Sturla Gunnarsson is frustrated.

When hijacked airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States was transformed. But when Air India 182 exploded over the Irish coast in 1985 and 329 – mostly Canadian – lives were lost, Canada largely remained silent.

‘There was no great outpouring of emotion, no state funeral,’ Gunnarsson says of the incident in which hundreds of Canadians lost their lives after the passenger jet departed from Montreal and a planted bomb exploded, killing everyone on board.

So Gunnarsson made Air India 182, a first-person account of the tragedy and its subsequent inquiry, as a ‘reconstruction and investigation.’ The film will have its world premiere as the 2008 Hot Docs’ Canadian Opening Presentation, April 17 at Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre.

The filmmaker is one of the few who directs both TV dramas (Above and Beyond) and feature films (Beowulf & Grendel) as well as venturing into documentary filmmaking. Gunnarsson hopes the doc can lend witness to the bombing and its tragic aftermath.

‘I hope this film goes some way toward distilling a very complex story and giving a voice to the Air India families, who are among the most graceful and dignified people I’ve ever met,’ says Gunnarsson.

The fest’s Canadian docs will also strike a lighter note.

Adrian Wills’ All Together Now connects the Beatles and Cirque du Soleil in a portrait of their joint Las Vegas show, Love.

Wills (Jackie Jackie, Big Money) and his team tiptoed around the likes of Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison’s widow Olivia, Yoko Ono and Sir George Martin to portray the warts-and-all creative process that leads up to opening night.

Wills says he had to tread carefully when the former Beatles and their representatives faced off with Cirque du Soleil over creative issues. The film is coproduced by Circle du Soleil Images and Apple Records, the Fab Four’s music label.

‘There’s a hypertension – a frenetic sense of knowing you only have one shot when these legends show up, and yet if you come between Apple and Cirque du Soleil, it could all boil over into something else,’ the filmmaker says.

The world premiere of All Together Now bows at the Bloor Cinema on April 19.

The National Film Board won’t be outdone by the Cirque, however.

Nettie Wild’s Bevel Up: Drugs, Users and Outreach Nursing is an NFB film coproduced by street nurses in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside who hired Wild to shadow them as they care for at-risk youth, prostitutes and homeless people.

‘Normally I don’t revisit an area in my films,’ says Wild. ‘I’m just too pooped. But these folks were so darn smart.’

The new 45-minute documentary forms the core of a four-hour interactive teaching DVD for use by student nurses and seasoned professionals who care for drug users.

Wild says the digital technology that enables the DVD liberated her as a filmmaker.

‘The documentary, or the interviews, could be the length that they needed to be because I wasn’t just dealing with a broadcaster,’ Wild continues. ‘I’m dealing [directly] with my audience, whether that’s a teacher in the classroom or a nurse on the reservation.’

Health care decisions and dilemmas of a different kind figure in Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma, another NFB film at Hot Docs. It is coproduced by White Pine Pictures’ Peter Raymont (A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman).

Director Patrick Reed follows Orbinski – a Toronto-based doctor with Doctors Without Borders – as he returns to Africa to exorcise the demons that have haunted him since he worked as a field doctor in war-torn Somalia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s.

‘This is one person’s struggle to tell the story, to be a witness, and to be honest about the difficulty of doing it and doing it well,’ Reed observes.

The filmmaker met Orbinski in Rwanda in 2004 while at work on Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire, Raymont’s documentary about retired lieutenant-general Dallaire’s return to that country’s 1994 killing fields.

But Reed says Triage is about an entirely different man than Dallaire, even though the films share the same creative team and cinema verité style.

‘With James [Orbinski], we knew this could not be about hero worship,’ Reed explains. ‘And he’s so interior that there’s room for other characters to breathe and other people to be part of the story.’

Other Canadian films bowing at Hot Docs include Tracey Deer’s Club Native, a story of love and rebellion on the Kahnawake Mohawk reserve; Siu Ta’s Daddy Tran: A Life in 3-D, where digital and vintage cameras help illustrate a family that migrates from Vietnam to Calgary; and FLicKeR, Nik Sheehan’s portrait of a Beat Generation backroom revolutionary.