Take a trip to the Edge

On the Edge is a new section of programming at this year’s Documentary Edge Festival that includes a selection of daring, provocative and sometimes controversial documentaries that are on the cusp of filmmaking.

The story of talhotblonde (USA) has been described as “stranger-than-fiction”; a love triangle that takes place completely online, “talhotblonde” (the user’s screen-name) is a teenage vixen that lures men into her web. The lies that are weaved lead to murder as the documentary reveals one of the most shocking crimes and the internet’s power to reveal our most dangerous fantasies.

In David Wants To Fly (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) young filmmaker David Sieveking follows the path of his professional idol, David Lynch, into the world of Transcendental Meditation (TM). It is a journey that leads him to the movement's founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, one-time guru of the Beatles. By the time he died 2008, Maharishi had expanded TM into a global conglomerate; offering courses that promised world peace and yogic flying. How does this fit with the somber films of David Lynch?

David Bond lives in one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world. He decides to find out how much private companies and the government know about him by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear - a decision that changes his life forever. In Erasing David (UK) he leaves his pregnant wife and young child behind, but is tracked by two ruthless private investigators, on a chilling journey that forces him to contemplate the meaning of privacy - and the loss of it.

Welcome to Sedona, Arizona, and the mystical kingdom of world-renowned sex shaman Baba Dez. Dez is thrown into a tailspin when his mission to heal women with sexual dysfunctions (he's slept with more than a thousand) drives away his one true love, Maya. Sex Magic, Manifesting Maya (USA) follows Dez as he aims to manifest Maya back by doing sex magic with other women.

Sixty and the City (Israel) is director Nili Tal looking for love at the grand age of 61. She would be fine with someone her own age, but will happily settle for a toy boy.  She is beautiful, slim and successful - everything that a man would want in a woman, but her first photo on an internet dating site is viewed as “too serious.” Thus, her journey to transform herself begins, meeting men from all over Europe along the way.

Karate-kicking midgets! Paper-mache monsters! Busty babes with blades! Filipino genre films of the '70s and '80s had it all. Machete Maidens Unleashed (Australia) is the ultimate insiders' account of a faraway backlot where stunt men came cheap, plot was obsolete and the make-up guy was packing heat!

Virtual world - new Reality. Life 2.0 finds director Jason Spingarn-Koff digging into the core of human interaction by assuming his own avatar and joining Second Life – and meeting a cast of characters online who have been drastically transformed by their new “cyber-life”.

For more on the films on show at next year’s festival, visit www.documentaryedge.org.nz