Feeding hunger

He's been making documentaries for 35 years. "It's all I know how to do - I'm incapable of anything else," says Peter Raymont.

The Canadian filmmaker, who arrives today for the Dubai International Film Festival, said he was excited about his first visit to the UAE in a telephone interview with tabloid! from his Toronto home at the weekend.

Here to promote his latest film, A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman, the 57-year-old is still on a high from hearing his documentary is one of 15 shortlisted for an Academy Award next year. On discovering the news a few weeks ago, Raymont said: "It felt wonderful. I think of it more as being among a very select few of all the hundreds of films made in the last year. It's extraordinary and it's a great, great honour."

The documentary is the only non-American film on the list and is up against Michael Moore's Sicko and three films about the war in Iraq. It follows the acclaimed author Ariel Dorfman's return to Chile and Argentina after years in exile following the 1973 military coup.

Raymont first met the subject of his latest documentary while promoting his last work, Shake Hands With The Devil, at a film festival in Durham, North Carolina, where Dorfman teaches at Duke University.

'Engaging'

"I just fell in love with the guy," Raymont recalls. "He's such an engaging, warm and articulate man. I thought, if this man's going back to Chile, he's got such a story to tell."

Ariel Dorfman, an acclaimed writer, human rights activist and playwright, narrowly escaped being killed in the September 11, 1973, military coup in Chile. Many friends and fellow workers, however, were killed, tortured or disappeared in the coup. As an advisor to Chile's overthrown President Salvador Allende, Dorfman managed to escape, finding refuge in the Argentinean Embassy for a few months before fleeing for good.

A year ago, as Raymont and Dorfman were filming his return to Chile, fate played a hand in the documentary's conclusion.
"It was very fortuitous that we happened to be in Santiago when General Pinochet died on December 10, 2006," said Raymont. "It was a very dramatic moment in Chilean history. There's still a third of the population in Chile who consider Pinochet a great man. There's no doubt that this man was responsible for the death of thousands of people. The death of Pinochet was kind of an X-ray of the country and, for our filming purposes, it enabled us to have a very powerful closing to the film."

'Appetite'

The filmmaker is now promoting A Promise to the Dead at a time when documentaries are experiencing a new lease of life. Citing Al Gore's Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth as having an enormous impact, Raymont said: "There's a real hunger and appetite for these films. There were many years of boring documentaries that were educational and good for you but now there's a whole genre of provocative point of view films that really harp back to the beginning of documentaries when film was to promote social change."

It brings Raymont to the man who inspired him to make documentaries in the first place: John Grierson, considered the father of British and Canadian documentary who made films in the 1920s and 1930s and was the first commissioner of the National Film Board of Canada.

"Grierson believed that the role of the documentary was to shine a bright light into dark places, to be a tool for social change and to wake people up about the injustices of the world," said Raymont.

"I think of myself almost as much of an activist as a documentary film maker. I have a strong opinion in my films. And I think people are more interested in watching documentaries with a strong point of view."

Don't miss it

Film: A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman.
When: Tomorrow at 12.45pm.
Where: Cinestar 9, Mall of the Emirates.
Length: 92 minutes.
Language: English and Spanish with English subtitles.

He's watching…

Peter Raymont's documentary is up against a film called War Dance in the 2008 Oscars shortlist. The film, also being screened at DIFF this week, charts the progress of children in Northern Uganda whose families and homes have been ravaged by civil war. Raymont described it as "extraordinary", and said: "It's just a beautiful inspiring film about the power of the human soul. If that film wins the Academy Award, I would be very happy."