Those who like their cinema escapist should be wary of the Planet in Focus festival. Those who believe that one of the medium’s greatest potentials is reflecting the (warming, shrinking and dying) world in which we live should find its eco-conscious mandate essential.

As usual, the festival’s programmers have assembled a slate of films that treat overwhelmingly central issues from a variety of nicely slanted angles. (One semi-disappointment: wouldn’t it have been great to see Larry Fessenden’s sub-zero horror flick The Last Winter, considering its lack of a local theatrical release?) The free Children’s Programme (Oct. 27, 11am, Innis College, 2 Sussex) features Colleen MacIsaac’s animated short Warming, a poetically spare meditation on our overheating sphere. The images are arresting — a school of submerged pop bottles hovering like jellyfish; a polar bear slipping forlornly into the water — and the tone is gently melancholy rather than strident.

Speaking of melancholy, the protagonist of Paul Davis’ -40 Degrees Celsius (Oct. 26, 9:30pm, Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex) could probably go for a little global warming. He’s an on-call teacher living in the northernmost reaches of North America who gets the call to go into work before sunrise. Of course, the sun rises at noon in these parts, but our hero is on the road before 8am, fixing breakfast in his darkened shack with the aid of a head-mounted lighting apparatus. Watching this bundled soul struggle to pedal his bike over frozen expanses of snow will make you think twice — maybe three times — before complaining about your Monday commute.

Two longer entries feature on crusading Canadians abroad: Christian Schidlowski’s Mr. Wong’s World (Oct. 25, 7:30pm, Innis Town Hall) is named for the Chinese-Canadian billionaire trying to restore dilapidated structures in Shanghai, while Pascal Gelinas’ The Water Bearer (Oct. 25, 9:30pm, Innis Town Hall) focuses on Quebecer Gilles Raymond, who is spearheading running water systems in rural Indonesia. Both films could be filed under “workmanlike” in terms of their style, but neither descends into heroic hagiography — their individual subjects remain subordinate to the larger themes (China’s economic boom in the former, cross-ideological collaboration in the latter).

The best film on display this year happens to be the last: Laura Dunn’s The Unforeseen (Oct. 28, 7pm, Royal, 608 College) is probably the American documentary of the year. It’s the story of an oasis within an oasis — a limestone aquifer in the middle of Austin, Texas that served in the 1970s as a sort of ground zero for the city’s famously left-leaning constituency. The real estate developers looking to raze the area were rebuffed, time and again, until the election of a certain smirking Texas governor in the mid-1990s left the back door wide open.

It’s an infuriating development, but the story is larger than Texas: its subject is nothing less than the death of idealism, and Dunn is generous enough to allow her apparent villain — the former wunderkind developer at the centre of the conflict — his own heartfelt lament. She also neatly integrates the seemingly disparate aesthetic imperatives of her famous producers Terrence Malick and Robert Redford, resulting in a film that’s both achingly lyrical and blisteringly direct.