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From prom nights to paper trails, documentaries at the Vancouver International Film Festival probe public life.

For independent filmmakers, this is the best of times and the worst of times. Things stink because—in an age of Macintosh Spielbergs and YouTube De Niros—more and more young talent is chasing fewer entertainment dollars. But it's also all good, because resources are available that were unthinkable even 10 years ago.

Local scenester David Hauka is highly sensitive to this creative conundrum. His new mid-length film, Certainty, is screening as part of this year's Vancouver International Film Festival, which launches today (October 1). The veteran director's aim was to illuminate nothing less than “the magnificent series of events that bring us to be alive in this universe”, as he put it in a call from a laundromat near his West Side apartment. He said he couldn't have done it without computer access to the U.S. Library of Congress and other sources that previously would have required much more legwork and money. That portal does come with a caveat, however.

“Yes, the current technology allows us to reconstruct a history, or construct one that we prefer. The images of history are all unanchored now, however, and we have to take extra care that our sources are correct and put in context.”

Showing October 6 and 11, the semi-ironically titled film offers a uniquely compelling meditation on death, grieving, popular culture, and personal memory as guided by the road map of Hauka's own family's ups and downs.

“It's a look at how social iterations shape us, and a recollection of a time when science was full of rock stars,” he said. “Now, of course, there's a war on knowledge, and this has erased much of where we came from. You don't want to go back to the founding myths of the place you left, and in some ways, we're still like Europeans landing in the New World, waving our guns around.”

That's interesting, because Terry McEvoy, programmer for the VIFF's Canadian Images series (and therefore responsible for Hauka's inclusion in the event), recently told the Georgia Straight about how childhood games used to be lifted from Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, and other TV shows beaming from the centre of a three-channel universe. Those days are long gone.

“Today, the culture has no centre,” McEvoy said bluntly, “so no kid now can even picture a time when it did, let alone comprehend what it was like to be driven by myths that everyone shared.”

Tarnished by implications of genocide and imperial ambition, increasingly noisy by the mid-1950s, the “cowboys and Indians” racket actually helped facilitate the rise of science as a new religion and entertainment genre. The space race offered a clean new backdrop against which to play out ideals of masculine endeavour, with noble loners using their tools to expand the limits of “civilization”, testing themselves against a fierce environment and unknowable others.

For Americans, at least, the pioneering threads binding the western movies and TV shows to the colonization of space frayed badly because of Vietnam, especially after CBS's Walter Cronkite declared the war a tragic blunder. Young people eventually lost interest in the crew-cut pursuit of new worlds.

The focus of technology shifted to microwave ovens and home theatres. AIDS arrived to supplant the fear of enemy missiles, while nonideological geeks in Seattle and Silicon Valley strove to scale corporate technology to personal use.

The result has had far-reaching consequences, although the changes are still hard to grasp. Since Apple met Microsoft, the primacy of the individual within society has been repeatedly asserted, while community has expanded sideways, with common interests, and grievances, uniting people across tribal and geographical lines. The push-pull between personhood and mass identity has become the central dynamic of this nameless decade, with political parties now reduced to flags that barely mask corporate interests.

Everything has become entertainment, and the means of production—cellphones and digital cameras—are now in everyone's hands, allowing citizens to document atrocities, post stupid tricks, or embarrass sexual partners even as increased surveillance obliterates the lines between public and private life.

This tense dynamic is being explored in the VIFF's 28th installment. Follow the Money and The Way of Nature are parallel programs that finger the corporate paper trail wrapped around our collective throats. From this short distance, there's a lot of evidence that right and left quietly changed places in the Reagan-Mulroney-Thatcher era, with former progressives now asking to slow life down long enough to contemplate changes, and so-called conservatives pushing for unchecked growth, regardless of costs to planet or society.

That notion is addressed exhaustively by a nearly three-hour French doc called Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy (screening October 2 and 4), which posits that when the Cold War's “binary system” collapsed, the motivation to morally evolve started to vanish.

Taking the macro view, Franny Armstrong's U.K.-made documentary The Age of Stupid (October 7, 9, and 10) looks forward in anger to the final victory of ignorant pride, in a future world shorn of life's fundaments by climate change. Such issues are also broached by films like Crude (October 4 and 13), Sweet Crude (October 8, 9, and 13), and Canada's H2Oil (October 11 and 12), which examine our deadly obsession with commodifying basic resources.

Highly detailed docs such as American Casino (October 1, 7, and 13) and We All Fall Down (October 1, 6, and 12) sift through the ashes of the ongoing mortgage crisis. Runaway investment is given a sexier gloss in The Great Contemporary Art Bubble (October 2, 3, and 9), a scabrous study of irrational desire as a tool of market manipulation. Meanwhile, Canada's Broke (October 8 and 10) looks at the quotidian result of this collapse through the doorway of a single Edmonton pawn shop. (Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story opens in Vancouver the same weekend as the fest.)

No matter where the dough is going, most North Americans keep clicking their way through the detritus of this unravelling reality. Formerly, we were forced to amuse ourselves to death with old-fashioned, noninteractive tools like newspapers, magazines, and television. To offer a tart reminder of the Internet's relatively recent genesis, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Ondi Timoner, whom we already know from her up-close-and-personal work with rival rock bands in 2004's DiG!, will be here with her latest, Sundance grand-jury prizewinner We Live in Public (October 1, 9, and 14).

Timoner has previously looked at cults and community gardens, but her weirdest visit came in 1999, when Josh Harris—a now largely forgotten and possibly sociopathic former dot-com millionaire—hired her to digitally document his bizarre experiment in communal living in a Manhattan bunker where everyone was famous for a month. This was followed by the on-line meltdown of Harris's romantic relationship, also enacted before cameras.

“I was creeped out, for sure,” she said of this material in a call from her L.A. office. “He asked me to make the film out of the bunker stuff, but then when it was shut down, he took the masters because he didn't like the way he looked.”

The cigar-chomping entrepreneur went on to also lose all his money in public, and he slipped off to Africa to rebuild his image. But after Timoner started winning awards, she was again pursued by Harris, who now agreed to give her free rein with the material.

“I still didn't think it was relevant. Bush had won the second election, and the country was under some kind of mind control. But as time went on, the project seemed to be about all of us, about what are we giving up in terms of our relationships in order to be connected by this electronic web. Ten years ago, we didn't have broadband,” she continued. “Now we're never off, and it happened so fast. We're driven by fear of being alone, and now that we have this umbilical cord, we always feel connected.

“Don't get me wrong; I love the Internet. It's the most amazing invention ever. I couldn't have made or put this [film] out without it,” she said, pointing to on-line editing and Facebook promotion as vital tools of the modern film biz.

Irony is encoded even further into the DNA of a film like Beyond the Game (October 6 and 9), a Dutch doc that follows two masters of the all-consuming game World of Warcraft—an on-line obsession that claims to have more than 10 million subscribers in its grip—as they barely acknowledge the real-world places in which they meet to compete via machine for the world championship. The upside of the current technology is more clearly seen in Prom Night in Mississippi (October 11 and 13), written and directed by Canada's Paul Saltzman. In this delightful doc, teens record their firsthand experience of events leading to the first-ever integrated prom dance at their small town's one high school—in 2008.

“My belief,” Saltzman said on the line from his office in Toronto, “is that evil—that is, people harming others for pleasure or gain—is identifiable, and if you shine a light in those corners, that kind of behaviour scurries.”

When Charleston, Mississippi, resident Morgan Freeman offered to pay for an all-student dance, Saltzman and Patricia Aquino, his spouse and coproducer, moved there for five months and got to know kids of both races, giving them small, high-def cameras to use as diaries. In the end, though, only one of the white parents risked talking to Saltzman.

“For me, the most wonderful thing was the camera's ability to reflect back how these kids are, how brave and important,” Saltzman said.

The writer-director knows something about life in public, since he and his ex-wife, veteran director Deepa Mehta, had their family's affairs dissected in a book by daughter Devyani Saltzman.

Himself a Freedom Rider in the 1960s (he spent 10 days in a Mississippi jail with a thousand other protesters, “in the poorest county of the poorest state”, he adds), the filmmaker also spent a week with the Beatles during their 1968 Indian retreat.

“I just figure you can never go wrong following your heart and passion,” he concludes. “I know for sure that good documentary filmmakers don't sit outside their experiences.”

Other VIFF films use the digital-diary form to explore personalities writ large and small. In Defamation (October 1, 4, and 5), Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir follows a very different high-school class to Auschwitz and wonders if a society so singularly obsessed with prejudice might be traumatizing its children and projecting more fear into the world.

In Oblivion (October 9 and 11), Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann returns to her native Peru to let her disheartened countrymen vent on-camera. More individually, Claudia Lehmann's smart Berlin Playground (October 11 and 12) follows the difficult passage of Berlin bassist Hans Narva, and the camera's presence affects his choices.

Elsewhere, the anonymous eyes behind Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country (October 2 and 14) animate the idea that confronting oppression with rapidly transmittable pixels can eventually help put an end to evil. Maybe. Prevailing social myths were questioned heavily during the U.S. conflict in Vietnam, but to what end? In the superbly made The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (October 2, 4, and 6), history comes alive as archival material draws unforced parallels between Richard Nixon's secret war in Southeast Asia and George Bush's mendacious slide to bloodshed in this decade.

“No,” Vancouver's Hauka continued where he left off, “the lessons of Vietnam were not strong enough to prevent Iraq. Orwellian doublethink has taken us right through to Katrina, which was a massive failure of even the concept of America. Today, personal gain is taken to the extreme of pure fetish, and Internet traffic is largely escapist material, with no real connection with your culture and history. Somehow, we have evolved into a stub of our own civilization.”

Even so, the growth of “the internets”, as Bush junior famously put it, enabled Hauka to piece together a lyrical essay of great evocative power, and in ways impossible previously.

“Of course, you create a whole artifact and it can just as easily vanish in a blip. This is a very potent era; things could go right in spite of ourselves, but I am somewhat pessimistic.”

No moral lesson is drawn by Ontario filmmaker Chelsea McMullan in Deadman, which shares with the better-known Johnny Depp movie of the same name a vision of the frontier as proving ground of operating mythology. The 50-minute essay—which acts as a foundation, along with a half-dozen much shorter shorts, for the National Film Board's 70th-anniversary program, screening October 9, 11, and 16—literally plays cowboys against Indians as a rural B.C. man builds a Wild West fantasy park from scratch. Meanwhile, a nearby First Nations family ponders why anyone would want to live in the past—especially such a false one.

The film neatly summarizes the tensions appreciated by people informed enough to know that such problems exist.

Options remain in this tale of two planets. It is still up to us whether the future will look like a space station, pulsating with phosphorescent technology, or a ghost town, with tumbleweeds drifting through an empty, red-dust landscape. Or are there other choices?

In any case, there is one certainty: Walter Cronkite won't tell us what to do.