A happy couple strolls in the country on a summer afternoon; it is an idyllic scene, until suddenly, disaster strikes. A rake.

In the completely deadpan mockumentary Rakes, the gardening implement is a silent killer that lurks among us. And rakes can strike anywhere, anytime. Footage shows rakes striking the unaware in yards, offices and even the bathroom.

David Manning, who works as an editor for comedy programs, is the brains (director, producer and editor) behind Rakes. He describes his mock doc as ‘very similar to a documentary about landmines except rakes are…quieter. It’s a parody of any Hard Copy-style, one-sided story about some horrible thing in the world that’s a danger to everyone.’

In the film’s three minutes, a variety of experts are consulted. ‘We speak to a doctor who gives the medical perspective on the injuries, there’s a poor helpless victim who had a bad experience with a rake and a college professor to give us some historical perspective on rakes.’

Other highlights include a SWAT team that responds to rake emergencies, a political activist who organizes protests to have rakes banned and a corporate spokesman for rake manufacturers eager to wash his hands of any responsibility. ‘Rakes don’t kill people,’ he says. ‘People kill people.’

Rakes was one of six three- and four-minute scripts selected to be made and shown at Hot Docs as part of the Moc Docs program.

The shoot took only one day and featured only ‘talented amateurs. We didn’t have the budget for real actors.’ Post was handled principally by Manning, leaving the budget for a sound recordist and DOP and some audio post.

Moc Docs, presented by the Canadian Film Caucus with the participation of CBC Newsworld’s Rough Cuts and Telefilm Canada, was born from a session of hilarity between co-executive producer Sally Blake and Jeanette Loakman.

The idea for the series came from imagining the possibilities springing from the series Dogs With Jobs, says Blake. ‘Imagine if you did a series called Dogs Without Jobs, Dogs on the Dole, Homeless Dogs, Couch Potato Dogs.’

The idea for Moc Docs appears to have hit a nerve: in less than a month, Hot Docs has received more than 120 applications.

‘It was a short window and the response was amazing. Moc Docs touched a nerve with people. Documentary filmmakers wanted to show they were funny, not always deadly serious,’ Loakman says.

Blake points to recent mainstream films that use the conventions of documentary to comedic effect such as Drop Dead Gorgeous and parts of Strictly Ballroom. ‘You see it cropping up so much and I think it’s because documentary has become so prolific. It’s taken up so much more of TV that people understand what documentary looks and sounds like, and that’s why documentary style has crept into commercial films.

‘To fit into the genre you have to do the one-on-one interview thing and the verite thing, so you take the style of a serious film only to have a completely ridiculous made-up subject matter. They all achieve that balance between subtlety and absurdity. They have to embody all the qualities of a documentary, only in a mockumentary. It’s not real and the issues are outrageous.

‘We have one film that is a Seven Up [style] film that follows the life of a child after he’s been labelled ‘it’ at recess. We chose these films because they’re all really funny, but there’s a dark side to that humor that challenges the viewers. And it’s very Canadian; we have a great sense of humor. Inside the polite exterior lurks this satirical monster dying to get out.’

And then there’s the guerrilla filmmaking side of the exercise: most films were shot in a day and turned around in a week.

‘It’s all about down-and-dirty [filmmaking]. It costs very little money and [is] just a really fun thing to do. [It is] a chance for those of us who are pretty serious documentary filmmakers to take the grammar of our own films and turn it on its head and have fun with the genre. Anything goes,’ says Loakman.

For example, in his mini-epic Manufacturing Hair: The Role of Big Hair in an Advanced Society, which takes the form of a trailer for a longer doc, Justin MacGregor incorporates propaganda films from the 1950s that encouraged women to spend time on their hair, speaks to a scientist who examines the effects of hair products on the environment, and uses a biblical scholar to examine the role of big hair in the bible.

‘Is big hair the new class system?’ a social analyst asks at one point. And those were just the experts MacGregor, the doc’s director and cowriter (with producer Claire Queree), could fit into his three-and-a-half minutes.

‘All these [other] angles came up but I had to keep tight. They [the angles used] were the funniest. I think the more serious you make a trivial subject the more humor there is in that,’ says MacGregor.

Like MacGregor’s work, most of the films send up specific topics, but there are those that parody doc-making itself.

For example, A Civil War Documentary Documentary, framed in the style of Ken Burns’ Civil War, takes as its subject matter people who have sat through the entire 11-hour series.

Filmmakers Duncan McKenzie (producer and writer) and Naomi Wise (codirector with Eric Lunsky) say they hope to parody the length and style of the doc series. The viewers of the series are treated with the same reverence the original series had for veterans of the Civil War, as cameras pan up and down artificially aged photographs and voice-overs read from letters and diary accounts.

‘The devices that [Burns] uses are very simple and we make fun of his style,’ says Mackenzie. ‘The main thing he does is pan across photographs. We rarely see a human. This is big-budget documentary and it looks like it was made on a shoestring. Some images have nothing to do with [the Civil War]; they’re just a sunset or a cannon. We’re exaggerating his style.’

However, Mackenzie says Moc Docs encompasses much more than in jokes for filmmakers. ‘I think there are some jokes [in the film that] film people would appreciate especially, but anyone who has watched a TV documentary would get the joke. People who don’t watch doc at all won’t get much out of it. Documentaries are a wonderful format for comedy. Usually when you have a comedy sketch it’s funnier when it seems more real.’

Mockumentary in some cases merges seamlessly with some docusoaps.

‘Sometimes the best mock docs are the real ones,’ says Loakman. ‘There’s a docusoap that’s real that I thought was a parody for the longest time. I think that’s another thing that attracted people to Moc Docs – that nonfiction can be more absurd than fiction.’

Perhaps most interesting is that judging from the applications submitted, ‘People out there have documentary mishmashed with ‘reality.’ Most people see documentary as factual,’ says Loakman.

‘It’s because reality television has become entertainment so people are used to watching it,’ says Blake. ‘Definitely, for the public, the definition of documentary is so broad, I would have to say anything that’s factually based [qualifies as a documentary]. I think the definition of documentary has broadened to include any kind of factual TV.’

‘The proliferation of new channels has meant that more documentary is available. It may not have been documentary in the classical form. Now documentary can cover wildlife, science programs, the origins of food, rather than be straight cinema verite or an auteur point of view. The question is, what is a documentary? The number one 1998 documentary at IMDB was Pammy and Tommy’s Honeymoon.’ *