On the Toronto International Film Festival’s official Doc Blog, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers has been asking various film fest and doc professionals (including Matt Dentler, Agnes Varnum, and David Nugent) to name the nonfiction films that they’re most excited to see at this year’s TIFF.
No one’s asked me what I think, so of course I’m going to chime in anyway: the film on the Real to Reel program that I’m most looking forward to is probably Obscene, Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor’s portrait of publisher Barney Rosset, who fought obscenity trials over works like Tropic of Cancer and I Am Curious … Yellow. I’m also interested in Operation Filmmaker, which made a few of the Doc Blog lists. Directed by Nina Davenport, it’s the story of an Iraqi film school student who, after the bombing of Baghdad in 2003, gets a job on the set of Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated. One blogger, reviewing the film at the Sydney Film Festival, called it “an often gauling example of the naive simplifications that those on the Left, for all that they may mean well, often make.” He didn’t mean that as a compliment, but it’s piqued my interest nonetheless.
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