The Best Documentary Films of 2009

Anvil! The Story of Anvil tells the story of Toronto-based musicians Steve 'Lips' Kudlow and Robb Reiner, two humorous guys who've been best friends and played together in Anvil, the heavy metal band, since they were in their teens. Their debut album, Metal On Metal, took the music world by storm, and Anvil was credited with setting the trend that boosted other metal bands--Anthrax, Metallica and Slayer--onto the charts, while poor management decisions pushed Kudlow and Reiner into the background. This is their revival. Great music. Great fun. Film was finished in 2008, released in 2009.

On its third Antarctic Campaign, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an international organization dedicated to preserving Earth's oceans, sent two small, ill-equipped ships to the Ross Sea, an internationally designated whale sanctuary, to prevent the Japanese whaling fleet from killing cetaceans on their huge factory ships. There are storms to survive and gripping face-offs with Japanese whalers and -- surprisingly -- Greenpeace.

Using infra red cameras to tell a story that reels out like a spy thriller, Richard O'Barry, the animal trainer behind the phenomenal success of the television show Flipper, and animal rights activist Louis Psihoyos recruit an A Team-like crew of filmmakers and environmentalists to expose Taiji, Japan's fishermen's annual dolphin roundup and slaughter of thousands of dolphins.

The Texaco/Chevron contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon, dubbed the Amazon Chernobyl, is a much larger although lesser known calamity than that of the Exxon Valdez. Toxic chemicals have turned thousands of square miles of rain forest into a wasteland where nothing will grow, and several tribes of indigenous people have been brought close to extinction, along with the region's unique flora and fauna. Joe Berlinger's film exposes the extent of the damage and follows the 27-billion dollar law suit that the local people and international environmental and humanitarian groups have brought against Chevron.

To explore the fundamental premises and chronicle the advent of Earth Day, our annual celebration of Gaia and whatever ecological awareness we can muster, documentary director Robert Stone has assembled and interviewed a special tribe of the environmental movement's elders -- Stuart Udall, Denis Hayes, Paul Ehrlich, Pete McCloskey and Rusty Schweickart, among other activists, politicians and forecasters -- who give testimony about advances made by conservationists during the 1960s and '70s, and lead us to an understanding of what happened to bring us to our current situation -- on the brink of environmental disaster.

Food, Inc. is an alarming expose of the way food is produced and distributed in the United States. Interviewing investigators, journalists and farmers, filmmaker Robert Kenner shows how almost everything we eat is produced and distributed by a very few huge multinational corporations, such as Monsanto and Tyson, and that quality of nutrition is secondary to production cost and corporate profits.

Chris Rock was genuinely alarmed when his adorable six year old daughter, Lola, was crying because she didn't have 'good hair.' Set into motion by concerns about his little girl's happiness and self-esteem, Rock investigates American's -- and, in particular, African-American women's -- attitudes towards their hair, and the billion dollar industry that thrives on concerns that it's not 'good.'

The 1994 genocide of Tutsis by Hutus left Rwanda physically and psychically bereft and unable to function. The Gacaca Law mandated Tutsis and Hutus to reconcile -- to forgive and move on with the rebuilding of the nation. Anne Aghion spent more than nine years chronicling the peace process to produce this brilliant documentary that brings us to a new level of understanding about the human capacity for creating mutuality.

Filmmaker Nati Baratz's Unmistaken Child follows a Tibetan Buddhist monk on his journey to remote mountain villages, where he seeks to identify the child who is the reincarnation of his recently deceased Lama. The film provides a rare, intimate and very moving look at the processes and rituals observed by Tibetan Buddhists as they carry on the ancient rites of their religion. The film was completed in 2008, released in 2009.