Now firmly in Canwest’s embrace, the former Alliance Atlantis specialty channels are back in the hunt for documentaries.

‘We’ve had a bit of a pause in commissioning,’ Michael Kot, VP of factual and documentary for Canwest, told delegates at the Toronto Documentary Forum as the flagship market of the Hot Docs festival got underway Wednesday.

Kot, a former History Channel programmer now responsible for nonfiction fare across Canwest’s conventional and specialty channels, was on hand at the TDF to provide input and, possibly, cool cash to filmmakers with a documentary-in-progress.

He was preceded by Christine Shipton, VP of original programming for Global, who announced $4 million in new subsidies for homegrown documentaries.

Both were among documentary commissioners and distributors, both Canadian and international, that will field 22 documentary pitches through Thursday.

Judging by the pitches heard Wednesday morning, they are most interested in films that meld politics and the bizarre.

An example is Taqwacore, a proposed one-hour documentary about the birth of Islamic punk music from Montreal-based EyeSteelFilm that already has financing from SBS Australia and the Banff World Television Festival.

Taqwacore director Omar Majeed fielded interest from Swedish pubcaster SVT for a culture slot, the Sundance Channel hinted it may come on board if Islamic punk meant more than ‘three or four bands,’ and Canwest’s Kot also waved his cheque book after he praised EyeSteel’s Arctic Hip Hop, a film about music workshops in Nunavut that aired on Global.

Also pitched at TDF was Nora Meyer’s The Director, a film about Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk as a filmmaker.

‘[Sihanouk] has made 50 films and four albums of easy-listening music,’ Meyer said of the enigmatic Asian leader.

German broadcaster ARTE saw a few strands that Meyer’s film could fill, while Japan’s NHK added precious words for any filmmaker: ‘We need to talk.’ HBO’s Lisa Heller said the U.S. channel could come in ‘at a later date.’

U.S. director Tucker Capps was also on hand to pitch Goold’s Gold, a feature doc about an eccentric geophysicist intent on finding gold beneath receding glaciers in Alaska.

The pitch, for a film that combines gold fever with global warming, received a mixed response from the broadcasters. The Sundance Channel said the film was green and offered an ‘iconoclastic’ perspective on global warming.

SBS Australia said it already had a ‘global warming/gold rush’ film in the pipeline, while Kot said he didn’t have an environmental slot to fill, yet.

‘Give us time,’ Kot told the TDF delegates.