Ten days of DOXA Documentary Film Festival viewing will wrap up on Sunday (May 16). Six repeat screenings of sold-out shows (including Bloodied But Unbowed, Crude Sacrifice, Experimental Eskimos, BAS! Beyond the Red Light, and No Fun City) will be held on that final day, so you'll have a second crack at anything you've missed. (Visit www.doxafestival.ca/ for details.) Here are some other selections to keep in mind as the festival winds down.

Eyes Wide Open: A Journey Through Today's South America
(France)
Filmmaker Gonzalo Arijon attempts too much by cramming into less than two hours visits to four neighbouring South American nations. Still, he manages to capture the whiff of changing political winds, and fellow Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano—author of 1971's influential Open Veins of Latin America—proves a poetic tour guide.

Belying the well-assembled film's generic title, Arijon seems a tad gullible to the rhetoric of Venezuelan big-shot Hugo Chávez and Bolivia's more measured Evo Morales. But there's equal emphasis on “little people” in backwaters of Brazil and elsewhere, with aboriginal views of the Earth's threatened environment finally gaining some traction with new leaders. The movie leaves you with the hopeful impression that South Americans are now far less subservient to colonialists who spent centuries keeping them separate and conveniently blind to the true value of their own manifold resources. (Pacific Cinémathí¨que, May 13, 9 p.m.)

> Ken Eisner

Disco and Atomic War
(Estonia)
The Cold War was famous for its missile silos, but much of it was fought in the TV studio. Estonian director Jaak Kilmi's Disco and Atomic War is a fast-moving and funny history of the battle for the airwaves that raged for decades between the city of Helsinki, Finland, and its Soviet-controlled counterpart, Tallinn, Estonia, just 75 kilometres away across the Gulf of Finland.

The propaganda struggle begins in the mid-'50s and slowly but surely turns in Helsinki's favour, as cooking shows, episodes of Knight Rider, and films like Emmanuelle (the H-bomb of “soft power”) land in Estonian households and convince viewers that life on the other side isn't the capitalist abbatoir they've been warned about. See this film, if only to marvel at the idea of Estonian villagers gathering weekly in 1980 to follow the plot line of Dallas through handwritten letters from the capital. (Pacific Cinémathí¨que, May 14, 8:30 p.m.)

> Brian Lynch

Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie
(U.S.)
Wavy Gravy is probably the best-remembered character from the original Woodstock movie. The clownish director of security took to the stage to warn the massive 1969 festival audience about the “brown acid” (“It's not poisoned acid; it's just bad acid”). He also prevailed upon the organizers to allow his Hog Farm commune members to set up a free kitchen and roused the sleeping music lovers with his famous, “Good morning. What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000.”

Director Michelle Esrick's documentary about the life of Wavy Gravy, formerly Hugh Romney, will appeal to anyone of a certain age who has fond memories of that era and/or the film. And as a walking slice of social-activist history, Gravy's story will be of interest to younger viewers with a political bent. The film is also darn, well, cute. The elfin and rotund prankster, now approaching his 74th birthday, is almost impossible not to like. Interviews with Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Odetta, Jackson Browne, and many others help fill in the blanks. (Granville 7, May 15, 7:30 p.m.)

> Martin Dunphy