What’s Up Docs?

Looking for something different at the movies after that grinding Odyssey? VIFF Centre is celebrating women documentary filmmakers this month, artists who don’t require a blockbuster canvas to reveal the world, often through the smallest details.

Searching for Satyrus (from Aug. 14) marks Rena Effendi’s ostensible quest to track down the very rare Satyrus effendi, a butterfly discovered by and named in honour of her late father.

The fact that the butterfly in question is restricted to the disputed territory bordering Azerbaijan and Armenia makes this expedition quite daunting, as the countries have been at war for 30 years.

But Effendi’s real mission is to understand the father she barely knew, and that proves a far more perilous endeavour.

Like Effendi, Canadian filmmaker and editor Mary Stephen, director of Palimpsest: The Story of a Name (from Aug. 14), sets out on a personal investigation into her family history, seeking to answer the age-old question: What’s in a name?

Stephen — editor of 10 of Éric Rohmer’s films — was born in Hong Kong and has never understood why her Chinese parents had an English surname.

Armed with her father Henry’s journals and reams of home video, Stephen retraces not only the family history, but the history of a nation through tumultuous war years and the strange, anomalous British outpost that was Hong Kong.

For an ambitious man of Henry’s generation, a British name might have opened doors — and for that matter, the same may have been true for Stephen herself. The film industry in the 1970s and ’80s wasn’t exactly teeming with opportunities for Asian women.

Vancouver born and bred, Kat Jayme has established herself as a gifted purveyor of sports documentaries with such films as Finding Big Country and The Grizzlie Truth, both Audience Award winners at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Her new film Naomi Osaka: The Second Set — screening in the director’s cut with Jayme in attendance Aug. 15 — chronicles tennis champion Osaka’s return to the court after becoming a mother.

Crucially, this is not about a “comeback,” but about an evolution.

And don’t underestimate the power of the four girls in Alysa Nahmias’s Sundance hit Cookie Queens (from Aug. 7).

Tracking four Girl Scouts between ages five and 12 as they participate in an annual cookie sale, this is a real charmer. The girls are indefatigable cuties who mercilessly turn the screws on their hapless marks using every tool that nature has afforded them.

Not that Nahmias is under any illusion about the dubious politics of this enterprise. For that matter, nor is 12-year-old Olive, the champion sales queen across the country, who ends the film preparing to battle the organization for a larger share of the profits.

Closing out our summer of documentaries is Poh Si Teng’s American Doctor (from Aug. 28), which asks us to see Gaza through the eyes of three surgeons who volunteer their services — putting their lives at risk — as Palestinian hospitals find themselves in the firing line.

It’s impossible to imagine a big Hollywood studio financing a project like this, or many of these films, in fact, and though it is still a man’s world, in the words of James Brown, “It wouldn’t be nothin’ / Nothin’ without a woman or a girl.”