April 21, 2004: FADE IN

In years past, I have been suspicious of the viability of the documentary. Even allowing for demurrals from its more self-aware practitioners, it's still a form that claims, through convention, to depict absolute truth. But all of documentary's raw material is filtered through the plain fallible humanity of people, who carry with them biases and assumptions from whatever station they originated. These biases and assumptions dictate what is chosen to be filmed, how one phrases interview questions, how one edits the footage, and any other decision that goes into making the 'document.' Thus, I felt, one had to look askance at such a slippery form, which doesn't just re-create events, but also intrudes on and changes them simply through introducing a camera into the mix.

But though these doubts plagued my coverage of the past two Hot Docs festivals, I am warming to the genre. It's not documentary's fault that it's been tarred with the brush of solemnity; in truth, journalists and essayists collect what information they can and give their best guess, a process no less fallacious than that of the documentarian. The Hot Docs festival can be seen as a celebration of those best guesses, an invitation to participate in the guessing process by which we must give presence to the life beyond our limited horizons. Some will be mistaken, some will be manipulative, some will be faulty in their logic...and some will change the way we look at ourselves.

To that end, Hot Docs programmers have reached far across the globe to bring together as many good guesses as they possibly can. Though the annual spotlight falls on the Netherlands and South Africa, 25 countries in total will be represented by this year's line-up, meaning the opportunity to expand our horizons is that much broader. Every one of these 106 documentaries--some of them shorts, others, like the 218 minute Final Solution, epics--gives us the chance to match wits with someone else's perspective on the world and the things that happen when that perspective is applied to something beyond it. It's an exciting prospect, even for a skeptic like me.-Travis Hoover