Political documentaries are taking over at the
Toronto International Film Festival
Sep 15, 2018 | By Faizal Khan
On a rainy day early July this year, Cameron Bailey was scouting movies up in Mumbai when he came across a curious scenario. The artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) had just received an invitation to watch a movie in a local Elmmaker’s home. “Usually I would go to a screening room in a studio to see a Elm I wanted to consider for selection,” says Bailey, notorious in the festival circuit for his reputation as a pitiless selector who preferred a formal setting to a friendly site. This time though, he decided to take a chance. “I went to the house and watched the Elm on his editing table,” recalls Bailey.
The Elmmaker was Anand Patwardhan and the Elm, ‘Vivek’ (Reason). The controversial Indian documentary director had just completed his new Elm that explores the fault lines in India’s politics. “I felt devastated,” recalled Bailey at the world premiere of the Elm at the Toronto festival last week. “It was an important Elm that peopled needed to see. It showed that documentary Elmmaking is an act of courage.”
Sharp Commentary
Screened in the TIFF Docs programme, Vivek is one of the several documentary Elms with a strong political content at the 43rd edition of the Toronto festival that concludes on September 16. Patwardhan, who is known for such explosive Elms as In the Name of God, Father, Son and Holy War and Jai Bhim Comrade, is joined by veterans Michael Moore, Rithy Panh and Werner Herzog. From India to Italy and Afghanistan to America, documentarians are pushing the boundaries to present varying perspectives from around the world.
“We don’t know the reason for everything happening in the world,” says Patwardhan, whose Elm examines the role of faith in the fragmentation of society into interest groups. The four-hour and 35-minute Vivek, which begins with the assassination of social activist Narendra Dabholkar Eve years ago, ends with the killing of journalist Gauri Lankesh before focusing the camera on fundamentalism and nationalism. “I made the Elm primarily to Eght what is happening in India,” says Patwardhan, who shot the Elm on a low budget with support from friends.
Many modern societies are put under the microscope in Elms at TIFF Docs this year. Moore’s new documentary, ‘Fahrenheit 11/9’, is on Donald Trump’s election as American president, while celebrated Cambodian director Panh reminisces on the genocide in his country in ‘Graves Without a Name’. Herzog handles the personality of Perestroika mastermind Mikhail Gorbachev in ‘Meeting Gorbachev’, and exiled Russian documentary maker Vitaly Mansky looks back on President Vladimir Putin’s rise in ‘Putin’s Witnesses’. Jawad Rhalib, the Moroccan-born Elmmaker from Belgium, examines the Muslim culture, associated more with terror today, through art in his new Elm, ‘When Arabs Danced’. American Tom Donahue’s ‘This Changes Everything’ looks at the gender dynamics in Hollywood, shaken in recent times by sexual abuse allegations against powerful personalities in the Elm industry.
“People are looking for understanding political changes at a deeper level,” explains Bailey about the increasing importance of non-Ection cinema today. “News is not everything. Filmmakers can give us insight into the changes we are witnessing in the world.”
Students are also at the centre of another American documentary director’s focus. James Longley, who makes Elms in dangerous surroundings such as Palestine and Iraq, sets his new Elm, Angels Are Made of Light, in war-torn Afghanistan.
“I want to give the audience a sense of the political situation in the country,” says Longely, who won an Academy Award nomination in 2006 for his documentary Iraq in Fragments. “The Elm opens up the region a little bit to the US. We Americans don’t know anything about this region. If America understood the region, its policy would be direrent.”
Moore’s new Elm spares neither Republicans nor Democrats in analysing American politics. In a riveting review of Trump’s election, the maverick director – whose stinging criticism of president George W Bush in Fahrenheit 9/11 raised the bar for documentary Elmmaking – shows how America is moving from democracy to despotism. “We are one 9/11 away from losing our democracy,” declares Moore in Fahrenheit 11/9, which opened TIFF Docs. “We have to get rid of the rotting system that gave us Trump,” he says in the Elm that shows him talking more to the students who survived the Parkland school shooting than politicians. Moore even brought a few Parkland survivors like David Hogg to his Toronto world premiere. “These fearless kids are on Ere and the Ere is spreading,” says Moore, who won an Oscar for Best Documentary in 2002 for Bowling for Columbine, a critique of gun violence in America.
Like Longley’s Elm, which focuses on some school students in Kabul as a beacon of hope for the country’s future, Freedom Fields, a searing portrayal of gender politics in strife-torn Libya, looks at sports as a way forward. Naziha Arebi, the director of Freedom Fields, uses her country’s Erst women’s football team to sew optimism in a nation on the edge of the abyss because of civil war after the Arab Spring revolution in 2011. “The revolution is not ours anymore,” says a young footballer in the Elm as she and others set out to start another, through women’s football, a symbol of development for her country. Kicking the ball to a fellow player, she adds, “You can’t live without hope.”
(The writer is a Delhi-based freelance journalist Follow the writer on Twitter @FaizalKahn)