Gerry Flahive is a producer at the National Film Board studio in Ontario.

* * *

‘There are so many intriguing people in the world, so many important stories to be told – why make them up?’

Filmmaker Wendy Rowland’s words are echoed by many others these days.

Once upon a time – only a few years ago – it seemed as though the best, brightest and brashest of new filmmakers wanted to make fiction.

Documentaries were broccoli, drama the cheesecake. If you wanted to be seen to be creative, you had to be inventing stories on film. And nobody watches documentaries anyway.

But the trend has turned, and the Canadian English-language documentary landscape, dominated by talented and committed fortysomethings for some time – since they were thirtysomethings – has been enriched by the arrival of inventive new talent, filmmakers who don’t see documentary as a temporary crash pad, a place to pick up some cv points on the way to real movies.

Developing. Emerging. Young. New. If at times they sound like phases in the life cycle of the caterpillar, they are now frequently heard terms describing some of the most interesting filmmakers around – even if some of them aren’t so ‘new.’

Consider this list (a sampling from an informal survey of producers, directors and documentary commissioning editors across Canada) the first page of many, an unrepresentative but hopefully revealing look at who’s out there (it does no justice at all to the richness of French-language documentary talent, a parallel pool from which, unfortunately, little work is drawn and versioned for English-speaking audiences).

With video production and equipment prices crashing, and a growing appetite for alternative approaches to storytelling and image-shaping, the documentary scene is wide open. And with specialty tv’s need for docs booming, it has to be welcoming.

Wendy Rowland

variety might call her a ‘multiple threat,’ as Toronto-based nyu grad Wendy Rowland has written, produced, researched and edited some of her own films and worked on those of colleagues ranging from Shereen Jerett (Kid Nerd), Ron Mann (Twist) and Arthur Borman (The Making of ‘… And God Spoke’) to Michael Moore (Canadian Bacon).

Her 1991 short documentary On Her Baldness was popular on the festival circuit, was picked up for u.s. distribution by Women Make Movies, and even screened in San Francisco in a program entitled ‘Pluck: The Cult of Hair.’

But it is her 1996 one-hour film Packing Heat (made during her stint at the National Film Board in Montreal as one of its first four Fast Forward filmmakers, selected from a national competition) that has made the biggest impact.

This irreverent documentary study of women and guns is a winner of eight international awards, and screened in more than 20 festivals.

Filmmaker and film professor Lois Siegel uses Packing Heat with her students, calling it ‘humorous, thoughtful and scary.’

Rowland is currently developing Jane Doe (a film about a woman suing the Toronto police department for failing to warn her about a serial rapist in her neighborhood), and Bubbie, Nana, Yia Yia, Grannie… , an irreverent film about grandmothers.

Kenton Vaughan and Craig Chivers

it’s not often that first-time filmmakers see their work go straight to primetime national television. But that happened recently for the team of Kenton Vaughan (producer, codirector and writer) and Craig Chivers (codirector, cinematographer) on their streetwise documentary Turning Away, which premiered on cbc’s Witness.

But they brought to their well-received portrait of two Toronto squeegee kids backgrounds in journalism (Vaughan has worked as researcher, field producer and associate producer at the cbc, and wrote a history of the documentary at the network as part of his Masters in Journalism degree) and photojournalism (Chivers’ photo credits include National Geographic assignments and freelance work in Sri Lanka, Brazil and the mean streets of Toronto). Chivers is also the videographer on Cristine Richey’s s&m documentary-in-progress, Tops and Bottoms.

‘I discovered how difficult it was, even for people like Allan King and Donald Brittain, to get documentaries made and seen,’ says Vaughan. ‘Even so, I knew I needed to give it a try. It was always a matter of finding the right story to tell.’

Next up? Chivers says the team wants ‘to move off the streets and into the donut shops’ to profile this ubiquitous Canadian institution. ‘The subject matter also guarantees catering the screening party will be cost efficient.’

Sun Kyung Yi

one fan of director Sun Kyung Yi says she ‘has that light behind the eyes you know will propel her to go on to make some really interesting and important documentaries.’

Indeed, her name was mentioned by many, all taken with her first film Scenes From A Corner Store, about the culture gap between a Korean corner-store owner and his wife, and their two Canadian-born daughters.

Yi says it was to have been her ‘first and last film’ but guesses she’s ‘addicted to documentary.’

It went on to garner a nomination for the Donald Brittain Award as one of the best documentaries made for Canadian television.

cbc Witness commissioned her second film, Hide and Seek, a story of illegal immigrants, and is developing two other projects with her, including Thai Girls, an investigative documentary on the international sex trade in young Asian women.

She brings to her film work a background in newspaper journalism, radio documentaries and the writing of a book, Inside the Hermit Kingdom: A Memoir.

On the subject of ethics, Yi refers to an old saying, ‘Blessed is he who has nothing to say and cannot be persuaded to say it,’ and for her own part feels the ‘challenge for the documentary filmmaker is to persuade subjects to share their most intimate thoughts and experiences with the camera, yet avoid exploiting or betraying them in the editing process.’

Hunt Hoe

as writer, producer and director of the feature drama Foreign Ghosts, Malaysian-born Montrealer Hunt Hoe was inspired to move in a new direction.

‘My first documentary came about because of the musicians featured in the Foreign Ghosts soundtrack… I was so mesmerized by the authentic sound and impeccable performances that I wanted to do something that featured the musicians up front and not buried in the background.’

The documentary that followed – Journey of Strings – was ‘so personally satisfying that I realized that it’s more spontaneous and creative to make a documentary.’

The film jumps musically from 13,500 b.c. to a 1990s-style world-beat jam, with three women and three musical cultures – Chinese, Greek and Latino – at the center.

Follow-up film Respect the Beat took the idea in a percussive direction.

Cultural collisions of a different kind are likely in his next project.

Who is Albert? will be a documentary that begins – perhaps over an arranged dim sum lunch for prospective couple Albert and May-Li – to see what makes the Asian-Canadian male who is he is, and to reveal the contradictory choices and codes he faces.

Chris Triffo

despite Chris Triffo’s dozen years of experience as a cinematographer (including a mentorship with Mark Irwin on a major u.s. feature), a producer (he is president of Partners in Motion, a growing production company in Regina, managing miniseries as well as upcoming docs for The Learning Channel and Discovery and a recent Gemini-nominated short drama Dirty Money), he feels his newest production ‘allowed me to grow up as a filmmaker.’

Dad (broadcast on Vision tv and scn) is a family story that couldn’t get much more personal. One critic describes this exploration of the filmmaker’s deeply troubled relationship with his estranged father as ‘scarily painful and not for the faint-hearted… this knockout documentary is a remarkable act of self-laceration.’

National Film Board Winnipeg producer Joe MacDonald calls it ‘an extraordinary portrait that is refreshing and innovative.’

The film immediately generated calls and e-mails from across the country to the filmmaker, something particularly satisfying for Triffo who strove to work with ‘a thematic language that would affect other people’ and express himself ‘in a way that was meaningful.’

The critical and creative success of Dad has given Triffo a new enhanced perspective as a storyteller from which to consider and develop future documentary projects.

Eisha Marjara

‘delve deeper.’ It’s the goal – and practice – of Montreal-based Eisha Marjara. As a director, photographer, cinematographer, writer and editor, and with a knowledge of four languages, she has the tools to do so. And with roots in social issue documentaries, experimental work and ‘docu-fiction,’ Marjara is applying them in a comprehensive way in her career.

Marjara is currently at the nfb cutting Desperately Seeking Helen, a blend of fiction and non-fiction. The feature-length work is a personal journey in search of a childhood idol, Helen, ‘a Madonnaesque diva of popular Hindi cinema… and the personification of a woman who could balance perfectly the changing/conflicting roles of women.’

Her 1993 short The Incredible Shrinking Woman, about beauty, body image and sexuality, showed, for critic Cameron Bailey, ‘a sophisticated understanding of both issues involved and the melodrama they demand.’

Marjara considers herself ‘an experimental filmmaker and artist above anything else.’

‘In an age of information and media overload, it is easy to become seduced by technology and divert oneself from meaning,’ she says.

She is now developing a film which will explore the ‘relationship between technology and human nature.’

Heather Frise and Velcrow Ripper

calling Velcrow Ripper and Heather Frise ’emerging filmmakers’ is a bit like calling Michael Ondaatje an ‘overnight success’ because of The English Patient.

Just because one particular work – in this pair’s case, the 1996 Genie Award-winning Bones of the Forest, also named best of the festival at Hot Docs! – attracts more mainstream attention and credentials than previous films doesn’t mean they haven’t made their mark. With a total of 21 films and videos to their collective credit, they have a body of work that has been seen all over the world.

But the success of that film has put their names on the Rolodexes of network tv types. Bones of the Forest, in the words of Jim Sinclair of the Pacific Cinematheque, expanded ‘the expressive possibilities of the activists documentary’ bringing ‘a deliriously avant-garde aesthetic to the controversial subject of contemporary forestry practices.’

Now teaching at the Gulf Island Film School in b.c., Frise and Ripper bring to their documentary work an eclectic background in painting, multimedia installation, sound design (Ripper did sound work on such films as The Falls, The Adjuster and Highway 61) action poetry and radio work.

‘Making documentaries gives us the opportunity to delve into an issue that matters to us. We always work as a two-person crew, which allows for an intimate interviewing atmosphere, and the luxury of spending large periods of time in the field.’

Their most recent film, Open Season, about the efforts of animal rights campaigners to intervene in bear hunts, runs this spring on CBC Newsworld’s Rough Cuts and on cbc in b.c.

Mike Clattenburg

far From Home is, perhaps, not that uncommon a film title. However, add the subtitle India Kicked My Ass (‘in a good way,’ says director Mike Clattenburg) and you have a tantalizing documentary offering.

Halifax filmmaker Mike Clattenburg brings irreverence and a range of local and national television experience to his documentaries, from his early work at Halifax Cable tv’s That Damn Cable Show, to stints at MuchMusic, ytv, Sesame Street and, now, at Jonovision at cbc.

Described by one fan of his work as ‘very talented and a real up-and-comer, very unpretentious – like all Maritimers!’ Clattenburg picked up the Best Atlantic Short Award for his 1996 film Liquor Store at the Atlantic Film Festival and a most promising director prize there the following year for Bernie, a 14-minute doc about a hermit living in a school bus who spent much of his time eating ‘Kraft Dinner, tomatoes and counting deer.’

The aforementioned Kicked My Ass – named best Atlantic documentary – chronicled the filmmaker’s enlightening if draining trip. He’s thinking about a sequel, but says ‘the thing with me and documentaries is that I never know when I’m going to do one or why I’m going to do one… I never have a statement of purpose before I shoot a doc – I just follow my nose.’

Clattenburg contributed his cinematography skills to a film about a cab driver who drove from Halifax to Hollywood to make it in the movies, and directed the short drama Nan’s Taxi for Global, picking up three Gemini nominations, including best director.

Laurence Green

few short documentaries in recent years have caught more attention than Laurence Green’s 1995 Reconstruction. Not only did this deeply personal film win a spot at more than 30 festivals and special screenings around the world and a raft of international awards and nominations at competitions and festivals including Chicago, Leipzig, Toronto, Uppsala, Hamburg and Tampere, it also won over critics with its skillful orchestration of images and startling honesty.

‘The film effortlessly traverses the terrain where the avant-garde, the autobiographical and the documentary genres intersect,’ wrote Toronto critic Marc Glassman.

Bertrand Bacque of Switzerland’s Visions du Reel, wrote that ‘this letter sent to a long-lost sister… succeeds in producing the equivalent of the most subtle literary works.’

The film is often cited by other filmmakers as an inspiring influence.

Recently busy as a professor of film production and screenwriting at Toronto’s York University, and directing a short drama (Cabin Fever), Green says he’s ‘attracted to documentary because it’s impossible to define. There are fewer formulas than there seem to be with drama. If, as a filmmaker, I want to experiment and toy with different forms and styles, then documentary, with its diverse and ever-elusive definitions and boundaries, is a vital and exciting place to be working.’

Green’s next project might be a look at 1940s Canada through the eyes of an expatriate satirist.

* * *

Also in this report:

– Hot Docs! brings in international players p. 36

– Opportunities at the NFB doc studio p. 37

– An indie filmmaker chronicles his Seven Days in Cambodia p. 38

– Hot Docs! distrib options p. 39

– Nominees for the fifth annual Hot Docs! awards p. 47