If 'life unscripted,' Doc Edge's tagline, makes a truth claim that is liable to elicit a raised eyebrow from anyone who happens to have taken a Film 101 paper, there is nevertheless something to be said for the immediacy, freshness and urgency proper to documentary filmmaking.
With 74 docos from across the globe, and offering a number of excellent homegrown pieces amongst these, this year's Doc Edge has something for everybody. There's food, sex, politics, adventure, drinking and dancing to be had; kind of like a wild party, but one from which you get to go home sans hangover or broken bones.
Here's our top pick:
LEITIS IN WAITING
Offering a window into the intersections of imported religious fundamentalism, and more traditional understandings of gender diversity, Leitis In Waiting presents us with the story of Joey Mataele and the Tonga Leitis, a group of indigenous transgender women whose vibrant lives are becoming increasingly inviable in an ever-more-inclement religious setting. Like a number of our other picks, this is a doco sensitive to its subjects' agency and sense of self, never putting words into their mouths, but rather carefully listening, and allowing us to listen in too.
And more...