Anyone for Canadian film?

Well, yes, especially if it’s a documentary. The genre’s clash of people and ideas makes the Canadian doc the most engaging and entertaining part of this country’s film industry, no contest.

And the Toronto International Film Festival recently unveiled 26 feature documentaries for its Sept. 4-13 run, 14 of which are American titles that benefit from increased equity financing and other private investment.

‘There’s much activity around that’s giving filmmakers bigger budgets, and allowing more production out of the U.S. than anywhere else,’ says Thom Powers, the festival’s documentary and Mavericks series programmer.

But going into TIFF, the question is will any of the festival’s doc titles clinch meaningful distribution deals, now that art-house cinema attendance has slumped, specialty divisions are folding and DVD profits and broadcast licence fees are shrinking?

Particularly worrying is the lack of activity likely from ThinkFilm, long a doc buyer at festivals, but which lately is in scaling-back mode, having shuttered its Toronto office. That doesn’t portend well for documentaries of all genres in Toronto looking for acquisition.

This is a shame, because for too long the homegrown documentary has been regarded as a poor cousin to the Canadian dramatic feature, in which, all too often, the portrayal of human contact tends to leave ordinary Canadians as cold and disconnected as the characters on screen.

The political documentary, by contrast, offers a collision of worlds in which audiences are left to ponder whether there will forever be a clash or whether there’s a hope for reconciliation.

A case in point: Malcolm Rogge’s Under Rich Earth, a film about a bitter land battle in remote Ecuador between a Canadian mining company and local peasants, depicted as a David versus Goliath tale.

‘[Rogge] almost got himself killed, and that always helps,’ says Powers, revealing one reason he chose the film for a world premiere as part of TIFF’s Real To Reel sidebar.

In one hair-raising scene, thugs in paramilitary gear hired by Ascendant Copper, a junior mining company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, attempt to use tear gas and shoot their way past a barricade erected by rock-slinging farmers.

That’s some contrast with your local business page, where Canadian mining companies forever declare themselves environmentally and socially responsible as they chase valuable minerals in far-off lands.

Rogge says explaining this complex story was difficult, in that he was forever under pressure from interview subjects to take sides.

‘If they perceived you may be neutral, that could close the doors quickly,’ he points out.

Standoffs, quiet or violent, feature in a host of the documentaries booked for TIFF.

Dan Stone’s At the Edge of the World follows notorious Canadian eco-warrior Paul Watson as he and his Sea Shepherd volunteers battle Japanese whaling vessels in the Antarctic Sea.

In the retelling, Stone uses close-ups of Watson and his anti-whaling activists cooped up on their ships in unpredictable seas, and helicopter shots to capture sea-borne confrontation.

TIFF documentaries that also aim to educate and mobilize include Paul Cronin’s A Time to Stir, a four-hour film about the 1968 Columbia University student strike that ended in police violence, and the Thai documentary Citizen Juling, which examines the Islamic insurgency in southern Thailand.

Powers says the current lack in the marketplace of high-profile docs from the likes of Michael Moore and Al Gore should not obscure a fertile year for documentaries at TIFF.

‘There has been a shortsighted focus on the recent lack of a documentary blockbuster. In the larger picture, more docs are getting funded and released theatrically than ever before,’ he insists.

There’s also some big money going into U.S. indie docs, especially among TIFF titles.

Larry Charles’ Religulous, which features TV comic Bill Maher on a whirlwind tour of world religious shrines, comes to TIFF by way of Lionsgate, and Jeff Skoll, the Canadian-born businessman who used his eBay fortune to back An Inconvenient Truth and Darfur Now, has helped fund Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., a slick doc that draws on the reporting of Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma).

Religulous has the most potential to be a juggernaut comedy at the multiplex, while Food, Inc. is likely to tap into the current zeitgeist over local food versus global industrial agriculture.

Both docs also do well in tapping into well-known personalities.

‘[Eric Schlosser and Paul Watson] may not have the celebrity stature of Al Gore, but they have strong followings,’ Powers says.

The National Film Board is well represented in Toronto, not least with Astra Taylor’s heady Examined Life, a film about popular thinkers, and Luc Bourdon’s The Memory of Angels, a retrospective on NFB films.

So, whatever the doubts coursing through the distribution market at TIFF over theatrical nonfiction, kudos to Powers and the fest for giving political docs a showcase when they’re sorely needed.