娱乐英语新闻:Funny or controversial, documentary films garner attention at Toronto festival

TORONTO, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Some of them are really funny, some are deadly controversial, but the effect is the same -- documentary films have garnered uNPRecedented attention at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

    "The Topp Twins", a film about New Zealand's finest lesbian country-and-western singers, on Saturday took the People's Choice Awards for documentary film. And the first runner-up was "Capitalism: a Love Story," the most recent piece of the controversial yet well-recognized Michael Moore from the United States.

    It was the first time in its 34-year history for the biggest North American film celebration to add a documentary category to its much-coveted People's Choice Awards.

    "We balanced the topics of the documentaries and look for films from different aspects when we were selecting movies. We tried to have an international view." Thom Powers, TIFF documentary programmer, told Xinhua on Saturday right before the release of the Awards' winners.

    "This year's documentaries have a sense of immediacy like never before," Powers said. "Current events are getting a fresh perspective in films about the post-crash economy, Iran, Berlusconi, surrogate mothers, U.S. Army veterans and more."

    Powers, also the founder and artistic director of the Stranger Than Fiction documentary series in New York, has selected documentary movies for the TIFF for four years. The premieres he has presented include films from veteran directors such as Werner Herzog, Jonathan Demme, David Guggenheim and Kevin Rafferty, as well as the first feature length works of Adria Petty, Kristopher Belman and Jeffrey Levy-Hinte.

    "Maybe I created too many noises about how important documentary film is, so TIFF agrees with me in order not to hear from me again," Powers quipped when asked why the TIFF created a separate documentary category in the People's Choice Awards.

    The reality is that in the past two years the documentary films were the first runner-ups of the TIFF's top prize. Last year More Than A Game, a documentary about NBA superstar LeBron James, was next to the People's Choice winner Slumdog Millionaire.

    "If documentaries come to so close, we should acknowledge it," Powers said.

    The theme of "Localization vs. Globalization!" permeates every documentary film in the 2009 edition of TIFF. Most of the documentaries are about how the economy, the environment and the energy crisis are all interconnected, such as disappearing bees (Colony), billions in "stolen" art (The Art of the Steal), an apocalyptic view of the future (Collapse), and outsourcing to India including surrogacy (Google Baby).

    Interestingly enough, Michael Moore and his "Capitalism: A Love Story" were perhaps the most reported topic in addition to this year's People's Choice winning movie, Lee Daniels' "Precious."

    Moore said that the main idea of his movies is to make people "uncomfortable." He even offered his sympathy to a bunch of journalists, on the ground that "the daily newspaper will be dying in two years."

    "It's sad it is the last time I will see you in a press conference," he said, adding that capitalism killed the newspaper because of its greed, which leads the newspapers to put the advertising revenue in the first and the circulation in the second. Therefore, when ad dries up, newspapers die for sure.

    Contrary to the newspaper's grim future, Powers said, the market of documentary films is growing as they give a fuller picture of today's major political, economic and social events other than fast and fragmented information people picked up from the Face book and the Twitter.

    "It gives you a good more than one and a half hours to learn and understand an event, a trend or even a tragedy," he said.

    Meanwhile, some of the documentaries premiered at the TIFF are quite popular with the audience after releasing to the public last year. For example, "The Food Inc." made more than four million U.S. dollars in box office.

    "The tears are real, the laughs are real, the angers are real," said Powers, who has been teaching a class on documentary development at New York University's School of Continuing Professional Studies since 2000.

    Powers attributed the increasing box office to the "very knowledgeable audience."

    "Our audience are those people who care about the world issues and global news, who watch BBC and New York Times. All in all, they are curious about the world," he said.