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.

But the Toronto docs that seem to be attracting the most pre-fest buzz, amongst both Powers’ respondents and film bloggers, are Body of War (otherwise known as “the Phil Donahue movie”) and Encounters at the End of the World (otherwise known as “Werner Herzog in Antarctica”). Regarding the former, Powers made an interesting comment to The Reeler not so long ago:

What’s interesting to me about this film — and Donahue’s choice to become a documentary filmmaker — is it sort of signals the way documentary filmmaking has moved to the center of the culture. Phil Donahue has the power to get on television or be in a newspaper or have access to any medium that he wants to tell a story, and here we see him choosing documentary film. It was not an easy film to make; he’s been working on it for a couple years, and it’s important to say that he teamed up with a veteran documentary maker, Ellen Spiro.

I had a related thought last night whilst re-visiting An Inconvenient Truth: Al Gore certainly didn’t have to make that film in order to create a media event around his efforts to educate about the environment, but making the film allowed him the make that event much more personal. I wonder how much Phil Donahue we’ll see in Body of War?

As for the Herzog, I think SXSW’s Matt Dentler sums up the general sentiment: “I’ll see anything Herzog does. But when it’s his first big documentary after the brilliant Grizzly Man, consider me first in line.”