Ray Pride is a contributing editor to Filmmaker, film editor of Newcity, co-front page editor of Movie City News and writes the Movie City Indie blog. Links to his writing and photography are at raypride.blogspot.com.

Ray answers our call with these three titles he's anticipating at TIFF:

The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World (pictured above right)
Which came first, the chicken or the kung pao? Documentaries that capture process, from coal mining to high school basketball to the most quotidian of social and economic gestures that enable our daily lives, always hold succor. But wending one's way through the world's largest restaurant in Changsha, Hunan, with seating for 5,000 and 300 chefs? That should offer up a dozen docs worth of flavor.

Terence Davies, Of Time And The City
After a sustained drought, the master of mood and brood returns with an unsentimental nonfiction pic about his sentiments toward his long-abandoned Liverpool birthplace. He never considered himself a documentarian, but the textures and light in his prior films, along with an uncanny sense of how music evokes memory, has proven him an essayist of the held breath, the captured instant. Bonus: Davies narrates in his lovely, excitable tones.

Les plages d'Agnes
Memoir and essay merge in Varda's most recent documentary divertissements, and using time spent on beaches in California and across Europe to capture musings on her life and career, sounds like the most fragrant of structural conceits.