the rough-cut stage, the doc’s finances nearly doubled to $132,000.

By contrast, Kastner’s Kike Like Me had a budget of $500,000, continual support from TVOntario’s Rudy Buttignol, and broadcast licences from the Sundance Channel, SBS and VPRO-Netherlands. What started as an ironic investigation into modern Jewry turned into a ‘true character arc’ for Kastner, as he confronted anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.

Like Caine and Melnyk, he has asked distributors to attend the Hot Docs screenings with expectations of a theatrical life for the film.