In more Toronto lineup news, indieWIRE has posted TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers’ selections for this year’s festival. Highlights:

• Emmett Malloy’s The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights will mark Jack White’s return to the festival as the star of a nonfiction film, after last year’s It Might Get Loud.
• In Collapse, American Movie director Chris Smith follows “radical thinker Michael Ruppert” and “explores his apocalyptic vision of the future.”
• Bassidji tracks director Mehran Tamadon’s three-year immersion “into the very heart of the most extremist supporters of the Islamic republic of Iran (the Bassidjis) to understand their ideas.”
• In Videocracy, Erik Gandini examines the business and political interests of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlosconi, to show “how his reality TV shows full of bikini-clad women enriched his friends and beguiled a nation.”
• Straight from Cannes, L’Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot follows archivist Serge Bromberg’s discovery of an unfinished film by the director of Wages of Fear.
• How to Fold a Flag, from Gunnar Palace directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, tracks “U.S. soldiers as they create new lives post-Iraq—from a Congressional candidate in Buffalo to a cage fighter in Louisiana—set against the backdrop of the 2008 election.”

indieWIRE has the full line-up.

Via the Flaherty Seminar’s Twitter comes the news that West Coast nonfiction filmmaking legend Chick Strand passed away over the weekend at the age of 78. A force behind the formation of art/underground film distributor Canyon Cinema and founding editor of the influential Canyon Cinemanews journal, as a filmmaker Strand (real name: moved fluidly from found footage collages (like Loose Ends, which you can watch on Vimeo) to impressionistic ethnographic documents shot in various parts of Mexico to not-quite-feminist portraits of female experience.

An example of the latter, Strand’s 1979 feature Soft Fiction was a huge early eye opener for me when I first saw it in art school ten years ago. A sort of narrative built out of five women’s first-person stories about their sex lives shot in Strand’s inimitably intimate style, it’s the kind of film that reveals the arbitrariness of the lines that we draw between genres.

There was an excellent story about Strand in the LA Weekly a couple of years ago which offers a sense of her personality; I’ve excerpted a section about her teaching style after the jump.

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October Country, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s debut documentary feature describing a year in the lives of four generations of Moshers living in a depressed upstate New York suburb, is a rare work of impressionistic nonfiction. Its patchwork of visual detail often reminded me of the photographs of Gregory Crewdson (whose work you might have seen on the cover of this Yo La Tengo album, or this Six Feet Under campaign). Crewdson’s work usually imbues suburban and domestic scenes with the aura of the supernatural; nothing actually horrific is visible in the frame, but the presence of something is always implied, out of frame, in the air. With their arresting images of smoked-clogged rooms and American flags convulsing in the wind, Mosher and Palmieri demonstrate a similar knack for lighting and framing the mundane to spin it towards the surreal, suggesting an invisible but not imperceptible force altering the proceedings. The style fits because the Moshers are essentially living a ghost story, with each member so haunted by past decisions that’ve lost control of the future.

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Winnebago Man screens tonight at CineVegas, and next week at SilverDocs. In the interest of full disclosure: I was on the jury that awarded the film the grand prize at the Sarasota Film Festival in April.

Many documentary filmmakers have to at some point insert themselves into the lives of their subjects in order to get the story in front of the camera. Actually incorporating that blurring of boundaries between documenter and documented into the finished film is tricky business; at best, you’re David Maysles, capturing unforgettable material from Little Eddie Beale whilst engaging in shy flirtation with her from behind the microphone. At worst, you’re Michael Moore, piling the post-9/11 sick on to a boat, sailing through the seas of self-parody to Cuba, drowning your own good intentions further with each nautical mile.

Rarely is a filmmaker’s experience of becoming part of their story presented with as little artifice and self-service as in Winnebago Man, Ben Steinbauer’s document of his mission to first find Jack Rebney, the man who became a cult celebrity via a widely circulated video of his profanity-packed outtakes from a motorhome industrial video shoot, and then coax Rebney into coming to terms with his unlikely notoriety. The film works on a number of different levels: as detective story, as a no-frills work of historiography on the strange new phenomenon of accidental celebrity motivated by the rise of viral web video, and as insight into a filmmaker’s process of discovering what story he’s telling and how to tell it. Structured against a narration (spoken by Steinbauer, scripted by Steinbauer and Malcolm Pullinger, who also edited) of remarkable candor and clarity, on the whole Winnebago Man is an incredibly literate examination of YouTube culture (arguably the biggest threat to actual old-school literacy to be invented in decades), its discontents, and its half-hidden side effects.

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The International Documentary Association threw a party for and tribute to the filmmakers nominated for Oscars for short and feature length non-fiction films last night, and most of the best jokes of the night had to do with Man on Wire’s star wirewalker Philippe Petit. Sort of. In introducing a clip from the film, host Lily Tomlin asked, “What does it take to be arrested for the crime of the century? Apparently more than a meltdown on the set of I Heart Huckabees.” Cue insidery guffaws.

Earlier in the evening, IDA’s Eddie Schmidt tossed off a Petit joke that was less funny ha-ha than funny remarkable as an answer to a thrown gauntlet. Without naming names, Schmidt responded to Alexandra Pelosi’s claim to the New York Times that “it’s like a dirty little secret” that documentaries “are boring.” In the same story, Pelosi also proudly declared that she won’t make films longer than standard broadcast length, and refuses to submit them to film festivals — thus marking her supposed populism in firm opposition to the entire cinematic ethos that IDA was celebrating. Schmidt offered a rousing rebuttal: “The only person who is allowed to say that anything is boring is Philippe Petit, because he has walked on a tightrope between two buildings.”

Since nominee Werner Herzog was absent, Petit (seen above, apparently praying for a miniature version of the man behind him) was the most charismatic character in the room, and even after a year on the festival circuit, he and director James Marsh inspired a standing ovation. But it was a clip from Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World — the scene where the demented penguin goes his own way towards certain death — that got the biggest laugh of the night. Herzog’s schtick may sometimes seem to be bordering on self-parody these days, but the material it produces doesn’t get old.

Meanwhile, chatter over wine and tomato soup before the tribute program kept circling back to the recent sudden changes at Sundance. More than one person I talked express some degree of bemusement over a non-sourced, sort-of charticle on The Wrap, pegging Sundance programmers John Cooper and Trevor Groth, former AFI programmer Shaz Bennett (whose name The Wrap misspelled) and sometime Sundance programmer and current Without a Box guy Christian Gaines as the top contenders for Geoff Gilmore’s abandoned post. Cooper and Groth were at the event last night, but if either knew the what the future holds for their festival, they weren’t saying. When the topic came up, Groth simply smiled and said, “We live in exciting times.”

More pictures from the event after the jump.

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True/False, that annual magical haven for nonfiction lovers in Columbia, Missouri, has announced a portion of their 2009 festival lineup. In addition to some festival circuit usual suspects (Sundance 2009 winners We Live in Public, Rough Aunties, Burma VJ and Afghan Star; LAFF 2008 winner Loot, and the Oscar-nominated Waltz with Bashir), there are a number of sneak previews and premieres that sound, based on their two-sentence pitches, to be well worth a look:

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“I was the smartest kid in town, and the reporters knew it,” brags Josh Harris in We Live in Public, Ondi Timoner’s documentary on the rise and fall of the Internet’s first (and still its most charismatic) video mogul. It’s a telling statement, in that it points to both Harris’ 1990s raison d’etre, and also his achilles heel: it’s not what you do that matters, it’s that people are watching you do it. Timoner’s portrait of the prescient (and quite possibly crazy) web pioneer will be a must see for anyone interested in internet fame and the phenomenon of casual over-sharing, even if her storytelling tactics are surprisingly stale.

A quick-cut pileup of stock footage, video captured by Timoner over a decade on Harris’ trail, and footage recorded during his surveillance projects, Public outlines Harris’ troubled childhood and tricky relationship with his alcoholic mom before clicking into its comfort zone with Harris’ founding of Pseudo.com. Pseudo, launched in 1993, morphed from a Prodigy chat service into an internet TV network, complete with themed channels and on-air personalities. The company –– and Harris –– became best known for throwing wild parties, which by the late 90s had formed the core of the Silicon Alley social scene. For a brief, heady moment in time, celebrities mingled with nerds, and nerds became celebrities — just because, as Silicon Alley Reporter & Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis puts it, “you knew how to set up a modem.”

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My favorite non-fiction film at SXSW 2008 was Tommy Davis’ One Minute to Nine, a haunting portrait of a mother’s last few days at home with her family before she heads off to prison for killing the husband and father who abused and terrorized them all. My review attracted a number of comments from people wondering where they could see it; I myself wondered why the doc seemed to disappear from the festival circuit in the Spring with no formal announcement regarding distribution. I had hear a while back that HBO had picked up the film for broadcast, and in this interview with AJ Schnack, Davis confirms the HBO deal, and says the film will also be back to festivals and in theaters prior to its premiere on the channel in late 2009. Good news for an extremely sad film.

A sampling of movie events happening around town this week:

• Flaherty NYC will present its second monthly program of non-fiction shorts tonight at Anthology Film Archives. The lineup includes two pieces by Sylvia Schedelbauer and two by Alison Kobayashi. Pamela Cohn, who will moderate a discussion after the screening, describes Kobayashi as a “very young, Tracey Ullman-esque performance artist” who “does everything by herself–makeup, wardrobe, shooting, editing.” More info on the program here.
• Also tonight: Rooftop Films is putting on a free showcase of animated shorts at Chelsea Market. I can’t find info on the specifics of the lineup, but the Rooftop website promises free beer. Here’s the lineup.
• David Redmon and Ashley Sabin are bringing one of my favorite non-fiction films of the year, Intimidad, to MoMA this Friday and next Wednesday. You can read my review of the film from SXSW here; more info at MoMA’s website.

Personal documentaries rarely operate under the aesthetic and narrative rules of horror films, incorporating shocking Shyamalan-esque twist endings, but Dear Zachary: A letter to a son about his father does, so it’s fitting that Oscilloscope are beginning its roll out on Halloween. When filmmaker Kurt Kuenne’s childhood best friend Andrew Bagby was killed at the age of 32, almost certainly by his years-older jilted girlfriend Shirley Turner, Kuenne began filming testimony from his friends and family as a memorial to his lost friend. Shortly thereafter it was revealed that Andrew’s probable killer, who though charged with the crime had not yet been extradicted from Canada, was pregnant with Andrew’s child, and as Andrew’s parents Kate and David moved to Newfoundland and fought for custody of the baby, Kuenne drove across the continent from California to conduct interviews. At that point, he restructured the project: it was now a filmed letter addressed to baby Zachary, about the man his father was. But before Kuenne finished filming, the story would take another, much more devastating turn. It may be impossible to talk about Dear Zachary in terms of craft without spoiling the real-life twist which compromises the integrity of its structure, but I’ll try to be as vague as I can. …Read more

The International Documentary Association announced their nominees for their annual awards today. The five features to get the nod are Kassim the Dream, Stranded, Man on Wire, Young @ Heart, and Waltz With Bashir. It’s an interesting batch of nominees, for sure. For one thing, it excludes some the year’s most seen American documentaries. Though Young @ Heart and Man on Wire made multiple millions and are thus considered nonfiction hits, both of the religion twins, Religulous and Expelled (currently the #2 and #3 highest grossing nonfiction films of the year, respectively, behind U23D) were excluded from the honors. Also interesting is the nod for the mostly animated Waltz with Bashir, which Sony chose to keep in the New York Film Festival rather than pull for a qualifying run.

IDA also announced today that in addition to the career award that they’d previously planned to give to Werner Herzog, the December 5 ceremony will also honor Rob Epstein with the Pioneer Award, and Stefan Forbes, director of my favorite political doc of the year thus far, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, will get the Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Filmmaker Award.

indieWIRE has the full list of honorees.

An email from AJ Schnack reveals that he, in partnership with the Toronto Film Festival’s Thom Powers and Indiepix.net, are launching a new range of awards for “excellence in non-fiction filmmaking.”

Prompted in part by general disappointment in the doc community over the Oscar shortlist, a panel of twelve film festival directors have produced a short list of 15 films, which will be eligible for nominations in nine categories. There are four films common to both the Oscar shortlist and this new list: Lake of Fire, No End in Sight, Sicko and Taxi to the Dark Side. The nominations, and the official name of the awards, will be announced at a press conference at the Sundance Film Festival, which you can be sure the Spouties will try to attend. In the meantime, you can peruse the panel, the shortlist, the categories, and AJ’s blog post about how the awards came to be.