Toronto: Day 9 (Hanging in the boneyard)

It's the next to last day of the festival and the place is beginning to clear out. All of the "big" movies have screened and today's the chance to bat clean-up. So I wandered into the Canadian documentary "Manufactured Landscapes" this morning and found myself face-to-face with the most challenging film I've seen here.

Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, "Landscapes" focuses on the work of Edward Burtynsky, the photographer who specializes in capturing images of industrial decay. Actually, it's safer to say the film's a three-way collaboration between the director, her cinematographer Peter Mettler, and her subject, as they wander the environmental killing fields of the metastasizing new China and find awful beauty everywhere.

"Landscapes" avoids direct commentary as it shows where your used laptop goes (to one of a handful of villages where the locals specialize in disassembling it down to the grommets) or to factories the size of small states or to the site of the Three Rivers Gorge Dam, a structure so large that the planet reportedly wobbled on its axis when its reservoir was filled. The film's images are so mesmerizing, though, that it changes the way you see the world, which is, after all, what good movies are supposed to do. The filmmakers use their medium as a form of visual oncology, and they find poetry everywhere.

Hope this one comes to Boston, because it's good.