TORONTO—On the night when Astra Taylor introduced the world premiere of her documentary film Examined Life to a Toronto International Film Festival audience, her entire family was sitting in the audience. The Canadian-born, Georgia-raised daughter of a science professor has little formal education but has now made two documentary features about philosophers. Examined Life, which plays at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que Friday to Wednesday (March 20 to 25), sees leading intellectuals examining contemporary issues. In the dining room of a Toronto hotel, Taylor says that she invited her family to thank them for an unusual upbringing that has played an important role in her choice of documentary material.

“It was important to me that they came here because there is something in the spirit of our own journey that I see when I watch the movie. My father is a scientist and taught me the inquisitive spirit, and I think the film contains a lot of our values. I barely have a formal education by regular standards. I was fortunate that in our formative years we weren’t sent to school. We were unschooled, which is like radical home schooling. I think the way that the education system and our whole culture is set up, it beats thinking out of people.”

In Examined Life, Taylor takes her philosophers out of the classroom and into the streets. Cornel West compares philosophy to jazz while riding in a cab through New York; Judith Butler discusses individualism in the streets of San Francisco; and Slavoj Zizek (the focus of Taylor’s debut film, Zizek!) talks about ecology while standing in a garbage dump. She says it was important to her to make sure that the audience would not feel that the men and women in the movie were talking down to them.

“I would be horrified if I made a movie about philosophy that made people feel stupid,” she says. “I really want people to be inspired to think for themselves. I would be quite sad if they felt as though only established thinkers are allowed to ask these questions and to go on like this. I hope the movie doesn’t have that effect. At the same time, I didn’t want to alienate the ”˜inside baseball’ crowd by making it mindless.”

Taylor worked hard to ensure that the messages she wanted to deliver were front and centre in the film. She says her only worry was that they might get lost in the presentation. “I kind of hate the film,” she says. “The editing is the toughest part, because you have to find a way of taking 40 hours of people going ”˜Blah, blah, blah’ and turn it into a film. I think it is that now, because it looks at animal rights, disabilities, ethics, social change: the things we are consumed by as a family to the exclusion of almost everything else. The world I want to live in is one in which everyone is a philosopher in a way that makes them question authority and everything around them.”