I interviewed filmmaker Richard Parry a few months ago while working on a realscreen story about war reporting. At the time, he mentioned that he was editing a film about a friend of his that he’d known for ages who’d also started visiting, and reporting from, war-torn countries as a young, eager man with a passion to see war up close and personal.

The resulting film is Blood Trail, which premiered at TIFF. Here’s a quickie synopsis of the film: Robert King is a war photographer from the States who covers battles on the ground (and often the front lines). In the film, which takes place over the course of 15 years and falls naturally into three acts as we see King snapping pictures in Bosnia, Chechnya and Baghdad, we learn what was going on in King’s mind during this time, and now.

Considering the emotions this film brings up — awe, disgust, despair — it’s a hard one to sum up. Instead, I’ll share a few of the most memorable moments from this powerful film for me:

• Explaining why he wanted to photograph wars, King says he thought of himself as a “messenger put on Earth to convey a message of human suffering.”
• In a light moment in the film (it’s all relative), a fellow war reporter advises King, who’s on his first trip to a war zone, against wearing the military-type pants he’s sporting.
• In a later scene, King admits “The only thing I knew about war is what I saw on TV. The only thing I knew about war correspondents, I read in a book.”
• In a reflective and heartbreaking moment, King says “Wars didn’t fuck me up; I was fucked up before I even went, and that’s why I was so good at it.” Later on, he comments “I’m not normal. I’m damaged goods.” (At this point during the screening I was weeping away…)
• King’s wife Olga, a woman he met in Russia and now lives with in Tennessee with their son, expresses her thought’s on King’s profession: “How could you risk your own life to take pictures that people don’t want to see?”
• When asked if he’ll be covering wars for another 15 years, King says “Why quit now? The whole world’s going to turn into complete chaos.”

So while I’ve revealed some content from the film, it does no justice to how rich and raw this documentary actually is. I recommend it to anyone who’s curious about the emotional toll war reporting takes on those who make their living in this honorable yet grueling profession. Rather than try to sex up the topic, the doc, which Parry coproduced with Vaughan Smith, is as harsh and unapologetic as the wars it covers.

At first glance, Cape Town’s Sea Point Promenade looks like your typical public chill-out spot. (Well, minus the fact that it’s gorgeous and so close to the Atlantic that it nearly spills into it; I’m more accustomed to Toronto parks littered with broken picnic tables and empty dime bags - but maybe I’m not visiting the right ones…) It’s more the behavior of visitors at Sea Point’s pools that seems ordinary: young kids jokingly pull down their friends’ swimming trunks, an employee diligently tests the pools’ pH level, teenagers flirt and frolic in skimpy swimwear and the lifeguards complain about their crappy sun block.

Before the TIFF screening of Sea Point Days, director François Verster described the promenade (the film’s main locale) as the most densely populated area in Cape Town. Only white people were permitted to use Sea Point during apartheid, but today it attracts a mixture of races and classes. Verster uses the park and its visitors to bring light to some of the bigger issues facing post-apartheid South Africa.

So while the opening shots of the film show people lazing about the promenade, the tone quickly changes as we hear black teenagers in the Sea Point showers talk about the way their friends at school use guns. Their realities are juxtaposed against scenes with the white residents at a nearby nursing home where the dolled-up grannies, complete with pink lipstick and coiffed hair, have dance recitals and do exercises from their chairs. Then we shift back to the beach, where a homeless black man who dreams of working in theater says he’s a South African citizen but gets stopped on the beach by police for no reason, and is treated like an outsider in his own country.

Throughout the film, both black and white people give mixed signals about today’s reality in South Africa. There are some from both groups who believe apartheid is a distant memory, and others from both groups who believe it is permanently engrained in the culture regardless of it being over on paper. As the caretaker at Sea Point Promenade says, it could take another generation before the lingering grip of apartheid truly loosens its hold on the country. Verster’s film shows that a stroll through Sea Point’s promenade is much more than your ordinary walk in the park.

During a stretch of severe ‘cowboy policing’ in Bakersfield, California in the ’80s, several citizens were falsely imprisoned for molesting children — mostly their own. The overzealous Kern County District Attorney wanted to clamp down on those who abused children, and he didn’t let a pesky little thing like innocence get in his way. Long story short, all it took was this DA’s mission, a misguided social worker and police, and suddenly children in the neighbourhood were claiming they’d been molested. As it turns out, they’d actually been interrogated and forced into telling sickening stories that weren’t true. The kids ended up testifying in court and a lot of shocked (and innocent) adults were put behind bars.

Thanks to the Northern California Innocence Project — a guardian angel for the falsely imprisoned if there ever was one — the cases were eventually reopened, and the way the children had been coerced into giving false testimonies finally came to light. But the length of time these people spent in jail before their convictions were reversed is appalling. In the most extreme case, John Stoll, who’d been convicted of molesting his young son, spent 20 years behind bars. No, that’s not a typo. TWENTY YEARS.

I’ll let you watch the film yourself to get the full story, but wanted to share a moment from the Q&A after the film screened at TIFF. Several of the film’s subjects were on stage (while Sean Penn, who narrated and executive produced the film, remained seated in the crowd. I thought that was a nice touch since had he also come onstage, the audience would have presumably focused on him). Anyhow, when Stoll was asked how he’s so calm after spending two decades in prison for crimes he didn’t commit, he simply said “I had 20 years of being mad. Twenty years is plenty. Now I’m out and I want to focus on having a good time.” Can you blame him?

I went to Friday’s TIFF screening of American Swing because, let’s be honest, the topic of the sexual revolution in the States holds a certain amount of intrigue. Call me naive (hey, I was only a toddler at the time), but I associate the ’70s swingers’ movement with that scene in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam when Mira Sorvino and John Leguizamo take part in a coke-fueled orgy. Or the key party that takes place in The Ice Storm (one of my favorite feature films).

American Swing follows the launch and ultimate demise of Plato’s Retreat, a New York sex club that was closed down by the city in 1985. The film was a bit redundant (I’ve now seen enough grainy footage of naked frolicking bodies to last a lifetime), but it did give a good sense of what the swinging scene was all about. Plus, there were some memorable sound bites:

A woman with silver eye shadow and ’70s hair saying: “We have jobs. We pay mortgages. Just because we’re swingers, doesn’t mean we’re freaks of nature.”

Melvin Van Peebles, who frequented the club, saying: “Personally, I think with a little bit of encouragement, everybody’s on the wild side.”

Another club regular saying: “The jacuzzi was chemical warfare.”

Although some screen time was devoted to drugs and the impact of AIDS on the scene, the doc was more or less a lighthearted introduction to the birth of swinging in the US, complete with a disco-filled soundtrack. Did I want to douse myself in bleach after hearing about the crab-filled mattresses in the club? Yes. Still, I’m glad I saw what all the hype surrounding the scene was about.

I recently interviewed a high-ranking exec at a major US cablecaster and his positive, down-to-earth attitude about his job really impressed me. The television and film industry does have its share of ego-saturated execs - have you ever been privy to discussions about the wording of titles? It can get plain nasty. But, thankfully, for every diva in this biz there’s a breath of fresh air.

Here are the aforementioned exec’s thoughts on keeping grounded:

“I’m really fortunate, I have a great job, I work with great people, but I don’t let it get to my head, like ‘I’m the head of programming for a television network and you people are insects. That’s stupid. I’ve seen so many people in this business that have had the fortune to really move up and they’ve been great about it. I’ve also seen people I really like and they’ve moved up and they turn into monsters and it’s like, ‘You’re kind of a jerk now - what happened?’ They buy into the whole ‘I’m in 96 million households now or whatever’ thing and it’s like, ‘Yeah, but if you get a pink slip tomorrow, who would you be?’ Just be yourself. I always say ‘Follow the Golden Rule and be true.’ And I always tell people to be diplomatically honest.”

Makes sense to me.

Remember the days when you had to fax something to someone to get a reply? Or perhaps even make your way over to the post office? You should — it wasn’t all that long ago. Back when email was only beginning to seep its way into mainstream culture, I recall asking my mother, who was sitting at our home computer emailing her colleagues, “What do you mean your computer is talking with another computer?” Mind you, those were the days when her desktop setup was roughly the size of a garbage dumpster and I was too busy playing ‘Pitfall’ on my Atari to bother with her compute box.

Needless to say, I never imagined I’d have a blog. In fact, only a couple of years ago (OK, months) I was still teasing my friends about their online postings and rants. “Why would anyone read what you, some no-name dude in Toronto, think of a local indie band?” I’d ask. (My friends are used to my teasing by now.) They assured me they don’t blog because they expect thousands of web surfers to flock to their posts, but because they like feeling like they’re part of a bigger online community.

Seems a lot of people are in the same boat; everyone and their best friend’s cousin is blogging these days. Turns out people really do care what other people think — no matter how trivial or seemingly niche. The reason I’ve got blogs, and the Internet as a whole, on my mind these days is, of course, because realscreen has just revamped its entire website.

As coincidence would have it, I just stumbled across the July issue of Vanity Fair, which contains a fascinating piece called “Inventing the Internet: An Oral History.” (Check it out if you haven’t yet.) There’s one particular quote in the piece from Tom Anderson, one of the co-founders of MySpace, that stuck with me. As I know you know (since you’re Web-savvy enough to be trolling blogs like this one), MySpace is the world’s largest social network, and has an estimated 110 million active users (at least that’s the number cited in the article). Anyhow, here’s the Anderson quote:

“MySpace is a lot like a cell phone. When it came out, people were asking, Why would I have to carry a phone with me wherever I go? Now they can’t imagine not having it.”

The same is true of the Internet in general. It’s hard to imagine not being able to research using it, or send emails, or ever read another blog. To my indie band-loving, blogging-obsessed friends: next drink’s on me, and I’ll stop teasing you. For now.

With former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic now in The Hague awaiting trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for his part in the war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, I’m reminded of Milosevic on Trial, which I saw at the most recent Hot Docs.

The film, directed by Michael Christoffersen, covered the UN tribunal against former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic for genocide and other war crimes. The trial lasted more than four years, and Christoffersen and his team followed the proceedings with an unwavering eye, letting Milosevic’s atrocious acts speak for themselves. As you’ll recall, Milosevic represented himself during the tribunal, one he rejected throughout as being illegal. During the screening, my jaw hit the floor several times as Milosevic disrespected both the judge and those massacred during the war.

Milosevic died of a heart attack in prison before the trial was over. But the preceding years of testimonies and transparent stalling techniques provided more than enough material for an insightful documentary. I hope Christoffersen and his devoted team, or someone in the doc community with equal perseverance, will follow Karadzic’s trial - sure to be as unsettling and fascinating as Milosevic’s. Even in the current preparatory stage of his trial, Karadzic is pulling similar stunts to Milosevic - just last week he asked the UN tribunal to replace the presiding judge, whom he believes has a “personal” interest in convicting him. Please, someone get rolling.

I recently read some news about a Canadian movie theater chain that got under my skin. The company announced its plans to rent downtime at 29 of its theaters across the country to video gamers looking for the thrill of playing their Xbox 360 games on the big screen. (I’ll withhold any comment on how the gamers could better spend their time cleaning their apartments or, say, dating. Actually, I guess I won’t.) I’m not sure how much the theater execs aim to make off this endeavor, but they’re charging $179 plus tax for a two-hour gaming session. Seems about the same price as four popcorns.

But I’ve got my own suggestion for the use of theater downtime, which the article says is roughly 12 to 24 hours a week (and will likely increase once the school year starts). Rather than fill it with Red Bull-addicted gamers, why not use it to screen docs for - gasp - free? I’ve always been a fan of film fests offering free or reduced rates for seniors and students, so why not take that idea one step further and make it a year-round gift from mega theater chains and filmmakers to the general public?

It’d be an honorable practice and I’m sure the masses would come away more enriched after seeing a doc like Andrew Jenks, Room 335 or The 11th Hour than a small group of gamers would after blowing each other up in something called ‘Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation.’

When I met Up the Yangtze director Yung Chang at an NFB party in 2006 (right around the time he pitched the project at Hot Docs’ Toronto Documentary Forum), I was surprised at how candid he was. I asked him the basics about his film - what it was about, how far into production he was - but was particularly interested in his experiences filming in China. I’d recently written a piece in realscreen about the challenges some filmmakers face with the complex paperwork for shooting and permissions in the country, and was curious about whether Chang could relate. Turns out, he didn’t have permission from the Chinese government to film. It was actually the American-managed tour company that ran the cruise boat on which the film largely takes place that granted him access to its staff and tourists. Potential permissions crisis averted.

Chang was just as forthcoming at a screening of the film in Toronto about six months ago. He was also a bit nervous, admitting to the audience: “Our survival depends on our opening weekend.” Funny thing is, it coincided with the release of Paris Hilton’s The Hottie & the Nottie. Her film may also deal with the struggles surrounding the 21^st century Chinese dream, but I haven’t seen it.

Thankfully, Chang didn’t need to stress over his film’s survival. Yangtze has grossed over $1 million in North America, and is also playing in theaters in the US, Europe and Australia. Of note for those in Toronto or Montreal — the film has just been brought back to AMC theaters there for an open run that starts on August 15. Peel yourself away from Olympics coverage and check out another view of China.