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It's the week of Hot Docs, as I have heard at every screening, the largest documentary film festival in the world.  And it is great.  I'm a movie lover but I've always been more of a TIFF fan.  The love of documentary films is more recent for me, partly from my friendships with Monique Simard, now the Director of the NFB in Quebec and Velcrow Ripper, a director whose extraordinary new film Fierce Light is in Hot Docs and opens in theatres in Toronto and Vancouver on May 15 but also because documentary films have become so important to social change.

As someone who teaches globalization, there is nothing better than a film like Life and Debt for my students to understand the impact of corporate globalization on the Global South.  But it also seems to me that documentary films have become so much more creative and diverse over the last few years.  From The Corporation, a brilliant biting social critique, to Waltz with Bashir, a creative  anti-war blend of dreams, memories and real life all in animation to Fierce Light, a poetic and powerful exploration of the link between activism and spirituality,  documentaries not only give us a window into worlds we don't know, but also a deeper and richer understanding of what we think we do.

This year Hot Docs has alot of films about activism.  From John Greyson's Fig Trees, a wacky opera documentary about AIDS activism in Toronto and South Africa to Burma VJ, an astonishing film that follows the courageous video journalists who covered the almost revolution in Burma last spring, documentaries are one of the few places where the lives of the people who really make change in world are examined and celebrated.   My favourite film so far at Hot Docs is City of Borders a delightful picture of a gay bar in Jerusalem and the Jewish and Palestinian gays and lesbian who hang out there.  Not only do we meet fascinating characters like the devout Moslem drag queen from Ramallah to the lesbian Jewish doctor who falls in love with an enchanting Palestinian activist but we get a very textured look at the politics in Israel vis a vis the Palestinians.  Add to that how love on the one hand and a common oppression on the other overcomes the political divide however deep.

Unlike most of our mainstream media, which concentrates on the elites, whether political, corporate or cultural , most documentaries explore the extraordinary people who don't have power but are in general far more interesting and compelling.  Documentaries can go into depth on an issue in a popular and accessible way revealing complexities and depth that are rare in popular cultural forms.  

I've been very involved this year in protests against the Israeli assault on Gaza and found myself speaking more and more as  a Jew to counter the mostly spurious argument that anti-Zionism is the "new anti-semitism." So  I went to movies on a Jewish theme including Defamation, a rare honest and multi-layered exploration of the subject of anti-semitism , which usually sinks to simplistic accusations and silencing on one side and denials on the other. 

The National Film Board is currently making a film on my last book Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution and I can't wait to see how that oral history translates into film.