The arrival of television dealt quite a blow, for a while. Many said the arrival of home video would sound cinema's death-knell, others said its days were numbered with pay television.

Illegal downloads didn't kill it either (it did take out the home video market), and now we have the arrival of online film services like Stan and Netflix giving it pause.

What none of those things can do adequately is give the audience a sense of community, or give the audience anything but a facsimile of being there and seeing and hearing it yourself.

The film festival experience – that chance to have films introduced by the filmmakers themselves, to hear them explain the hows and whys of shooting, the sweat and tears they shed over their work, the salacious stuff they couldn't commit to film which all adds layers of depth – is one of the weapons in cinema's arsenal that keeps the experience fresh, which keeps audiences coming back.

For their third Stronger Than Fiction Documentary Film Festival, Simon Weaving and Deborah Kingsland have curated not just a slate of rare and exceptional films, they've curated a weekend of those intimate and first-hand experiences that Canberra audiences love.

Foremost among these are the two films from local Canberra filmmakers, beginning with the opening night film Sherpa (Thursday, July 30, 6.30pm) shot by Jennifer Peedom on Mount Everest.

During the 2014 climbing season, Peedom's cameras explore the unequal relationship between cashed-up foreign climbers and their Sherpa guides.

The year she had her cameras turned on the mountain, an avalanche killed 16 Sherpas and she captures the Sherpa community becoming increasingly vocal about their under-recognised role in a multimillion dollar industry.

ABC radio's Philip Clark will be leading the discussion with Peedom, further exploring the tensions between wealthy first-world adventure companies and the Sherpas, and this filmmaker from Canberra with a camera in the right place at a difficult time.

Simon Cunich has given Stronger Than Fiction the world premiere screening of his new documentary Maratus (Sunday August 2, midday).

The Canberra local studied documentary at AFTRS and made a sale to ABC's Compass program with his first doco Stumbling in Hillary's Footsteps, and has been cutting his teeth behind the camera and the editing desk at Prime Television producing the Prime Possum show.

"Citizen science" is the latest thing in the science world, where organisations like the CSIRO parlay the manpower of thousands thanks to the internet, having communities help it harvest data that it would never be able to afford to send trained researchers out to collect personally, as in astronomy where, every now and again, a backyard astronomer will identify a new comet, a new star that the big telescopes hadn't trained their lenses on.

Canberra man Stuart Harris is something of a hero in the field of citizen science as the man who discovered a new species of the extremely rare peacock spider while practising with a new lens for his camera in Namadgi National Park.

Cunich's film tells the story and so I won't spoil it here, but audiences can meet Harris in person following the film's screening and hear for themselves about this life-changing local discovery that made world headlines.

Also on the bill at the festival are Drone (Friday,July 31, 6pm), a Norwegian film from Tonje Hessen Schei who collects first-hand stories from the communities terrorised by drones in Pakistan and the desk-pilots who run them.

This film sits thematically alongside the closing night film Beats of the Antonov (Sunday,August 2, 6.30pm), a South African doco which also chronicles lives being lived in a war zone, this time the people of the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains who face regular bombardment by their own government.

The Wolfpack (Friday, July 31, 8.30pm) won best documentary at this year's Sundance film festival and ought to be a talking point. It is the story of a family kept locked away in their Manhattan apartment by strangely idealistic parents, unable to leave the house but with movies to connect them to the outside world. Filmmaker Crystal Moselle befriended this group of young men just as they were able to break free of their family's home, and I'm very much looking forward to ABC radio's Alex Sloan interviewing Moselle in person following the screening.

Among the quirkier subjects are the Korean Planet of Snail (Saturday, August 1, 2pm) about the touching relationship between a deaf-blind man and his wife, and Do I Sound Gay? (Saturday, August 1, 4pm) where journalist David Thorpe asks what and who "sounds gay". Thorpe's voice isn't in the lower registers, and so there is a personal and quasi-amusing origin to this exploration. I'm intrigued. It does sound like he's flirting with upsetting the arbiters of political correctness, so I wish him luck.

Politics is the subject of films The Chinese Mayor (Saturday, August 1, 6pm) about mayor Geng Yanbo of Datong, challenged to modernise his city by demolishing 140,000 households as part of a visionary cultural rejuvenation of his city, and Brand: A Second Coming (Saturday, August 1, 10pm) about the rebranding (pun intended, and I'm sure worked to death in the film itself) of comedian Russell Brand as a political agitator.

Sexual politics is the subject of The Hunting Ground (Saturday, August 1, 8pm), an examination of institutional cover-ups of rape crimes on university campuses in the US.

Also on the program is the cinematic photoessay The Pearl Button (Sunday, August 2, 1.45pm) on the coastline and populace of Patagonia, and How To Change The World (August 2, 4pm) about the evolution of Greenpeace.

The Stronger Than Fiction program spruiks this film as "part hippie-heist movie and part expose of the struggle to balance idealism and pragmatism… from some of the world's greatest environmental activists".

I wonder if filmmaker Jerry Rothwell has any insights on the "great" work they did destroying the hard work of our local scientists when they slashed and burnt an experimental wheat crop here in Canberra in 2011. Maybe I'll put my hand up and ask that question in the Q&A with Greenpeace staff after the screening.

Or maybe I won't. But that kind of opportunity doesn't come when you're at home watching this stuff on your couch.

Stronger Than Fiction runs from July 30 to August 2 at Palace Electric. See strongerthanfictiondocs.com.