Just when you thought that whole Dixie Chicks firestorm was finally dying down as time's passed and President Bush's popularity has headed in the same direction, those cheeky Chicks have managed to throw a gallon of 180-proof moonshine on the smoldering blaze in "Shut Up and Sing," the new documentary debuting in Toronto. Pay attention, not just to the public flareup around lead singer Natalie Maines' latest torching of Bush, this time with the f-word. "Shut Up" is likely to be a top Oscar contender for best documentary since its co-director Barbara Kopple's won twice before (in fact, she's the Hillary Swank and Sally Field of her category — she's gone two for two noms, never losing) and its distributor is Oscar-savvy Weinstein Co.

Listen to our podcast chat with Kopple — CLICK HERE!

Kopple won Oscars for "American Dream" in 1991 focusing on a strike at a hog slaughterhouse and "Harlan County, U.S.A." in 1976 about a strike at a coal mine. In "Shut Up and Sing" she teams up with co-director Cecilia Peck (daughter of Oscar-champ Gregory) to give a backstage peek at what happened when the Chicks, the biggest-selling female music act in history as of 2003, told a London audience that they were ashamed of being from the same U.S. state as Bush. What happened to their career immediately afterward was a nuclear flameout as patriotic Yankees rallied around the White House on the eve of the invasion of Iraq and the country music radio stations refused to play their tunes and former fans refused to buy tickets to their concerts.

"Shut Up" is full of footage shot at the time of the disaster, giving us views of the Chicks' shock, shame, befuddlement and fury us they tried to cope with the result and mount a comeback. To some extent they've done that since, by playing to new audiences in places like Canada where the Chicks arrived this week for the docu's debut at the fest. They came to town perky as ever, without remorse or apology, not even about the controversial scene where Maines looks into the camera as if addressing Bush directly, saying, "You're a dumbf***!"

To learn more about the docu and controversy, read Entertainment Weekly writer Chris Willman's article — CLICK HERE!

Top photo: In the Chicks' new CD "Taking the Long Road," Natalie Maines sings, "I'm not ready to make nice/ I'm not ready to back down/ I'm still mad as hell." Bottom photo: "The Dixie Chicks are incredible women who, even though they had this very organized, unprecedented campaign to silence them, to take away their freedom of speech, they wouldn't back down and, in fact, what it did was make them stronger as people," Koppel tells me at the Intercontinental Hotel during the Toronto International Film Festival.
(L.A. Times photo by Tom O'Neil)