TIFF 2010: Toronto International Film Festival

"Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie."

Reality is not just stranger than fiction, it can be stronger and more evocative when captured in a great documentary film. Hence the power of the Real to Reel program in the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.

The selection -- both in Real to Reel and in other TIFF programs where docs are spiked in as alternatives to fictional films -- is remarkable.

Among the strongest is Toronto filmmaker Sturla Gunnarsson's Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, a portrait of the Canadian biologist and environmental activist. Enlightening, beautifully crafted and heartfelt, it plays as a Special Presentation. In the same league, Chilean director Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la Luz) is one of the festival's most heart-wrenching yet astoundingly beautiful films. Guzman interweaves poetic stories of the past involving astronomers, archaeologists and the heroic women who still search today for the remains of "the disappeared" from Pinochet's fascist regime. It plays in Masters.

In Real to Reel, the lineup is varied in tone and subject matter. "There is never an overall pattern," programmer Thom Powers says. "But there are always clusters. I think one cluster this year is a very strong representation of women, both behind and in front of the camera."

Ten of the 23 films in Real to Reel were directed by women: Laura Israel's Windfall; Ondi Timoner's Cool It; Lynne Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution: A Secret History; Linda Hoaglund's ANPO; Kim Longinotto's Pink Saris; Sarah McCarthy's The Sound of Mumbai: A Musical; Naomi Kawase's GENPIN; Vibeke Lokkeberg's Tears of Gaza; and Ke Dingding's When My Child is Born (co-directed by Guo Jing). "There is a really strong showing this year that is notable," says Powers.

Just as significantly (perhaps more so), some films are specifically about the female experience. Longinotto's Pink Saris tells the tumultuous story of Sampat Pal Devi, an "Untouchable" in India's rural Uttar Pradesh. Brash, hectoring but enlightened, this self-appointed Judge Judy storms the countryside dispensing rough justice, challenging primitive thinking about the caste system, female enslavement and abuse of child brides. Errol Morris' latest meticulous opus is Tabloid, what he calls the "sick, sad and funny" story of a former beauty queen.

A world away, Paul Clarke's Mother of Rock: Lillian Roxon explores a seminal figure in the 1960s and 1970s New York music scene, while Leeson's !Women Art Revolution chronicles four decades of feminist struggle in the American art movement (with a showcase of great work). In stark contrast is Mark Hartley's Machete Maidens Unleashed! Hartley tells the giddy but often misogynistic history of international filmmaking in the Philippines, with women marginalized and exploited.

"There is another cluster that is notable," Powers says. "There is a trio of films about energy. I think it is very timely in the wake of the BP oil fiasco."

Risteard O. Domhnaill's The Pipe tells a classic David-Goliath saga of Irish fishermen and farmers fighting Shell over a natural gas pipeline. Israel's Windfall illuminates the web of environmental and economic lies behind wind power, when it involves rape-and-pillage of bucolic but populated areas.

Timoner's Cool It is the most controversial of all. This is a biopic of Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg emerges with "me-me-me" egomania, but he has profound questions to ask about global climate change. He acknowledges it is happening, and man-made, but ridicules proposals such as the cap-and-trade option for controlling emissions because of the potential for fraud. Lomborg seems oblivious of issues that Suzuki raises -- most critically the need to maintain biodiversity -- but he does have practical ideas about helping humankind.

The point, of course, is that these films promote intelligent debate after the emotional impact of their stories abates. Reel reality is in action.

3D doc coming to TIFF

Is 3D a gimmick or an exciting new technique for documentaries? Even famed German filmmaker Werner Herzog was skeptical when he set out to document the extraordinary prehistoric art in France's Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc caves.

"I can tell you it is not a gimmick," says TIFF's Real to Reel programmer Thom Powers, who kicks off his series with Herzog's 3D version of Cave of Forgotten Dreams. This is the first 3D doc to be shown at TIFF -- and the first 3D film of any kind which will be projected in the festival's new home, the Bell Lightbox.

"I sat down with Herzog in New York in June to watch 20 minutes of footage of this in the 3D format," Powers says. "I approached it with the same question: Is this a gimmick? Because it is also a film about cave art and you wonder what 3D can bring to prehistoric cave art. The answer is: a lot!"

Audiences should not think of the 30,000-year-old Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc art as "two-dimensional stick figures on walls," Powers says. "Part of the artistry is working with the contours of the cave. You and I are never going to see that art in person. Only a small handful of researchers are ever going to be allowed into those caves. They are fragile. They are the oldest images known to humankind."

Herzog negotiated a way in, using cameras that emit no heat. "But Herzog himself told me he was very skeptical of 3D before this project," Powers says. "And now he can't imagine this film any other way. Nor could anyone who sees it."