Thom Powers knows a thing or two about documentaries. When he’s not programming his special, weekly Stranger Than Fiction documentary series at the IFC Center, he’s traveling the world’s film festivals — from Sundance to Cannes — in search of the next great nonfiction film. Come summer, he turns his attention to programming the documentary lineup for the Toronto Film Festival.

Yet for as much as he knows about that corner of the film world, he still has found himself surprised by the hunger he’s seen in the New York City documentary community, an appetite for the Stranger Than Fiction events that has led the Tuesday night series to grow rapidly. Launched two years ago as a 16-week event, Stranger Than Fiction expanded last year, and this year it has blossomed into a 30-week affair divided into fall, winter, and spring seasons.

Five weeks remain in the current fall season, including tomorrow night’s selection, Doug Pray’s “Big Rig,” and a season finale November 27 that may draw more than a few radio and television fans to the movie theater: a collection of clips from the television documentary series “This American Life,” featuring radio and TV host Ira Glass with the show’s director, Chris Wilcha.

“That’s one of the things about Stranger Than Fiction,” Mr. Powers said. “I try to keep the format as open as possible. This season, we were more heavily weighted with sneak previews of feature-length documentaries, but in the past I’ve shown classic movies that aren’t really available on DVD, clips from filmmakers working in Iraq, even an ‘Orphan Films’ symposium” of found footage.

This season’s unlikely mix of titles reflects Mr. Powers’s eclectic approach to programming. Mr. Pray’s “Big Rig” puts us in the cabin of a semi truck as it crisscrosses the country, bringing to life a trucker subculture that — as the Stranger Than Fiction program notes point out — is essential to sustaining the nation’s mainstream culture.

Today more than ever, America is dependent on the more than 3 million semis making daily deliveries of food, gasoline, water, and more. Following truckers across 21,000 miles, through 45 states, and pulling into dozens of truck stops with them, Mr. Pray helps illuminate this world for New Yorkers, many of whom likely have never seen the cavalcade of semi trucks descending on Manhattan during the late-night hours.

Katy Chevigny’s “Election Night,” Mr. Powers said, is one of those rare political documentaries that work hard to avoid taking sides in any sort of debate. On tap for November 6, it turns its attention away from the political candidates and toward the wider American political process.

In 2004, Mr. Powers said, Ms. Chevigny “sent out camera crews all across the country, from Native American reservations in South Dakota to suburbs in Chicago to Florida and elsewhere, really capturing a day in the life of the American electoral process at the federal level. It really crosses all the political, racial, class, and economic lines.”

More than anything, Mr. Powers said, he hopes that by taking a look back at the 2004 presidential election, audiences will appreciate the great lengths to which people across the political spectrum go in order to participate in the process, and that citizens are united in exercising this most basic of freedoms.

“Iron Ladies of Liberia,” slated for November 13, is a documentary that Mr. Powers also selected for the Toronto Film Festival. He described it as a “rather extraordinary portrait of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, president of Liberia — the first elected woman leader in Africa.” On November 20, Stranger Than Fiction will host a special preview screening of “The Protagonist,” which is slated to begin a full theatrical run November 30. Directed by Jessica Yu, the movie tells parallel stories about four men at crossroads in their lives, and at several points uses wooden puppets to evoke their stories.

The season will close after Thanksgiving with the November 27 “This American Life” presentation, incorporating material from the Showtime television series, which grew out of the public radio series of the same name. “The show is a towering icon for radio documentaries,” Mr. Powers said, “and so their transition to television was watched keenly by documentary filmmakers everywhere, who wondered how they would meet the challenge of moving from one medium to another. So we’re going to discuss that in greater depth — and since not everyone has Showtime, it offers a whole new audience a chance of experiencing the show for the very first time.”

ssnyder@nysun.com