I'm not sure this was a "documentary". Director Peter Lynch had the idea in his head of a whale bone found in Toronto, but couldn't remember where the image came from. Some research revealed that, sure enough, in the 80's a whale vertabrae was dug up during the excavation for a streetcar line.
The bone is at the ROM and Lynch gets a resin cast made then drags it up and down, back and forth across the continent, trying to find out how this whale bone came to be in Toronto, meeting various obsessives: whale obsessives, side show obsessives, local history obsessives, etc. This was a neat exploration of the history of the troubled relationship between man and whales and man and the idea of the "whale".
For my tastes, this movie contained an exceesive amound of whale gore, whale blubber, whale flensing (slaughtering) and rotting whale carcases.
Just a technical note, high definition digital video, projected digitially is occasionally just gorgeous. Bright colours, sharp, just nice.