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Doc, Doc, Who’s There: A Conversation with Thom Powers at TIFF08

Published on September 3, 2008

Movies have been around for more than a hundred years, but documentaries of the hard-hitting, eye-opening and intimate type are much newer. It wasn’t until the 1960s that motion-picture technology was ripe for the so-called direct cinema style of now-canonic documentarists like Frederick Wiseman and Barbara Kopple. Their films, focusing on social issues like mental health, schools, and workers’ rights, have influenced two generations of successors.

Thom Powers

From his vantage as documentary programmer for one of the world’s most important film showcases, and as a documentary maker himself, New Yorker Thom Powers sees and feels those influences in his work for the Toronto International Film Festival—but he also sees the need to continue to innovate in the genre, to expand its boundaries. Which is why the 40-year-old, who teaches a course at NYU on documentaries, has programmed films like The Heart of Jenin (dirs: Leon Geller & Marcus Vetter, Germany) and Food, Inc. (dir: Robert Kenner, U.S.A.) for this year’s edition of TIFF. The former presents the poignant, harrowing tale of a Palestinian boy who’s killed by an Israeli soldier in a West Bank refugee camp, and whose father decides to donate his organs to Israelis; it’s the kind of story that, by humanizing a one-time intifada militant, risks invoking substantial ire. The latter, based on the work of food pundits Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, uses maverick techniques like hidden cameras to put American agribusiness in the crosshairs. Regardless of how the films are received today, Powers says, they will have succeeded if their searing truths can last as a testament for future viewers.

Documentary filmmaking’s past is never too far for Powers, either. He curates a series of screenings for the IFC Center in New York, and his typically eclectic selections stretch from modern-day “orphan” movies (found and home videos) to lost, decades-old classics of the genre. He’s also working on a book on the history of American documentaries.

Arts Engine correspondent Zach Dubinsky recently spoke with Powers about the place of documentaries at the Toronto International Film Festival and their role in wider culture.
First off, do social-issues documentaries get lost amid the glamour and celebrity of a festival like Toronto?
In a big festival like Toronto, every film has to fight for its attention—it’s both the wonderful and challenging thing about a big festival like this, that you’ve got a tremendous concentration of press and industry, and you’ve got a tremendous number of films from around the world. And everyone is competing for everyone’s attention.
But another component that you have in Toronto that is unique here compared with other major festivals is that you have an incredible public audience. There’s hardly any other big festival that has quite the same diverse community that Toronto does, so we can show a film from Pakistan and have a strong core audience of Pakistanis. In this regard, the Tribeca Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival are similar, but that makes us distinct from a festival like Cannes or Sundance.
Documentaries can sometimes present a harsh picture of the world, a picture that’s all the more bracing because it’s real. When you’re programming for the festival, what subjects are off-limits, and what kinds of films, if any, are too racy?
I can’t think of something that would be a taboo subject when it comes to subject matter only. We’ve shown many controversial films over the years, politically controversial films, films that are offensive to some people. We put a pretty high standard on using the festival as a platform for free expression. I would say on subject matter, there’s probably no restrictions, sometimes on the grounds of filmmaking, there’s a lot of stuff. There’s a lot that isn’t the right fit for this festival. We’re a festival that’s really about giving audiences a theatrical experience, and there’s a certain strata of documentary-making that is an important type of documentary but that doesn’t fit in there because it’s not about theatrical documentary-making. It’s well suited for television or other media.
For example, this year we’re showing a tremendous film called At the Edge of the World (dir: Dan Stone, U.S.A.) about the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which tries to stop Japanese whalers. It’s very much made in an activist spirit, and it’s about activists who are skirting the law to fulfill their mission by stopping Japanese whalers. They’re behaving almost like pirates, but it’s a film that’s beautifully shot, has a gorgeous backdrop of the Antarctic Ocean and shots taken by helicopter, so it has stunning landscapes and seascapes. That’s a theatrical experience.
On the other line are two documentaries we’re showing this year. Food, Inc. (dir: Robert Kenner, U.S.A.) is another example that draws on Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation. It has a filmmaking team that really knows how to make a theatrical experience. And the other film is Upstream Battle (dir: Ben Kempas, Germany). It’s about a standoff over dams that have been built in the Klamath River Valley in northern California—about the standoff between local native peoples and the energy company that has built the dams.
Now, as for films that wouldn’t be suited for Toronto, I can save anyone else embarrassment by pointing to one of the films I directed myself for PBS, called Guns & Mothers. It’s an hour-long program that was kind of the right length for the material, and I’d always intended it to be a TV program and I thought it was right for TV.
As Toronto has grown into one of the world’s largest film festivals, with all the attendant Hollywood hubbub, another more boutique film showcase has arisen in the city specifically for documentaries. Hot Docs, founded in 1993, is now North America’s largest documentary festival. Has it stolen some of your documentary thunder?
Happily, it doesn’t. I think it actually enhances the Toronto community—it makes the city one of the best-educated documentary-going cities in the world. The chief programmer at Hot Docs used to have my job at the Toronto International Film Festival, and he and I get along really well.
Because we come at different times of the year, there’s a certain number of documentaries that might have premiered at Sundance or might have just finished in the winter, and it’s going to make more sense for Hot Docs to take those. And I would say the real strength of the industry coming to Hot Docs is the TV industry; they’ve done a real service selling to that industry. So you have people coming from all over the world to look at and buy stuff—and you don’t always have those people coming to TIFF. TIFF is a major theatrical industry forum for people from around the world looking to market theatrical stuff. The documentary market has grown so large that it can easily accommodate two documentary festivals in the same city.

How do brazenly polemical non-fiction films such as Michael Moore’s affect the wider perception of documentaries as a whole? Do audiences trust documentaries less when some filmmakers take up political arms in the genre?
Michael Moore had his first big success with Roger and Me premiering at the Toronto festival [and winning the People’s Choice Award]. He always packs some of our biggest houses at the festival and draws a highly enthusiastic response. Anyone who is operating on his kind of level of attention is going to draw criticism and people who don’t agree with him—that’s part of what being a polemicist is, and you have to roll with it. Besides, it’s never been my taste to kind of narrow the definition of documentaries. I’m more interested in trying to expand the definition, expand the boundaries than trying to tell people how to limit themselves.
Take, for example, a film we have in Toronto this year, Waltz with Bashir (dir: Ari Folman, Israel). It’s almost entirely animated, and it premiered in competition at Cannes. This is a film that explores the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, in 1982, and one of the extraordinary things about this film is that if it had been made in a straightforward documentary style, it would reach a much smaller audience and get much less attention than it has by being approached in this animated style. The animation allows the filmmaker to explore things that he might not otherwise have been able to explore. People interviewed in the film describe that they’re happy to do it in an animated form, but that they wouldn’t do it if it was film. The film is even going to get a theatrical release in the U.S.
What about one of your program selections from last year, Phil Donahue’s documentary Body of War, about a paralyzed Iraq veteran’s struggle to come to terms with his decision to go fight—it was well received by critics and festival audiences, but then floundered when it came time for theatrical release.
Last year at the festival we had Eddie Vedder onstage to perform one of the songs from Body of War, and I don’t think I’ve been at a more energized presentation. It was a highly emotional and energetic evening. And of course, when the film made it out to theaters, it struggled, as just about every film on the Iraq war has struggled. But I think there’s another measure for these films, and that is that for the future, these are documents, these are going to be around for a long time. They’re not only interpreting for the present generation what’s happening today, but they’re going to be documents for future generations.
So a good documentary can perhaps worry a little less about its appeal to present-day audiences in order to be better postured for future viewers?
The other programming job I do is for my own series at the IFC Center in New York, the Stranger Than Fiction film series, and in that series I have the opportunity to program older films as well, like Marjoe [which won the 1972 Oscar for best documentary]. This past season, I showed Peter Davis’s The Selling of the Pentagon, done for CBS. He went on to make Hearts and Minds [1974 Oscar-winner for best documentary], and you can see how much the audience connects with those films, and it’s important to have those as historical documents.
You’ve been working on a book, also called Stranger Than Fiction, for more than five years now. What’s it about?
It’s about the emergence of the documentary in America in the 1960s and ‘70s. It looks at maverick indie filmmakers like D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysleses, Barbara Kopple, Robert Drew, Richard Leacock and what they were doing at the time. They were the first people to use the tools that we take for granted today, what we think of as the modern documentary; following people around in a candid way didn’t really begin until around 1960, when sync-sound cameras became available to do it. Any form of documentary before that was a much more staged affair, so what’s fascinating to me is how they invented this form. Every bit of it was a struggle.
What are some of the lessons to be learned from their experiences?
I made documentaries myself for over 10 years, and it’s a constant learning process at every level. Each film brings new challenges in the subject matter and the storytelling, not to mention the financing and the distribution. Each one is its own journey. Some lessons you learned from the last one helped, and sometimes you have to relearn them all.
The Toronto International Film Festival runs from Sept. 4 to 13. More information is available at the festival’s website, www.tiff08.ca .

This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.

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