Hot Docs and the Art of Fact
Hot Docs has just announced its 2009 line-up. Festival is slated for April 30-May 10. Another good reason to go to Toronto. Here’s who they are:
Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is North America’s largest documentary festival, conference and market. Each year, the Festival presents a selection of more than 150 cutting-edge documentaries from Canada and around the globe. Through its industry programs, Hot Docs also provides a full range of professional development, market and networking opportunities for documentary professionals.
Hot Docs was founded in 1993 by the Documentary Organization of Canada (formerly the Canadian Independent Film Caucus), a national association of independent documentary filmmakers. In 1996, Hot Docs became a separately incorporated organization with a mandate to showcase and support the work of Canadian and international documentary filmmakers and to promote excellence in documentary production.
Big screen documentaries strike me as similar to what Matthew Arnold (not Tom Wolfe) called ‘new journalism’ in 1887, describing the style of Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette: brash, vivid, personal, reform-minded…occasionally featherbrained. As Kevin Karrane put it in ‘Making Facts Dance’ an essay at the front end of The Art of Fact, an anthology of literary journalism:
" The Victorian social reporters, and the American muckrakers who followed them, aimed at a factual literature of modern industrial life. Their literary touches came less from artistic design than from the writers’ sense of moral or political urgency: a determination to dramatize the reality of poverty, prostitution and prejudice."
Pretty good definition of propaganda.
