"Am I Racist?" became the most popular documentary in a decade two years ago.
How? It wasn't due to Legacy Media coverage or promotion. Nor did it rely on fawning film critic reviews. The documentary simply struck a nerve, using humor and "Candid Camera"-style provocations to shred DEI insanity.
And it worked.
In a sane world, that would have coaxed some documentary filmmakers to expound on what "Am I Racist?" director Justin Folk achieved. Except that would mean copying his impish tics and right-leaning philosophy.
So, no one cloned "Racist" in the grand Hollywood copycat tradition. The genre remains an aggressively liberal one, and this year's offerings prove it.
The Toronto International Film Festival is one of the year's biggest movie events, a precursor to Oscar season and hotbed of awards-bait cinema.
Call it the starter pistol for the Fall's best and brightest films.
This year, TIFF will honor two major documentary films that have something distinctly in common. They hail from the Left. How Left? We'll have to wait and see. Read the tea leaves, though, and you might think it's an MS NOW convention.
First up is Alex Gibney's "Musk." The expansive doc is roughly three and a half hours long, a rare running time for a feature documentary. Gibney, a far-Left artist and Oscar winner, has plenty to talk about with Elon Musk's remarkable rise. But will it be fair and balanced?
Few have seen it yet, but here's how the head of the Venice Film Festival described "Musk."
[Gibney] traces the whole career — the contradictions, and the conditioning power that is centralized in the hands of a single man,” the festival chief added. “Consider a genius of capitalist entrepreneurship, but also a dangerous technocrat, with no moral scruples.
Now, Musk is no saint. His eagerness to impregnate numerous women who aren't his wife is alarming. So are some of his more provocative moments, like bringing a chainsaw to a speaking event to capture DOGE's job-cutting efforts.
It had to be done, but those job losses represent real people suddenly out of work.
So Musk is both fair game and a great documentary subject. It's also likely Gibney will bring a sizable axe to the task at hand.
Another TIFF title? "Rapinoe" appears to be a fawning look at the far-Left soccer player. Megan Rapinoe has been one of the most strident voices in all of professional sports. She promotes a far-Left agenda, and that includes having trans women compete against biological women in professional sports.
She's never directly questioned about that position or presented with damning facts that clash with her worldview. Will "Rapinoe" do the honors? If it did, it might not have made the TIFF cut.
Another TIFF doc with left-leaning potential? "Cheyenne" follows four young women in the male-dominated world of bucking bronco competitions. That could be a compelling story, full stop. But it also opens the possibility of feminist lectures.
Did any right-leaning documentaries make the cut? Do they ever?
We've seen some powerful documentaries from the Right in recent years. None may eclipse "The Fall of Minneapolis," a harrowing look at the George Floyd narrative from the scrappy team at Alpha News.
It proved too incendiary for any major film festival for a simple reason. It upends key progressive narratives, and it does it in a stark and sober fashion.
The documentary world remains a reliably liberal realm, with conservative documentaries forced to work around the margins. Sometimes, as was the case with "Am I Racist," that doesn't stop them from spreading like cinematic wildfire.
