Documentary Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Hot Docs ’26: Ceremony

May 6, 20262026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Banchi Hanuse

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Following the encore screening of Banchi Hanuse’s Ceremony at this year’s Hot Docs, an audience member chimed in to remark that as a Palestinian woman who has seen her share of colonial aggression, she was struck by how similar the tools and logics of different settler states are when it comes to treating contested territory as unoccupied and without history, thus perfect for relocation. Perhaps even more striking than that observation–or the moderator’s decision to thank the audience member for her comment but quickly punt to the next one without letting the filmmaker and her cast of Nuxalk creators and activists respond–is Hanuse’s documentation of the myriad ways in which Indigenous people have responded to those familiar efforts to stamp out their civilizations, from keeping the language alive through their own alternative schools to broadcasting their culture on community radio to documenting their own histories and staging ritual performances of their traditions. Winner of the festival’s DGC Special Jury Prize for Canadian Feature Documentary, Ceremony is an evocative, engaging, and refreshingly talking-head and infographic-free film about how the Nuxalk Nation finds hope for resistance and renewal through these deliberate practices in the face of the broader nation-state’s violent, centuries-long effort to fold them into the Canadian colonial project.

The Harlem Park Three now in When a Witness Recants

Hot Docs ’26: When a Witness Recants

May 5, 20262026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Prison

**½/****
directed by Dawn Porter

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda The moment from their railroading that most seems to haunt Andrew Stewart, Ransom Watkins, and Alfred Chestnut in Dawn Porter’s When a Witness Recants, which picks up with the Harlem Park Three after they’ve been freed from 36 years in prison for a murder they didn’t commit, is when the judge first addressed them, his voice dripping with disdain “like we shouldn’t be breathing,” as Alfred remembers it. Raised with love and affection as Black youth with bright futures in their West Baltimore community, only to be falsely accused and convicted of the murder of local student DeWitt Duckett on the basis of coerced witness statements, the men are struck in their retelling of events by how quickly the legal system rendered them null and void, depriving them of the future they were on track for as teenagers, as men, and eventually as fathers.

Amy Goodman broadcasting from a protest against the Death Penalty in Steal This Story, Please!

Hot Docs ’26: Steal This Story, Please!

May 3, 20262026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Nigeria

**½/****
directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda The picaresque life of Democracy Now! founder and host Amy Goodman gets the Forrest Gump treatment in Steal This Story, Please!, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s polished and accessible documentary profiling the firebrand–still one of the most trusted sources in leftist media–over the course of a nearly forty-year career. By embracing that montage-heavy, stone-skipping approach to a life on the front lines of direct action, they sometimes skirt a deeper exploration of the stories that have animated Goodman’s career. At the same time, the film positions her dogged independent journalism as the conscience of an often conscienceless country while successfully articulating her ethos that “We will not be silent” is the Hippocratic Oath of the press, whose reporting should be a form of public service that supersedes toadying and sucking up to power.

Abd Alkader Habak and Janay Boulos in Birds of War

Hot Docs ’26: Birds of War

May 2, 20262026, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Lebanon, Syria, UK

***/****
directed by Janay Boulos & Abd Alkader Habak

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers It’s 2016. Aleppo is under siege. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has banned journalists to stymie coverage of his atrocities, so BBC reporter Janay Boulos, a London transplant from Lebanon, contacts Syrian videographer Abd Alkader, a.k.a. Habak, for boots-on-the-ground footage. The fomenting Syrian revolution inspired Habak to pick up a camera and document what he was seeing in the early 2010s. Branded an activist, he fled his humble village in Idlib for the ostensible security of Aleppo, which soon came under attack from Russian and Syrian forces. Habak resumed filming. Janay hears a rumour that Aleppo residents are growing food on their rooftops. Habak gets her video proving it, and the BBC posts it on their website. Eventually, Eastern Aleppo is evacuated. Habak returns to Idlib, another war zone. He reaches out to Janay, pitching her ideas for other human interest stories that highlight Syrian resilience.

Black Zombie still featuring a Black man in white drawing circles in chalk on the floor of a dark, cavernous room

Hot Docs ’26: Black Zombie

April 25, 20262026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Maya Annik Bedward

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Late in Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie, a cross-cultural survey of the zombie in Haitian folklore and horror cinema, a Vodou priest who’s served as an authenticity expert throughout the film derisively summarizes Western imaginations of West African culture as a history of voyeurism. “I hope this isn’t that,” he says of Bedward’s documentary, whose title explicitly subverts Victor Halperin’s 1932 pre-code horror film White Zombie, a foundational colonial narrative of white innocence besieged by the ostensibly monstrous threat of Blackness, and whose intellectual project seeks to dismantle that film’s corrosive source text, William Seabrook’s Haitian travelogue The Magic Island, which exported the zombie and Vodou to the West as figures of exotic superstition. A rigorous if somewhat segmented essay on the colonial violence inherent in the horror genre’s extraction of West African beliefs, Bedward’s work easily clears this admittedly modest bar. Though it will read a bit introductory for historians of the Haitian resistance movement, French colonialism, and genre cinema, it’s nevertheless a formally engaging and provocative piece that effectively re-situates the zombie in the context from which it’s been extracted: the belief among enslaved Haitian plantation workers that death might return their spirits to their ancestral home in Ghana, while further violence at the hands of colonial administrators and their proxies might render them zombies, undead and hopelessly rooted on the colony for the rest of their days.

Linda Schuyler in a chair in a nicely appointed living room being interviewed

TIFF ’25: Degrassi: Whatever It Takes

September 12, 20252025, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
directed by Lisa Rideout

by Bill Chambers For my brother’s birthday a couple of years ago, I bought him an officially licensed novelty T-shirt for The Zit Remedy‘s “Everybody Wants Something Tour” that he continues to wear proudly for the, well, novelty factor. Talk about kitsch heaven, if you’re a Canadian of a certain age. But as I watched Degrassi: Whatever It Takes, Lisa Rideout’s new and decidedly uneven documentary about the television institution that spawned The Zit Remedy (among other fictional acts, including Drake), I began to worry I’d erred in giving money to the Degrassi Industrial Complex, whose genesis dates back to 1979, when Linda Schuyler adapted the children’s book Ida Makes a Movie into a short subject that was shot on, dun dun dunnn, De Grassi Street in Toronto. Ida Makes a Movie later became the retroactive pilot for “The Kids of Degrassi Street”–itself a dry run for “Degrassi Junior High”, which is when Schuyler’s dogged vision of a TV show that’s all Afterschool Specials finally hooked the zeitgeist. Everybody wants something they’ll never give up, indeed.

Life After still featuring Elizabeth Bouvia surrounded by men in suits

Life After (2025)

May 5, 20252025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Documentary, Hot Docs

***½/****
directed by Reid Davenport

by Angelo Muredda “I’ve done what I can, and the quality of my life is over,” 26-year-old disabled woman and assisted dying cause célèbre Elizabeth Bouvia says in archival footage of her 1983 legal fight to refuse medical care in the opening moments of Reid Davenport’s Life After. Bouvia, Davenport shows us through a montage of the media frenzy around her case–which largely evaporated once her petition proved unsuccessful–became a rallying point for the assisted dying cause, represented by an activist attorney from the Hemlock Society (whose more palatably named successor group, End of Life Choices, is later seen clashing with disabled activists in Congress) and given fawning news coverage for her frequently cited physical attractiveness and disarming affect. That the frank, direct, and relatable Bouvia made for good TV, as evidenced by a condescending “60 Minutes” update from 1998 in which Mike Wallace casually muses about the tension between her lingering prettiness and the ongoing cost to the taxpayer of her daily care, is not in dispute. But to what extent, Davenport wonders, can a disabled euthanasia activist who didn’t die, whose WIKIPEDIA page cryptically lacks either new details about her life or a conclusive date for her death, as Bouvia’s does when Davenport sets out to find her, truly be said to have no quality of life if she continued to live it?

SlipStreams Vol. 19 (Patreon exclusive)

May 19, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Mystery, Patreon, SlipStreams, Streaming, Thriller

Occupied City (2023)

April 26, 20242023, 2024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Netherlands, Theatrical, UK, War

***/****
based on the book by Bianca Stigter
directed by Steve McQueen

Now playing in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox.

by Angelo Muredda Late in Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, the filmmaker’s elliptical, 4.5-hour nonfiction adaptation of co-screenwriter and partner Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, a speaker at a commemoration for the victims of the Atlantic slave trade looks out into the audience at the Oosterpark and asks, “How do we create room for each other?” The site of that event, disembodied narrator Melanie Hyams tells us, was the storage yard for the occupying Nazi army’s vehicle fleet in the later days of the war, with German soldiers shooting at anyone who dared to steal stockpiled wooden blocks for use in their stoves. McQueen’s project in adapting such a sprawling, non-narrative text about the city he sometimes lives in is similarly anchored in the work of making room–not just for the myriad kinds of people who have lived and died there in the past 80 years, especially during the Second World War, but for the past and present as well.

TIFF ’23: Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros

September 20, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Frederick Wiseman

by Angelo Muredda Frederick Wiseman sets his sights on legacy-planning in Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, the venerable documentarian’s staggering but typically graceful 240-minute tour of La Maison Troisgros, a fine-dining restaurant in Roanne, France that has held onto its three Michelin stars for decades. A family-run establishment, the place is shepherded by gruff third-generation chef-owner Michel, who we meet sampling the wares in the market with his more subdued son and protégé, César, before they settle into a favourite Wiseman scene: a sit-down meeting to plan the evening’s menu that’s equal parts absorbing and boring. Though Wiseman treats the day’s market-fresh cauliflower and mushrooms like movie stars in a rapid montage of stills resembling a credit sequence, the real stars and main anchor points he returns to throughout his amiably rambling cross-section of the restaurant–which sets aside a full 30-minute chapter for the cheese man–are the Troisgros men, different kinds of chefs whose diverging styles while working under the same roof embody the restaurant’s past, present, and future.

Hot Docs ’23: All You See

May 13, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Netherlands

***½/****
directed by Niki Padidar

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Iran-born, Netherlands-based director Niki Padidar’s All You See isolates its three female interview subjects in small, sparsely-dressed rooms with no fourth wall, shooting them head-on in centre-framed compositions that meet at some nexus of Wes Anderson and Errol Morris. (For her part, Padidar has cited “all Charlie Kaufman films” and Lars von Trier’s Dogville as key influences on the picture’s design.) From inside these cubicles, the interviewees primarily reflect on how people in their adoptive country of Holland respond to them as immigrants. Consider this staging a kind of lo-fi expressionism, then, manifesting their feelings of being under interrogation while also highlighting their exoticism, which is somewhat invisible outside its cultural context. Or is it? It seems naïve to think this movie is about a xenophobia specific to the Netherlands, no matter the notoriety of Dutch racism (e.g., Zwarte Piet) or how superior the enlightened viewer might feel to these ladies’ offscreen tormentors. Beyond its formal daring, the uniqueness of All You See is that it delves into a rarely explored aspect of the immigrant experience likely to resonate with anyone whose conspicuous presence disrupts cultural homogeneity.

Hot Docs ’23: Food and Country

May 8, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

**/****
directed by Laura Gabbert

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda “I’ve spent my whole life working on this project,” NEW YORK TIMES food critic and memoirist Ruth Reichl says late in Laura Gabbert’s Food and Country, a well-researched but muddled look at the changing nature of food in America that considers how an already precarious food system buckled under the additional weight of COVID in the early months of 2020. Reichl’s statement is one of many big promises not quite fulfilled by Gabbert’s tentative approach to her subject, which is also hazily defined: at various points, it’s either Reichl’s research or the author herself. The result is an amiably rambling but overcooked, arms-length essay–partly Reichl’s and partly Gabbert’s–about no less than three major topics: Reichl’s biography in food writing; the state of corporate agriculture and farming in America, which stiffs farmers and shoppers alike and benefits only four major packing conglomerates; and the myriad ways in which the early days of the pandemic caused irreparable damage to both restaurateurs and their providers.

Hot Docs ’23: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

May 5, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Estonia, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

Savvusanna sõsarad
**½/****
directed by Anna Hints

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda “The soul cannot be cut away,” a woman says of her cancer surgery early in Anna Hints’s Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, an evocative and visually striking look at a group of women finding resilience in the face of trauma through community, storytelling, and ritual at a smoke sauna deep in the forest, somewhere in the south of Estonia. Hints’s film makes a timely companion piece of sorts to Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, another dialogue-centred chamber drama about generations of women’s pain and endurance set in a single, remote space. Where Polley’s film is a heavily scripted actors’ showcase reminiscent at times of a talky Stanley Kramer social-issues picture, Hints’s is a more tentative affair. The unnamed women’s stories drip out of them not in crackling monologues but in halting improvised anecdotes–about being perceived as women (first by their mothers, then by men), about their taboo feelings on sexuality and reproductive rights, and about their bare survival against the vagaries of illness, social repression, and sexual violence.

Hot Docs ’23: Praying for Armageddon

May 4, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Norway

**½/****
directed by Tonje Hessen Schei

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Praying for Armageddon is about the mobilization of Christian evangelicals, who, according to on-screen statistics, now make up 30% of American voters. That’s scary, but as the movie makes clear, no number is too small to set off alarms. We meet Pastor Gary Burd of the Mission M25 Ministry/motorcycle club, who says, “I don’t want you to think that I am raising a militia,” but holds his sermons in a bunker and knights his congregants so they may take up swords against whatever windmills the evangelicals are tilting at this week. “Swords” is uttered often in Praying for Armageddon, for what it’s worth. Jesus was a war hawk, according to Burd, who quotes Him in Luke 22 as saying, “Yeah, if you don’t have a sword, go sell your coat and buy one, because the time is coming when you’re gonna need a sword.” But the word has an elastic meaning in Christian evangelical-ese, even though influential figures like Christians United for Israel founder John Hagee insist the Bible–which the odious Hagee fashions into an acronym for “Basic Information Before Leaving Earth”–is “literal from cover to cover.” (Burd’s Jesus sounds like Mark Wahlberg, Hagee’s like Gary Busey.) Swords are swords, but they’re also guns, they’re also nuclear weapons. That’s why the so-called Armageddon Lobby (shudder) has concentrated its resources on indoctrinating U.S. soldiers to its religious crusade, which begins with proselytizing new recruits and baptizing them at the end of Basic Training. Presto! A Christian national is born–a perfect mirror image of the ostensible enemy, incidentally. Michigan-based company Tijicon went so far as to supply the Marines with rifle scopes engraved JN8:12, referring to the passage from John that reads, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” This way, you’re aiming Jesus at your targets.

Hot Docs ’23: Angel Applicant

May 4, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Ken August Meyer

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

By Angelo Muredda Swiss-German surrealist Paul Klee becomes a guardian angel for a chronically ill artist in search of a disabled ancestor in Ken August Meyer’s documentary Angel Applicant, a playful and affecting memoir of the filmmaker’s progress with systemic scleroderma–the same rare autoimmune disease with which Klee was posthumously diagnosed. Self-deprecating and puckish, Meyer walks us through the indignities and aesthetic possibilities of his bodily transformation with a mix of observational footage of himself in and out of hospitals and clinics and magical-realist dramatizations that see him replaced with a lifelike doll whose rigid body stands in for his stiffening skin and joints. He weaves an examination of Klee’s late style into these diaristic musings on illness, pain, and creation in spite of both, drawing inspiration from the artist’s prolific output in his final years living with scleroderma. In the process, Meyer openly wonders if Klee’s turn from intricate to bold lines and surrealist images of disjointed bodies in pain–modernist pieces deemed “degenerate art” by Hitler–might serve as a model for his own uncertain path forward.

TIFF ’21: Wrap-up

October 6, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Brazil, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Iran, Mexico, Music, Sweden, Thriller, TIFF, UK

by Bill Chambers I’ve been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn’t expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I’m fully vaccinated, I wasn’t about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

TIFF ’21: Flee

September 18, 20212021, Animation, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Norway, Sweden, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen

by Angelo Muredda The past is as fluid as the rotoscoped animation used to bring it to life in Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, a high-concept work of creative nonfiction whose unconventional style promises an immersiveness it can’t really deliver. Rasmussen’s animated documentary profile of his childhood friend, pseudonymously named Amin Nawabi to protect his identity, is intermittently moving and insightful about the horrors, the exhausting subterfuge, and the briefest moments of levity that define his life as a queer Afghan refugee, first in Russia and then in Denmark. But the opacity of its subject–whose story of family suffering, persecution, hiding, and now something like domestic stability, has frequently shifted not just for state officials but also for his friend and biographer–leaves the film as vague as its buzzword title. Moreover, Rasmussen’s inability to do more with those discrepancies besides shrug at the ambiguities of first-person storytelling from far afield places plagued by civil war flattens the closing emotional pitch.

TIFF ’20: Still Processing + Every Day’s Like This

September 21, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

STILL PROCESSING
***½/****
written and directed by Sophy Romvari

EVERY DAY’S LIKE THIS
***½/****
starring Kacey Rohl, Daniel Kash, Francis Melling, Krystina Bojanowski
written and directed by Lev Lewis

by Angelo Muredda Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari mourns and preserves the past in her wrenching new nonfiction short, Still Processing, whose title puns on the intricate work of processing photographic images along with the spectral traces of those they depict. Evoking a tradition of poetic but philosophically robust memorial essay films and literary texts about engaging with the material record of the dead, from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil to W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the film is nevertheless shot through with Romvari’s modest sensibility. Though Romvari herself is front and centre throughout, the film is a quiet affair, shot in the loneliness of archives, darkrooms, and bedrooms, frequently lit by faint glowing lights and punctuated by a running subtitle track that elucidates the filmmaker’s emotional state. A compelling marriage of form and theme, the film is also gorgeously photographed. Particularly striking is a sequence that finds Romvari working solo among the cold brutalist architecture of York University, taking old photos of her deceased brothers David and Jonathan out of the humble archive of the box they’ve been housed in for the first time. She delicately arranges their faces on a nondescript table that soon becomes a kind of installation, effectively massaging her siblings back to life through her hands in real-time, as if gesturing to the labour and art of processing grief that only filmmaking can accomplish.

TIFF ’20: The Truffle Hunters

September 20, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Greece, Italy, TIFF

***/****
directed by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw

by Angelo Muredda “I can’t send you the aroma by phone,” a truffle dealer tells a prospective high-end client between eroticized sniffs of his own product early in Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s sad and mordantly funny The Truffle Hunters. The impossible challenge of translating the singular olfactory pleasures of sampling a top-shelf white truffle into words over the phone is something of an apt analogy for Dweck and Kershaw’s project. The filmmakers convert the idiosyncratic private lives and nonstandard labour of several elderly, taciturn northern Italian mushroom foragers and their dogs (who are also their business partners) into crowd-pleasing documentary fodder for foodies as well as people who go to nonfiction for a chance to gawk at eccentrics. It’s deceptively simple work, equally warm when profiling the dynamics of the cross-species tag teams, bemused when surveying the frosty culinary scene (and clandestine back alleys) where truffles are bought and sold, and striking when it’s framing the hunters as small figures navigating a big green world in beautiful, naturalist tableaux.

TIFF ’20: I Am Greta

September 20, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sweden, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Nathan Grossman

by Bill Chambers A deceptively stock rise-to-influence documentary, I Am Greta has haunted me like nothing that begins with “Hulu Presents” reasonably should. The film is, of course, about teen activist Greta Thunberg, who went on a school strike in her native Stockholm to bring awareness to climate change and became a global phenomenon. It begins at the beginning, in 2018, as Thunberg takes a seat outside the Swedish parliament building with a simple sign that reads “Skolstrejk för klimatet.” One older woman stops to scold her, more or less, for risking her future by skipping school. Thunberg counters that at the rate we’re destroying the planet, she has no future to risk. The woman walks away in a huff: kids, right? This fearless interaction not only establishes a key theme of I Am Greta–Thunberg’s ability to make Boomer heads explode, Scanners-style–but is also something of a miracle, given that Thunberg, who has Asperger’s, once went three years without speaking to another living soul except her parents. What triggered this mutism was her horrified reaction to an educational video about the impact of climate change on polar bears; what snapped her out of it was her realization that she could change her ways (going vegetarian, unplugging power cords, etc.)–and potentially those of others, by drawing as much attention to our environmental crisis, the looming Sixth Extinction, as possible.