Last week in Toronto, Canada, it was obvious that the documentary has entered a new era of popularity when more than 40 000 people attended the 11th annual Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.
“We made the comparison that a documentary was like cod liver oil,” Chris McDonald, Hot Docs’s executive director joked: “It tasted bad, but it was good for you. It just took a while for the public to recognise that seeing documentaries could be interesting, engaging, fun and sexy.”
The Made in South Africa programme was particularly popular with Canadian audiences. It featured seven documentaries from South Africa, including four from the SABC1 series, Project 10.
The majority of the documentaries that played at this year’s festival were character-driven stories with an obvious narrative arc.
Through these characters filmmakers are opening a window on bigger issues, be it the co-option of the mainstream media by the United States Army during last year’s Gulf War, or the plight of occupied Tibet.
Attendance at Hot Docs has climbed nearly 50% in two years, making it the second-largest documentary film festival in the world after the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, which attracts more than 100 000 people.
“It’s proof,” McDonald said, “that Bowling for Columbine and Spellbound were not one-offs. It is a bona fide trend, and it is causing the audience to respond in new ways.
“Doccies need to have an emotional hook to interest the audience. An issue needs a strong character to draw the viewer into the story.”
Super Size Me, this year’s hit with festival-goers, is slated to open on screens in 25 countries, including South Africa. The film follows its director, Morgan Spurlock, as he eats nothing but McDonald’s for a month. The audience watches Spurlock add 11,25kg to his waistline, crank his cholesterol off the charts and, according to his doctor, turn his liver into “pâte”.
South African-born filmmaker Cathy Henkel, whose film The Man Who Stole My Mother’s Face played to a packed house at the festival, included herself in her film. The documentary follows Henkel as she returns to her native South Africa to track down and confront the man accused of raping her mother 15 years earlier.
“It is this emotional connection between the audience and the film’s characters that are making these films work in the cinemas,” she said.
“People don’t want to go to the cinema to be lectured, or told what they should know, or how to think, or to be given a history lesson. That won’t draw a crowd. The very personal and intimate stories do.”
Today’s documentary filmmakers are taking real stories and applying the same treatment the director of a feature film would apply to a movie. They are now paying as much attention to story and character development as to the overarching issue. It is a logical progression, especially when you consider that feature films based on true stories have always fared well with mass audiences around the globe.
Henkel pointed out that documentary filmmakers are no longer constrained by the ideal of objectivity: “No matter how much you try to be objective, the very fact that it is your vision, where you point the camera, when you turn the camera on or off, what you select on the edit table, all makes it a subjective undertaking. Once you realise this, the possibilities are endless.”
Therein lies one of the biggest criticisms of the documentary film. Many assume that since documentaries are covering real stories they must take the same approach that journalists take (or pretend to take) in covering the news: an unfettered, unbiased, objective outlook.
But audiences are starting to realise that documentaries are anything but objective. The documentaries that screened at Hot Docs are made by directors with agendas to fill and points to make.
The beauty of an effective documentary is that it leaves the ultimate decision up to the viewer. Perhaps audiences are flocking to see these films to satiate their thirst for alternative opinions.
Andrea Spitz, whose documentary Hot Wax premiered last week as part of the Made in South Africa spotlight and was screened this past Monday in SABC1’s Project 10 series, credited the SABC and the National Film and Video Foundation for encouraging its filmmakers to find and exercise their independent voice.
Spitz was also encouraged to see that SABC1 was nurturing South Africa’s documentary audience. In contrast to European documentary audiences, where the average age is 55 or older, SABC1 is aiming its documentaries at an audience between the ages of 16 and 34.
“It’s very exciting,” Spitz said. “People are developing an unparalleled sophistication and a visual literacy around documentaries that will only continue to grow.”
At the very least today’s students won’t have to endure another excruciating film on the migratory patterns of South Africa’s wildlife.