May 3, 2004: FADE OUT

Hot Docs 2004 Award Winners are: Best Canadian Documentary (Feature Length) Title: Army of One Director: Sarah Goodman Best Direction in the Canadian Spectrum Programme (Feature Length) Title: The Origins of AIDS Director: Peter Chappell, Catherine Peix Special Jury Prize Title: Continuous Journey Director: Ali Kazimi Best Canadian Documentary (Short to Mid-Length) Title: La Cueca Sola Director: Marilu Mallet Best International Documentary (Feature) Title: Checkpoint Directors: Yoav Shamir Special Jury Prizes Title: Tintin and I Director: Anders Hogsbro Ostergaard AND Title: No. 17 Directors: David Ofek, Ron Rotem Best International Documentary (Short to Mid-Length) Title: Wellspring Director: Sha Qing Honourable Mention: Title: War Feels Like War Director: Esteban Uyarra FIPRESCI Best First Documentary (Feature) Title: Arna's Children Directors: Juliano Mer Khamis, Danniel Danniel Best Direction in the Canadian Spectrum Programme (Short to Mid-Length) Title: La Cueca Sola Director: Marilu Mallet Honourable Mention: Title: Short Infinity Director: Kun Chang Best Documentary in the National Spotlight on the Netherlands Title: Putin's Mama Director: Ineke Smits The OMNI BEST THIRD LANGUAGE OR ETHNO-CULTURAL PITCH AT RENDEZVOUS Title: One of the Last Pitcher: Ed Kucerak The KODAK AWARD FOR BEST PITCH AT RENDEZVOUS Pitcher: Corrine Van Egeraat Outstanding Achievement Award and Retrospective Michael Maclear

The reader of this year's Hot Docs coverage could be forgiven for thinking that all is well. Seldom have I been so sunny about such a random sampling of cinema: the constant refrain was "three stars, three stars, three stars," and several films rated even higher; there was the odd failure (though no abject ones), but for the most part, the impression my capsules give is that the documentary is alive and well and lived in Toronto for the past two weeks. I should be thrilled. I should be ecstatic.

But somehow, I'm not. The truth is that while I found most of 2004's crop edifying, I didn't see anything that really knocked me out. The one runaway smash of the festival was there entirely by accident: Nettie Wild's FIX: The Story of an Addicted City, which only ran as part of the director's retrospective. Otherwise, the films were good and only good, the sort you'd come across on television and watch out of the corner of your eye--nothing you'd go out of your way to see. Sure, their topics were fine and their information was interesting, but as films, they were less than ambitious and looked it. What has happened?

The answer comes reverberating back: television. Most of the films on offer here aren't films at all, but glorified television shows. As such, they have to conform to the formats and aesthetics determined by networks and cable outlets. This means that despite fascinating subject matter--from The Take's factory liberators to The Ritchie Boys' Jewish intelligence agents and Super Size Me's exposé of fast food's perils--there's an emotional distance and a formal conventionality that somehow keeps the heat off the audience. Truly demanding and formally daring documentarians like Frederick Wiseman (whose cancelled Domestic Violence 2 would have raised the level mightily) have no room to operate in a system like this. One feels pathetically grateful for the occasional documentary that challenges the house style just enough to have some minor zing, leaving the critic in a quandary about how to rate the flatlining product on offer.

True, there were signs of life--Sarah Goodman's Army of One, for instance, deserved its Best Canadian Feature award. But I was left with the notion that two kinds of filmmaker came to Hot Docs: those who knew how to work within the system whatever the cost, and those outside the system who lacked the visual vocabulary to punch things up. While this latter category can produce true raw power (as in Arna's Children), it can also wind up with a meandering film like Final Solution, a film so afraid of missing anything that it refuses to cut out extraneous information. The aesthetically aware documentarian is an endangered species, either sucked into the cathode ray maelstrom or on the outs entirely.

If it's easy to complain about the awards (La Cueca Sola? No. 17?), the problem extends far beyond that debate. There needs to be a sea change in the way that television conducts itself, with more emphasis on eccentricity and less on "the format" that is so deadly to emotional connection with the material. The alternative is to be good but not quite good enough. Here's hoping that the men and women in charge can see the light.-Travis Hoover