What's Up, Docs

Enjoying my first real dedicated foray into the Hot Docs festival, held annually in Toronto. Last year, a business trip cut into my viewing schedule, and I only managed to see one film. In the past three days, however, I've seen four documentaries, all of them outstanding, and gained a renewed appreciation for the special role that visual journalism can play in society. As a print journalist, I love the written word, but some stories only truly hit home when accompanied by arresting images.

It would certainly be impossible to convey the deep love shared by Australian sheep farmer Chris Rohrlach and his quadriplegic wife Rachel - who suffered a massive stroke at 21 while pregnant with the couple's first child - without seeing the way they look at each other in A Good Man, a documentary that follows the couple as they open a brothel in an attempt to support their farming income. Nor could words fully encapsulate the struggles of Michael Levin and Kendell Campbell, the two youths from Toronto's Regent Park neighbourhood featured in Invisible City.  Those who believe that one's circumstances in life result entirely from good moral choices would do well to witness this film, which shows just how difficult it is to make the right choices when dozens of voices are pulling at you from every direction, your hopes and dreams are discouraged by the very people that are supposed to help you and no clear path to a bright future is visible. Along the same lines, A Hard Name gets into the heads of several ex-convicts and shows how abuse and neglect are disturbingly common landmarks on the path to prison - and how difficult it is to discard the hard shell one must develop to survive while locked up.

While these films all washed down their difficult material with at least some hint of hopefulness and redemption, Eric Daniel Metzger's Reporter doesn't offer up much in the way of optimism. The film follows New York Times op-ed columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof as he visits Congo to report on the civil war that has killed more than five million people in the past decade. The situation on the ground there is dire - with several militias battling for territory and resources, the civilian population has been decimated by violence, disease and starvation - and has been largely ignored by the West. Kristof struggles to write about the conflict in a way that will make people care, but the currents of the Western cultural river are clearly working against him. Reporter also serves up a sobering warning about the future of journalism, as Kristof laments that fewer and fewer media outlets are supporting the kind of expensive investigative work that he specializes in. Here in the West, we find it difficult to relate to the suffering a half a world away and, if we do care, we are frustrated by the fact that it's unclear how, exactly, our nations can improve the situation (do we use force to stop the militias? How much? Against which ones?). But imagine how much worse it will be when we no longer even hear about these atrocities.

If there is a common takeaway from these four films, it's that choice based purely on morality is a luxury, and those that divide the world into simplistic categories of good and evil need to dig a little deeper. And while pens like Kristof's do valuable digging, we need cameras like Metzger's to make these stories completely, viscerally real.