Jennifer Baichwal and her husband, Nick de Pencier, chased thunderstorms and talked to victims of lightning strikes for their latest documentary, Act of God. It opens tomorrow. (Stan Behal, Sun Media)

For the first time in its 16-year history, Hot Docs has a Canadian movie in the coveted opening-gala spot: Act of God. The film kicks off the renowned documentary festival tonight at the Winter Garden Theatre.

This honour for Act of God will come as no surprise to fans of award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, who has previously brought such other docs as Manufactured Landscapes, The Holier it Gets and The True Meaning of Pictures to the festival. Baichwal's gift for storytelling comes to the fore with Act of God, a movie about the metaphysical effects of lightning strikes.

The movie presents a handful of accounts from around the world about people whose lives were changed by lightning; Act of God is an intriguing mix of math, science, philosophy, religion and superstition.

The movie began to take shape when Baichwal met James O'Reilly, a Canadian playwright who wrote a monologue about his experience of being one of a group of friends hit by lightning.

Some called it chance, some called it God's will.

"But O'Reilly said none of that was true. He became a nihilist. He refused to ascribe meaning to it," says the elegant Baichwal, who recently helped promote Act of God here in Toronto.

"So I started thinking about these questions of metaphysics and the relationship between meaning and chance, and how something in us tries to find meaning in life, I think -- and yet, if you ascribe meaning to everything too easily, and say, 'Everything happens for a reason,' that's as banal as saying there's no meaning at all."

She continues, "I studied philosophy and theology at school, and in some ways those questions that I studied then are the ones I'm still thinking about now. Turning to documentary was a way of exploring those questions in a much more accessible medium than an academic paper."

Baichwal thought it would be interesting to examine a subject normally treated as scientific, "In a medium that doesn't deal with the science at all, that doesn't try to demystify it by explaining it scientifically, but just lets it be the mysterious force it is." She says of lightning strikes, "Something about the event is the paradox of being singled out by randomness. Being struck by lightning represents that for all of us. But for some people, there's certainty about what this means, and for others, there's no certainty at all. The grappling about whether to ascribe meaning or not, or to somehow try to find something in it anyway -- that tension, I think that's where most of us live when we think about these things. And there is no easy answer, and perhaps that's part of the reason we made the film."

As always, Baichwal made the film with her husband/producer Nick de Pencier. The two of them shot most of the spectacular lightning strikes shown in the movie, a feat that involved carrying a camera with them everywhere they went, for two years. They became storm chasers. "Sometimes we'd find ourselves in this situation where it's getting pretty hairy, and we're close to a storm, and we're the tallest thing in the landscape -- with a metal tripod. And we're thinking we can't leave our kids orphans," says Baichwal, smiling ruefully, "so we'd just look at each other and sometimes I'd go inside."

Baichwal's interest in what you might call the mysteries of the universe led her to complete an M.A. in theology at McGill. The filmmaker, who was born in Montreal but grew up in Victoria, B.C., has been making documentary movies since she graduated 15 years ago. Her success was immediate and all her movies have won major awards, but with her 2006 film, Manufactured Landscapes, which concerns the environment and the work of photographer Ed Burtynsky, Baichwal's reputation went global. The movie has won awards everywhere and is in theatrical release worldwide.

To film Act of God, Baichwal travelled to Las Vegas and New York, to Cuba, France, Mexico and London. She spoke to novelist Paul Auster, who almost died in a lightning strike, to a former CIA op who now heads the largest hospice group in America -- helping the dying after his own near-death experience with lightning -- and to musician Fred Frith, who helps her investigate improv and the electricity of the brain. She spoke to the mothers of children who died in a lightning strike in Mexico, and she attended a fantastic religious festival dedicated to Shango, God of lightning and thunder.

"To be a filmmaker," she sums up, "is to be able to have significant, meaningful relationships with worlds to which you'd normally have no access."

Act of God opens here in theatres tomorrow.

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