Films of the 2013 Toronto Film Festival: TIFF Docs

A Story of Children and Film is the world's first movie about kids in global cinema. It's passionate, poetic, portrait of the adventure of childhood: its surrealism, loneliness, fun, destructiveness and stroppiness: as seen through 53 great films from 25 countries. A story of children and film is an eye opener, a landmark film and a celebration of both childhood and the movies.

Second-generation filmmaker Marcel Ophüls chronicles his extraordinary life.

The University of California at Berkeley, the oldest and most prestigious member of a ten campus public education system, is also one of the finest research and teaching facilities in the world. The film, At Berkeley, shows the major aspects of university life, its intellectual and social mission, its obligation to the state and to larger ideas of higher education, as well as illustrates how decisions are made and implemented by the administration in collaboration with its various constituencies.

Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary's monumental and historical ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953 - an event that stunned the world and defined a nation.

A look at the world of Burt Shavitz, the face and co-founder of Burt's Bees.

Documentary on the psychological aspects of growing up with and without parental love. It centers around the Diaz family, who chooses to adopt three orphans from Russia, and how their new and old kids handle family together.

A documentary portrait of the late John Wojtowicz, whose attempted robbery of a Brooklyn bank to finance his lover's gender-reassignment surgery was the real-life inspiration for Dog Day Afternoon (1975).

A Sadhu who renounced the society, adopts a baby renounced by society.

A look at the extraordinary world of Penthouse founder, visionary and provocateur Bob Guccione.

A documentary on the late Vivian Maier, a nanny whose previously unknown cache of 100,000 photographs earned her a posthumous reputation as one of the most accomplished street photographers.

Similar to her 2012 documentary, The People of the Kattawapiskak River, which detailed the housing crisis of the Awattapiskak First Nations people, Alanis Obomsawin's Hi-Ho Mistahey. examines this community with a shrewd political eye, aiming to raise awareness about the lack of resources allotted by the government for education. Her voice, one of sensitivity and political necessity, is a vital part of the Canadian narrative, bringing attention to marginalized people with an eye for detail and community introspection, humanizing a subject that, for those in mainstream culture, is more of a peripheral social grievance than something for active consideration. In 2000, the elementary school in Awattapiskak was shut down after the land was determined to be toxic. Since then, the students have been schooled in outdoor portables with heating and vermin issues, making it difficult to maintain a dedicated staff and offer the children the same comforts and amenities that children in more centralized regions are afforded. The government had initially allotted funds for a new school but, as noted in Hi-Ho Mistahey!, the budget for education within the Department of Indian Affairs isn't specifically protected and can be utilized for other issues if they're deemed more critical. Frustrated with endless financial delays, the community, spearheaded by teen activist Shannen Koostachin, reached out to children across Canada, creating a grassroots awareness campaign throughout the schools, forcing parliament to listen through sheer volume. This story, in itself, is quite inspirational and captivating as a cultural assessment of the ever-changing Canadian landscape. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly complex or involving story, which is why Hi-Ho Mistahey. tends to feel directionless and unfocused. Amidst the core narrative about this movement, which, tragically, was started by someone who couldn't see it through after losing her life in a car accident, Obomsawin inserts several interviews with community members about topics like meat smoking and suicide statistics without specifically relating it back to the central topic. Obviously, the aim is to paint a picture of the community and determine why it's important to keep children there rather than have them go off to the city to study, but it plays more as a series of disjointed sob stories to make saccharine what is already an essential dialogue with enough emotional weight to sustain itself. And since there's little stylization or sense of pacing, it leaves everything feeling bloated and amateurish. Still, Obomsawin's determination to keep the world aware of the social and political issues affecting smaller communities in rural areas is commendable. She's clever enough to acknowledge that these plights stem from a Canadian cultural tendency to deny our less than flattering pass without dwelling on it or tossing out glib or dismissive comments about the urban lifestyle. It's this integrity and determination that helps make a difference.

Ignasi M. is a documentary about an eccentric HIV positive, gay, Catalan man, who goes about his daily life in a humorous manner. He meets with friends and family members and discusses with them politics, sex, art, and much more.

The story of cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky's ambitious but ultimately doomed film adaptation of the seminal science fiction novel.

A place: Theresienstadt. A unique place of propaganda which Adolf Eichmann called the "model ghetto", designed to mislead the world and Jewish people regarding its real nature, to be the last step before the gas chamber. A man: Benjamin Murmelstein, last president of the Theresienstadt Jewish Council, a fallen hero condemned to exile, who was forced to negotiate day after day from 1938 until the end of the war with Eichmann, to whose trial Murmelstein wasn't even called to testify. Even though he was without a doubt the one who knew the Nazi executioner best. More than twenty-five years after Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's new film reveals a little-known yet fundamental aspect of the Holocaust, and sheds light on the origins of the "Final Solution" like never before.

Using spare narration and stunning imagery, Midway focuses on the plight of the Laysan Albatross plagued by the ingestion of our plastic trash. Both elegy and warning, the film explores the interconnectedness of species, with the albatross on Midway as a mirror of our humanity.

A documentary that examines whether a charity organized by Pat Robertson to aid Rwandan genocide refugees was a front for diamond mining.

A group of Egyptian revolutionaries battle leaders and regimes, risking their lives to build a new society of conscience.

Inventor Tim Jenison seeks to understand the painting techniques used by Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer.

Former United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, discusses his career in Washington D.C. from his days as a congressman in the early 1960s to planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Comprised of smuggled footage and uncensored interviews, DANGEROUS ACTS gives audiences a front row seat to a resistance movement as it unfolds both on the stage and in the streets. As the members of the Free Theater confront the choice of either repression at home or exile in the US and the UK, DANGEROUS ACTS reconfirms our belief that the power of art and hope can indeed change the world.

Surveys the history of Jewish comedy.