E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fame and obscurity Toronto’s Hot Docs festival celebrates both BY GERALD PEARY

It’s not only the documentaries that are sexy and popular these days but a handful of the filmmakers who produce them. Ken Burns and Michael Moore, both experts at courting publicity, are A-list celebs, perhaps more famous than they are talented. There are less-buzzed-about documentarians who can also claim a spirited following: an admiring local film and video community turned out in numbers for the recent appearances of Richard Leacock at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and Albert Maysles at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Leacock, especially, is a cinéma-vérité guru about Boston, with lots of followers (many of them female!) nostalgic for the hedonistic 1970s, when he operated the MIT Film Unit.

This week’s documentary superstar? I’m delighted to report that it’s Cambridge’s very own Errol Morris, who brought the city of Toronto to its feet during a three-day celebration there of his estimable career, from Gates of Heaven (1978) to the Oscar-winning The Fog of War (2003). It was astonishing to see how revered he is in English Canada. Amid lengthy interview sessions on all the major television shows, Morris was anointed by Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe & Mail as "the most critically respected American documentary filmmaker of the last 25 years." His visit was capped by several appearances at the Hot Docs International Film Festival, where he was honored with a retrospective and an Outstanding Achievement Award.

Yours truly was recruited by Hot Docs for an on-stage Q&A with Morris, whom I’ve known for decades, since reviewing his first movie and giving Gates of Heaven only three stars. "It should have been four stars," I recanted during our Toronto talk, but Morris would have none of that. "That’s like grade inflation!" he teased me.

Six hundred people came out for this event, and many more were turned away. For two hours, Morris charmed the audience, sliding between intimate philosophical musings and hilarious bursts of gallows humor. At the end, a standing ovation saluted him, with fans bolting on stage wanting autographs, and Morris and company were led out of the building flanked by fest volunteers, who kept the filmmaker clear of too-aggressive groupies.

The hit movie of Hot Docs 2005? It’s Grizzly Man by Germany’s Werner Herzog. As often with Herzog (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes; Fitzcarraldo), here’s a story of an obsessed, perhaps lunatic, overreacher on a macho quest taking him where normal humans shudder to tread. Herzog’s real-life protagonist is Timothy Treadwell, who for 13 summers lived among Alaskan bruins, whom he gave human names and claimed as best friends. In October 2003, one bear pal ate Treadwell and also his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard. Herzog uses Treadmill’s 100 hours of self-made movies as the basis for his question. Is there an underlying harmonious world order in which man and animal can be one, as Treadwell believed? Or is the world of nature chaos, random destruction, as Herzog believes? Grizzly Man is endlessly absorbing, with the ex-alcoholic lead seeming crazier and more deeply paranoid as the movie progresses, shedding his credibility as a guardian of grizzlies against the intrusions of mankind.

Elsewhere at Hot Docs? O misery!, as bluegrass’s Ralph Stanley has sung out. What an odious world we live in! My three-person international jury selecting the Best First Documentary picked The Devil’s Miner, a heartbreaking look at the life of a 14-year-old Bolivian boy, Basilio Varagas, who works monstrous hours in a notorious silver mine that, the legend says, has killed eight million employees over the centuries. If the rock falls don’t get you, lung disease does before you’re 40. Can Basilio, a nice, smart, deep-thinking kid, escape? It’s hard to see how, unless the filmmakers (American Kief Davidson and Austrian Richard Ladkani) broke the documentary wall and gave him thousands of dollars.

There’s more sadness in Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary, in which Arturo Pérez Torres follows several groups of impoverished Nicaraguans who try to cross Mexico and then sneak into the USA in search of jobs. This film confirms the horrors we’ve heard about of getting into Texas and Arizona, but far worse is what happens to those nice peasants in Mexico, where they’re raped, their money is stolen, they’re beaten up by police, and they lose arms and legs falling off trains moving north. O misery!

Contact Gerald Peary at gpeary@geraldpeary.com