THE LAST ROUND
directed by Joseph Blasioli

A look at the crazy, labyrinthine ways of boxing as seen through the eyes of Canadian heavyweight George Chuvalo. Ostensibly about the day in 1966 when he went head-to-head with Muhammad Ali and managed to last the full 15 rounds, it follows the contours of his career as he strives for the world championship belt. A precocious, driven athlete, he becomes Canadian champion at an early age and sets his sights on the world--but the world has other ideas for him, and his yearning for a title shot is constantly frustrated. After a depressing string of ups and downs, including a bad decision at an important bout with Floyd Patterson, the politics of both the sport and the world land him in the ring with The Greatest--a story so bizarre that it can't be properly described here.

DRIVING ME CRAZY
directed by Nick Broomfield

Of interest to pupils of documentary--and no one else--is Driving Me Crazy, a film in which Nick Broomfield, for better and for worse, reveals his own machinations on camera and upstages his ostensible subject. Hired by producer friend Andrew Braunsberg to document an Austrian stage production on African-American music, the director shamelessly inserts himself into the scene, recording the financial and political transactions that allow him to continue with his work. In so doing, he antagonizes many who work on the production and doesn't seem to care, concerned only with continuing the film and dodging the various interests who would like to interfere.

HUSH
directed by Victor Kossakovsky

By far the most original of this year's crop is Hush, in which director Victor Kossakovsky turns his gaze through his apartment window and collects the goings-on outside. Lovers meet in the street, dogs are walked, street-cleaners sweep up the curb, and public workers tear up the street to do... something. Seasons change, rain and snow fall, a police van has a close call at an intersection and the hole in the street gets bigger and bigger as the workers continue to do God-knows-what. Sometimes the action unfurls in real time, sometimes in silent-movie fast forward, and the tone is always antic, bemused, and friendly.

BAADER-MEINHOF: IN LOVE WITH TERROR
directed by Ben Lewis

Or rather, Ben Lewis: In Love with Obviousness. This brief history of the ultra-left Red Army Faction, whose terrorism swept West Germany during the '70s, doesn't really deal with the issues that created it; the film is far more interested in the sensational aspects of their rampage than in any of the questions that it raised. Admittedly, some of the details depicted are fascinating: I didn't realize that Andreas Baader's squeeze Gudrun Ensselin was a sex-movie queen, or that the BMW, RAF getaway car of choice, became known as the "Baader-Meinhof Wagon." But for the most part, the film has an ambiguous pulpy charge, where you feel thrills and horror and wind up too confused to think.

At every turn, bad filmmaking choices are made. Director Lewis assembles both ex-RAF members and pillars of the West German community in an attempt to find "balance" and not offend anyone; even as we thrill to the terroristic adventures, we have Helmut Schmidt likening them to Nazis and the head of police revealing that their actions paradoxically increased the budget of the police force, just so we don't get too caught up. And there are some bewildering sub-Errol Morris visual tropes involving pigs, which are in reference to the RAF's description of the cops, or the group's victims, or something--it's never sure what. In the end, the film combines the worst of the radical left (conscienceless adventurism) with the worst of the mainstream (wishy-washy avoidance of controversy) and will please no one. ** (out of four)

ROCKETS REDGLARE!
directed by Luis Fernandez de la Reguera

The lively but tragic saga of Michael Morra, a.k.a. Rockets Redglare, is explored in this somewhat crude but extremely moving documentary. Morra/Redglare lived a life that would be ennobled by the word "marginal": he was born a heroin-addicted baby, raised in grinding poverty, all but witnessed the murder of his mother, and bounced from needle to rehab to needle again in a titanic losing battle with addiction. But he was also an extremely creative individual, and rose in the '80s to become a character actor, comedian, and performance artist of some note. Famous friends (Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe) gather to sing his praises as both performer and friend, and his own drawling testimony on his life is offered as evidence of who he was.

THE DAY I WILL NEVER FORGET
directed by Kim Longinotto

The co-director of Divorce Iranian Style is back with this intelligent and powerful documentary on female genital mutilation in Kenya. Not only does it show, in a chilling centrepiece sequence, the immediate and excruciating pain it causes the young girls subjected to the practice (as well as the health consequences of dirty instruments and heavy stitching), but it also explores the cultural mechanisms that ensure that people, even women, will continue it. The ears burn at hearing tribal leaders offer their explanations of the logic in its implementation, as well as at the older women who encourage girls to not be "dirty" and submit. One gets a sense of how deeply entrenched is this particular rite of passage, and how difficult it is to get traditionalists to part with it.

But the film's second purpose is to show the ways that it is being fought and the people who are fighting it. Various social outreach programs, including a school for runaway girls fleeing their parents' wishes, are explored, and we see the efforts of various medical professionals and social workers trying to wean people off the practice, culminating in a landmark court case where a girl sued and won the right not to be another victim. Longinotto's camera records all of this without punctuation and quotation marks, letting her subjects' own words hang them and letting the actions of individuals speak for themselves, resulting in a provocative film of great effect. ***1/2 (out of four)

KIM'S STORY: THE ROAD FROM VIETNAM
directed by Shelley Saywell

This is the story of Kim Phuc, who was napalmed during the Vietnam War and became the subject of an infamous photo that shocked the world. Her life is full enough of incident: having become a symbol of America's brutality during the war, she was turned into a propaganda instrument by the Vietnamese government and subsequently defected to the west. She remains, however, a committed pacifist and continues to build bridges between herself and veterans--including, in the film's biggest surprise, the pilot who dropped the napalm on her.

STUPIDITY
directed by Albert Nerenberg

Words fail me in describing this travesty, a hypocritical assault on the senses which traffics in the very imagery it pretends to deplore and leaves you drained, battered, and completely demoralized. Ostensibly, it's about the media events and herd behaviours that conspire to keep the stupid oppressed and the even dumber in power, but despite the presence of Noam Chomsky and scattered other intellectuals, Stupidity is an exercise in smug superiority that does nothing to fight the powers that be. It's more interested in looking smarter than the crowd instead of fighting for their rights, and to that end repeats ad nauseam the very images (Adam Sandler movies, Jackass stunts, fraternity-style gross-outs) that it should be opposing. Flashed over and over at mach speed, these pictures simply grind you down, making you feel hopeless instead of angry, or simply angry with the twit who concocted the whole mess.

AND ALONG CAME A SPIDER
directed by Maziar Bahari

You'd think it would be clear-cut: a serial killer who murders sixteen prostitutes should be treated with a maximum of scorn. But that's not how it happened in Iran, where the notorious Saeed Hanei dispatched members of society who were already believed to have been the scum of the earth. The sadistic "spider-killer," already high on killing from the Iran-Iraq war, believed that he was doing God's work, and interviews with his family reveal that they are proud that their son/husband/father was taking a stand on those who would corrupt the earth. Public opinion is hardly clear-cut, as revealed by the ambivalence of his co-workers in condemning his actions and by the approval of hardliners who applaud him.

HOW HIGH IS THE MOUNTAIN
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang
HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang

These are two tangentially related films by the Taiwanese director Shiang-Chu Tang, and they're like nothing else in the Hot Docs festival. They're neither as overly schematic as so many socially-minded documentaries nor overly aestheticized like the school of Errol Morris--in fact, those poles don't really apply to these films, which record social processes through the examples of individuals and which have a formal beauty to them that is totally non-coercive. Watching them, you don't feel forced into taking a stance; you are provided with the stuff of peoples' lives to draw your own conclusions as to how they ended up the way they did.

How High is the Mountain is perhaps the less interesting of the two, but that's not to say it's without its charms. Presented with two milestone events in the director's life (his wife's pregnancy with a new son and his father's stroke), he decides to accompany his father back to his hometown as he prays at the graves of his family. Nothing in particular happens on the trip: father catches up with the brother whom he hasn't seen in years, debates the family's roots on the mainland and in Taiwan, and visits the even older teacher of whom he was a pupil. But the process of returning, remembering, and paying homage is full of nostalgia and melancholy for both father and son, and reveals both the gravity and lightness of the familial bond. *** (out of four)

How Deep is the Ocean is the brief but leisurely telling of Si-Mamnno, an Orchid Island native with a troubled past. Scorned by the Taiwanese for being an indigenous person, he went to Taiwan for work, fell in with a gang, and drank himself into a stroke by his mid-thirties--at which point he returned home, fought his way back to walking again, and resolved to build himself a house. This could have easily degenerated into a patronizing social-worker diatribe, but Tang's film is supremely humanizing. It's not about an indigenous person, but this indigenous person, with specific traits and specific needs; he is shaped by his ancestry but is also himself, not stuffed into a box with others who fit his "type." The film does double duty as a revelation of a social process and a portrait of a person, making it highly unusual in the current crop of documentaries. ***1/2 (out of four)

THE LOST BOYS
directed by Clive Gordon

Can a film have a wealth of new information and still be a failure? If the film is Clive Gordon's The Lost Boys, the answer is an unfortunate "yes." Dealing with the ultimate fate of some of the "lost boys" of the Sudan, who fled to northern Kenya when they were attacked by the Arab army, it shows a handful of the 3500 who were selected for resettling in America. On the plus side, it shows a process that rarely is seen on film, that of people struggling to adjust to a new culture: the "boys" have to adjust to the Byzantine ways of their new home and suffer the indignity of menial "entry-level" jobs at the bottom of the American dream.

But the film never really investigates the opinions of its subjects. Subtly, it objectifies them, rarely asking them directly how they feel, instead simply staring at them as they mutely deal with the various helpers and the ridiculous harshness of American culture. The film cries out for some interviews where the young men can vent some steam, or at least give a personal viewpoint as to how things are going. It's simply not enough to offer the film's admittedly impressive compositions and incidental classical greatest-hits score as proper insight into how someone is thinking, and so The Lost Boys suppresses as much as it reveals. ** (out of four)

GENERATION OF HATE
directed by Shelley Saywell

In Generation of Hate, Shelley Saywell goes to Iraq and doesn't come back with much you didn't already know. Apparently, the Iraqi people hate America for constantly attacking them and aren't allowed to speak about Saddam's oppression--shocker! Sure, it can't hurt to hear that one more time, but Saywell's primitive technique doesn't give the subject much urgency beyond the common liberal "tsk." Lacking in structure and confused in focus, the video ricochets from subject to subject, taking sound bites here and there and imposing frightfully obvious voice-overs that often repeat themselves. The Iraqi people deserve better than this clumsy and perfunctory gloss over their national agony. ** (out of four)

STRIP CLUB DJs
directed by Derrick Beckles

One approaches a film on this topic with a sense of humour: surely it couldn't have anything other than good ribald laughs. But as Strip Club DJs inches ever closer to its conclusion, it becomes more and more disturbing, until you are choked-up with a combination of contempt and pity for those who would play the tunes at your local peeler bar. It turns out that the DJ is the nerve centre for the whole operation: not only must he spin the discs, he must also arrange who has the rights to certain songs, quell unrest amongst dancers, and act as security guard to ensure that the VIP room hasn't turned into a bawdy house--unless, of course, he's being tipped to look the other way.

But the film is more than the nuts-and-bolts of the operation. The interview subjects are uniformly jaded: they've seen too many disgusting goings-on (and maybe participated in them) to view the job as anything other than something to get away from, and their mixed emotions are palpable by film's end. The environment, with its easy sex and plentiful drugs, is conductive to all manner of self-destructive behaviour; one DJ has acquired a coke habit that's already given him a heart attack. As such, it's guaranteed to make you look askance at the very idea of a strip club (assuming you don't already). *** (out of four)

JUCHITAN: QUEER PARADISE
directed by Patricio Henriquez

This documentary has a honey of a subject: a Mexican Zapotec town with a high tolerance for homosexuality. Unfortunately, it blows it when it takes a personal angle that obscures the town's inner workings. At first, the film gets your hopes up by showing Juchitan's relaxed nature--gays and the transgendered are treated with respect, women are given a high rank in society, and the Zapotec language is still spoken in a country where native languages are quickly disappearing. But Juchitan quickly shifts gears to follow several residents of the town, all of whom are male and none of whom give a real sense of how Juchitan society works.

Some of these interview subjects are fitfully interesting. There seems to be little agreement on how one should lead one's sexual life--a professor seems to think that monogamy is sexual servitude, while a beautician thinks it's simply a matter of respect. And there is some reflection on the death of a local celebrity at the hands of homophobes, as well as the Catholic church's mishandling of the situation. But one doesn't really get a sense of the society that surrounds them, and while it looks like it might be a great place to raise children, it's in dire need of some socio-historical fleshing-out. **1/2 (out of four)

ALGERIA: THE NAMELESS WAR
directed by Agneiska Lukasiak

Director Agneiska Lukasiak got more than she bargained for when she went to shoot in Algeria and fell in love with one of its countrymen, Habib. Not only was she in a country racked by civil conflict, she also had to face up to her culture shock at the country's radically different approaches to love. Despite her amour fou for Habib, his familial obligations make it impossible for her to marry without destroying his family's means of support. As she ponders her unhappy love, she wanders around Algiers illegally taping war zones, her Algerian friends all the while fearing for her as well as for their own lives.

BRUNO S. - ESTRANGEMENT IS DEATH
directed by Miron Zownir

At the Cannes premiere of one of his films, Werner Herzog discovery Bruno S. decided to play his accordion outside the theatre; unfortunately, no one knew how to take this, and the police were called in to arrest him. That pretty much sums up the life of Bruno S., who, after two films with Herzog, faded into obscurity, never to catch the public eye again. But that wasn't the only rejection in his life: not only was he the victim of neglectful parents, but his diagnosis of insanity when he was very young led to his being experimented on by the Nazis. This, naturally, has embittered Bruno, and in this film he expounds on the nature of his estrangement and rails against the unfairness that separates haves from have-nots.

The documentary that surrounds him isn't always up to the challenge. It seems a little too Herzogian in its use of Bruno as a found object; one gets the feeling--especially from the intense man who does the interviewing--that it collects him as something like the "outsider art" he produces for a gallery. Nevertheless, it gives full reign to Bruno's dissatisfaction over his isolated life, and offers bitter testimony from someone who has been betrayed by the "normal" members of society. One wonders if the filmmakers are too much a part of that society, but there's no denying that Bruno shines through them and passionately states his case. *** (out of four)

MY FLESH AND BLOOD
directed by Jonathan Karsh

Susan Tom more or less adopts special-needs children; this is her story, and it's both gripping and moving. A woman described by her mother as trying to fill her own "loneliness," Tom has taken on the children who are too much for other people--there are kids missing limbs, who have been horribly burned, who have cancer and cystic fibrosis, and one hyperactive boy with a terrible mean streak. The film takes stock of a year with Tom and her family, and considers what it takes to care for children who demand so much attention.

CHICKEN RANCH
directed by Nick Broomfield

This is the story of a Nevada brothel--the transplanted inspiration for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas--and it's not a particularly happy one. On the surface, everything runs like a well-oiled machine: the girls troop out for selection by the customers, they negotiate the price with the customers, and the proprietor beams for journalists about what a public service he's providing. But at least according to this film, the job of being a prostitute is an aggravating one, and as the women complain about inconsiderate tricks and fears of becoming "hard," it's clear that there's a dark undercurrent to the goings-on at the ranch.

WHEELS OF TIME
directed by Werner Herzog

I was initially bewildered by the substitution of this film for the cancelled Bus 174--how could a film by Werner Herzog, one of the big names of the German New Wave, have not been initially selected for a festival that could use the publicity? As it turns out, there is a reason: despite some unusually good intentions (for Herzog, anyway), his documentary is disorganized and lacking in rigour. The film plays as sort of What I Did On My Spiritual Vacation: Herzog visits various Buddhist holy events as people pray, listen to the Dalai Lama, make sand mandalas, and go on gruelling holy pilgrimages. All the while, he explains in the most rudimentary fashion what's going on, and features a couple of wholly uninformative interviews with the Dalai Lama himself. Another filmmaker would have tried to evoke the spiritual journey of these people, but Herzog, strangely, isn't that creative this time out, and simply stands on the margins and films. The results are probably old news to the committed Buddhist, and definitely tedious to the uninitiated.*1/2 (out of four)

ECHELON: THE SECRET POWER
directed by David Korn-Brzoza

This is a sometimes gripping, sometimes irritating film about international espionage and those who direct it. An information-gathering organization with tentacles in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, "Echelon" long ago abandoned the post-WWII directives that created it and started gathering intelligence on private citizens through highly questionable means. Now that the electronic and information ages are upon us, Echelon, the NSA, and various satellite organizations can listen in on your telephone calls and whatever other electronic transmissions you might be making; the Anglo-American coalition uses this information not only to fight whatever aggressors might lurk in other countries but also to get an illegal economic edge on other countries.