Dive into the lives of others

The Cove is a thriller about attempts to stop the capture and slaughter of dolphins in Japan. Photo / Supplied

If the crop of documentary films in this year's festival is any indication, the planet is in less distress than it has been for a while.

It's a meaningless measure, of course, since the movies on screen in the 41st Auckland International Film Festival, which begins next Thursday, are the fruits of ideas that germinated a couple of years ago at least.

But the line-up seems less doom-laden than it has in recent years: in a world dominated by the Bush doctrine, Iraq was always looming large and environmental degradation and climate change featured prominently.

This year's non-fiction programme - almost 40 titles counting the music films and an excellent section devoted to movies about artists - does not turn its back on the world's troubles: the Middle East conflict is the setting for Rachel, a touchingly personal but powerful and angry anatomy of the killing of a young American peace activist in the Gaza Strip; and The Cove is a knuckle-whitening real-life thriller about attempts to stop the capture and slaughter of dolphins in a remote Japanese bay.

But if the schedule lacks blockbusters in the Fahrenheit 9/11 mould, it is notable for films that take us gently and unassumingly into the lives of others, of people whose reality is astonishingly different from our own.

Among the titles previewed, the most remarkable single individual has to be the title character of Big River Man, a quixotic Slovenian whose appetite for swimming the length of the world's great rivers is exceeded only by his prodigious thirst. To call Martin Strel an endurance athlete probably stretches the meaning of that term, since his training regime includes a minimum of two bottles a day of rough red, but there's no denying his record: he had swum the Danube, Mississippi and Yangtze before, followed by this film's cameras, he took on the Amazon. As things start to go dramatically, even surrealistically wrong in ways no one imagined, it feels like we have stumbled on to the set of Apocalypse Now directed by Werner Herzog.

Less dramatic, certainly less weird, but by no means less riveting, is the sublime Modern Life, a tender and generous portrait of farming life in the part of France where the filmmaker Raymond Depardon grew up. Depardon is an acclaimed photographer, a member of the Magnum co-operative, and the moving images he captures have a contemplative stillness about them, too.

His title is tellingly ambiguous since what he shows us is actually a traditional way of life being shouldered aside by the march of time. But it's a handsome and often haunting elegy for its subject, remarkable for its lack of artifice and pretension.