By B. Ruby Rich

POLITICS SMASHED THROUGH the fourth wall this year and invaded the Toronto International Film Festival, an event normally ruled by the cinematic gods of art, commerce, and celebrity. Spilling over from the many political documentaries already playing around the United States, new arrivals reached the festival with special guests in tow. I've been to Toronto through many a U.S. presidential race, but I've never seen this kind of challenge up on-screen. It was sometimes hard to tell the festival publicity from the political campaigning.

A pair of new U.S. documentaries aimed squarely at the election and the Iraq war and landed direct hits. Gunner Palace came to town accompanied by a few of its soldier boys, home from Iraq intact. Mixing embedded journalism with reality TV and more than a bit of M.A.S.H., Gunner Palace captivated festival viewers with a grim portrait of individual soldiers caught in a war spun out of control.

Codirector Michael Tucker's footage was captured over repeat visits to one army battalion and edited by codirector Petra Epperlein to approximate the feeling of danger and confusion on the ground. We see U.S. troops move through Baghdad's alien landscape, fighting an urban enemy they can hardly identify. Over the months of an ever extending deployment, they morph before our eyes from energetic gung-ho liberators with faith in their mission to jittery pawns in somebody else's bad idea, fighting to stay alive. It becomes hard for them to relax even in the comfort of their base – a requisitioned palace formerly inhabited by Uday Hussein – where they swim in the pool and spin out hip-hop and electric guitar riffs between mortar attacks and night patrols.

Too bad Gunner Palace shows the disaster of Iraq too clearly to win a slot on Fox TV. Nor is one likely for Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, by Kerry's old pal George T. Butler, which applies similar X-ray vision to its subject. Butler edits hours of archival footage into a you-were-there flashback to drive home the veracity of Kerry's wartime heroism, repudiate the Swift Boat gang, and demonstrate that Kerry's antiwar tossing of his Vietnam ribbons was, in context, a noble act. He even manages to find footage of the notorious Paul O'Neill (Nixon's dirty-tricks point man) debating Kerry on TV.

Going Upriver brings to the surface a Kerry I didn't know existed: charismatic, idealistic, eloquent. Who turned this brave leader into a Stepford candidate? Activist groups like MoveOn.org could do worse than buy airtime to show Kerry's historic testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a passionate attack on failed foreign policies and warmongering. Yeah, just the kind of speech he ought to deliver now in 2004. Maybe Butler could produce it? After all, look what his early doc, Pumping Iron, did for Arnold.

It's rare that documentaries upstage fiction films on the same subject, but the festival entries by John Sayles (Silver City) and Wim Wenders (Land of Plenty) were pallid by comparison. Instead, it took a Brazilian filmmaker to bring history and current events together into one satisfying fictional whole. Lúcia Murat's Almost Brothers examines the failure of idealism and the intergenerational conflict that seals its downfall. From the violent prisons of the former dictatorship to the violent favelas of today, her characters play out the dynamics of race, class, and ideology. Think City of God, with its Hollywood shenanigans deleted and three decades of politics inserted. Murat is committed to examining the ties that bind the present to the past. We could use somebody like her here in the United States.

There were so many politically driven documentaries and fiction films that they formed a festival all their own: a whole tribute to South African cinema, for instance; Patricio Guzmán's latest Chilean almanac, Salvador Allende; Darwin's Nightmare, Hubert Sauper's look into the heart of darkness of Tanzania; Hong Kong expatriate Clara Law's documentary, Letters to Ali, on Australia's handling of refugees; Velcro Ripper's ScaredSacred, a global view of fear and faith; and on and on. The combination of urgency, censorship, and low-cost digital equipment has made 2004 a renaissance of committed filmmaking.

B. Ruby Rich's Toronto top 10

• Almost Brothers (Lúcia Murat)

• Bombón, El Perro (Carlos Sorin)

• I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell)

• The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel)

• Mondovino (Jonathan Nossiter)

• Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki)

• My Summer of Love (Pawel Pawlikowski)

• On the Outs (Lori Silverbush and Michael Skolnik)

• Sideways (Alexander Payne)

• The World (Jia Zhang-ke)