Why me?

It takes unusual dedication for a filmmaker to allow her husband to risk instant incineration in the name of art. But when director Jennifer Baichwal was shooting her documentary about lightning, Act of God, her husband, Nick de Pencier, served as director of photography. And part of his job entailed standing on the shoreline of their summer cottage on Georgian Bay during fierce thunderstorms, manning a camera on a metal tripod. “To get the good shot you have to expose yourself,” says de Pencier. “So you play the odds. It’s an interesting mental game.”

Sometimes Baichwal would be with him, until they decided that might not be in the best interests of their two children, ages six and nine. “We’d say, ‘Let’s not both get killed,’ ” she recalls. “So I’d go back to the house. And Nick would put on a life jacket so we could find his body if he was knocked into the water and was floating.” But if he received a direct hit there might be nothing to find, as Baichwal knew only too well. She goes on to tell the story of a girl who was struck while riding a pony down an English country lane: “All that was left of them was a pool of fat. They were completely incinerated.”

Act of God tells the stories of people who have been transformed by split-second lightning strikes, and who then spend years trying to make sense of the experience. The film shows how their lives have been changed by the compulsive search for meaning in a random event. Its subjects range from writer Paul Auster, who as a young teenager saw a boy struck dead, to inspirational guru Dannion Brinkley, a former CIA assassin who claims he was redeemed by divine visions after being zapped to the brink of death.

Premiering as the opening night gala at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival next week (April 30 to May 10), Act of God belongs to a new wave of documentaries that set out to investigate the unknowable, galvanizing hard science and dry fact with metaphysical inquiry and poetic visuals. Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) pioneered the genre, which documentary purists first viewed with the suspicion of shocked folkies watching Dylan go electric. Now the genre is ubiquitous. Among the films at Hot Docs, some of the most mundane matters—from Great Lakes sewage treatment in Waterlife to routine boredom in Bloody Mondays & Strawberry Pies—are goosed with a cosmic charge of metaphysics.

Baichwal’s previous film, the award-winning hit Manufactured Landscapes (2007), viewed a hellish landscape through Edward Burtynsky’s seductive photographs of industrial ruin. While it was more subtle than most eco-documentaries, beneath the haunting beauty of its images it carried a silent undercurrent of blame and guilt. With Act of God, once again Baichwal finds austere beauty in environmental horror, but this film is the polar opposite of Manufactured Landscapes. It’s about humility, not hubris. Anyone who survives a lightning strike can’t help asking, “Why me?”—or if the person next to him is struck dead, “Why not me?” But there’s no answer, and no one to blame—at least no one who is remotely accountable.

“Human evil we can explain,” says Baichwal, 45, a former philosophy and theology student. “Natural evil is something that’s impossible to explain.” Yet, even though being struck by lightning seems random, she adds, “it’s impossible not to ascribe meaning to it. It’s irresistible, because it’s such a sign from the heavens.”

In Mexico, Baichwal and de Pencier interviewed the mothers of five children who were struck dead one night in 2006 as they took part in a Catholic prayer ritual around a hilltop cross. One mother who lost her son says that the moment she heard the news she decided “the Lord chose him to be an angel; the Lord never makes mistakes.”

One of the more astonishing stories in the film concerns Brinkley, the former CIA thug, who had just got home from a mission in Nicaragua when lightning struck a phone he was holding. “It hit me in the side of my head, it went down my spine, welded the nails of my shoes to the floor, and threw me in the air,” he says. Brinkley remembers leaving his body, travelling down a tunnel into a bright light and meeting a dozen radiant, divine beings. He says he was dead for 28 minutes, completely paralyzed for six days, and disabled for two years. But he believes his near-death visions filled him with a surge of compassion that rewired his personality. Brinkley went on to create one of America’s largest organizations of hospice volunteers for dying veterans.