Set! is a documentary about the competitive world of tablescaping

But where do you put the taxidermy monkeys or the freeze-dried mice? How wide should you spread the blood? Should the glittery handgun sit near the bread plate?

Welcome to the competitive world of tablescaping, the art of setting the table.

But is it art, or a hobby, or a sport?

"This is the Olympics of table setting," says one competitor at California's 2019 Orange County Fair, the subject of a documentary, Set!, screening at Dendy Canberra on July 4, as part of the Stronger Than Fiction film festival.

It follows a group of table setters as they vie for best in show; they compare it to brain surgery, talk about how they travel the world looking for items for their table, how they strive for the creative edge.

"It's about a lot more than tablescaping," says one woman, "it has a lot to do with life."

A good documentary has the power to make us think about more than the story being portrayed on the screen, says festival co-director Hannah de Feyter.

"The week after I saw the film for the first time I talked obsessively about it," de Feyter says.

"And I realised I was talking about all this serious stuff, about whether women are allowed to be competitive, does the income gap make hobbies more or less accessible to people, why do we describe something as a hobby, or is it art [and] does that have to do with who is making the art?

"It was then I realised that while this documentary was so much fun, there was so much more to it."

So much about this documentary fascinated me. The idea that everyone has a story, even middle-class white women who we would now, post-Covid, label as Karens. That women of an age who, for the most part, society has declared invisible, have found a way to express their passions, to make art. That if it was a documentary about men of the same ilk, who were passionate about, say, restoring vintage cars, or collecting watches, the whole thing would be taken so much more seriously.

It's not that the filmmakers Scott Gawlik and Jon Salmon dismiss their subjects. Far from it. The documentary is compassionate and non-judgmental and the humour is never condescending.

"What a thing to pick as your passion," says de Feyter. "By the end of the film you're there with these people, you're invested in them, who's going to win.

"While it does highlight the fun and quirky elements of this world, it never makes fun of the competitors or makes fun of how deeply passionate they are."

De Feyter says a good documentary makes people, and situations, seem more human.

"It's a way of humanising stories that we see in the news, or ideas we're thinking about, there are a lot of very big abstract concepts and when they are tied to a really particular sort of human narrative, all of a sudden there is context for understanding."

That's been the goal of festival director Deborah Kingsland since she curated the first Stronger Than Fiction festival in 2013 as part of the Canberra Centenary, alongside Simon Weaving.

She had been living in London for 34 years, making films, and came back to look after her aging parents. Setting up the festival gave her a vehicle to bring the world of documentary to Canberra, and her film students at the Canberra Institute of Technology.

"Since 2013, Stronger Than Fiction has made it possible for Canberra audiences to see the best of new documentary cinema, right here in the capital," Kingsland says.

"This is the capital, we need to be having conversations about the big issues of our time. Through screening entertaining, deeply researched, cinematically excellent work, we provide a way for this to happen."

Kingsland loves the discussion of the "domestic arts" that Set! encourages.

"I was talking about baking with a friend last night, and the effort that many women put into it, and it's all taken for granted that the women just do this," she says.

"The idea that so many women put so much artistic effort into so many of these things like baking or handcrafts or sewing and it's all considered more as a hobby than art.

"That women put so much effort into many things and they're not taken seriously."

She talks about a documentary, Hobbyhorse Revolution, a Finnish production which follows three teenage girls who compete in hobbyhorse riding. Oscar-nominated Selma Vilhunen sympathetically explores the stigma the girls face, while also never holding back on showing their joy and delight and growing friendships.

"It's all girls, the judges are all women, the trainers who make a living from it are women, but everyone takes themselves seriously. It's people saying we don't care about any of that other stuff, we're choosing to take ourselves seriously, choosing to believe that this thing that I care about and love is meaningful."

Tablescaping has undergone something of a resurgence during Covid lockdown. While we were all shut inside cooking away, baking bread, making meals, the final resting place of said food became important. There are Instagram hashtags and Pinterest pages, magazine articles on how best to choose a theme, or style cost effectively, or reflect the mood of the day. I mean we "tablescape" to some extent every time we sit down for dinner.

As far back as the 1700s, the aristocracy used table setting as an expression of their wealth and stature, a visual feast of their largesse.

Canberra artist Cathy Petocz has come on board with the festival to create a table for the foyer of Dendy cinema where the film will be screened. For our photoshoot, she's created a table based on vegetables, with cabbage leaf place mats, potato candelabras and spring onion napkin holders. She's been thrift shopping to find the right plates, two little vases that look like they've been made out of beans.

"I could never do this competitively," she says. "This is art for me, an expression of how I like to gather my friends around a dinner table, how important conversations around tables are.

"The world of art is full of competition but for me this is about people coming together, I love dinner parties, I love people sharing stories, in the end that's what a good film festival does, it tells those stories. Good art does that too."

One of the women in the documentary, Hilarie Moore, tells a good story, she's known for her statement pieces. Her table takes the theme of "Africa" and turns it into a statement on the serious issue of poaching. It's her table that's covered in blood, full of stuffed animals, decorated with bullets and bones.

The ladies of the county fair are up in arms.

"People said I should burn in hell," she says.

There's a topic for discussion at the dinner table.