Hot Docs Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

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.

Hot Docs ’19: Campo

May 8, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019, Portugal

***½/****
directed by Tiago Hespanha

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Despite its occasional stop/start rhythm, Campo is a consistently hypnotic audiovisual essay that ventures onto the Herzogian turf of Alcochete, Portugal’s Field Firing Range, called “Campo” for short after the Portuguese word for “field.” At 7,539 hectares (i.e., around 47 square miles), it’s Europe’s largest military base–so large that there’s room for livestock, including a herd of sheep, to graze on its grass, mostly undisturbed. A series of vignettes alternates drills and wildlife, though these juxtapositions aren’t quite that uniform, and oftentimes humans are present in the animal sequences, where they’re cooperative and not a blight. (A beekeeper closely monitors a hive to make sure his bees aren’t losing their radar like they have been all over the world.) Some scenes smudge the lines of fiction as indicated by this being a training facility, such as when medics labour to stop the bleeding of an allegedly wounded trainee who says, coughing up blood (for effect?), “When my father hears about this, he’ll shoot himself.” One camera angle, so peculiar it must be intentional, reduces a jeep and the soldiers inside it to action figures straight out of Marwencol.

Hot Docs ’19: For Sama

May 5, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019, Syria, UK

***½/****
directed by Waad al-Kateab, Edward Watts

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Born out of student journalist Waad al-Kateab's first-person video diary of the early days of the uprising against the Assad regime in Aleppo, For Sama is a startling document of how everything from parenting to the concept of home to the myriad forms of political resistance available to the young and idealistic is rendered uncanny by life under wartime. Co-directed by al-Kateab and Edward Watts, the film is both a daring work of frontline reportage and an appropriately anxious time-capsule message left to be discovered at some later date by al-Kateab's daughter, who is born during the conflict and whose future is ever-threatened by the precarious political status of her parents in the besieged city.

Hot Docs ’19: On the President’s Orders

May 3, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019, UK

***/****
directed by James Jones, Olivier Sarbil

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers A co-production of ARTE France and PBS's "Frontline", On the President's Orders covers a period of relative calm in Duterte's Philippine Drug War, which saw a death toll of 3,000 suspected drug pushers in its first year. In an effort to curtail the amount of bloodshed on both sides, Jemar Modequillo is installed as the new police chief in Manila's Caloocan district, the epicentre of the country's drug-related violence, and sets to work remolding the trigger-happy "wankers" under his command into a constabulary that patrols the seediest streets in search of alleged suspects to haul off to a seriously overpopulated jail. As we see, there is little distinction made between dealers and users (who typically aren't motivated enough to sell drugs), and a profound lack of empathy for addicts in general among members of law enforcement. "Drug users are a nuisance for society. Unless you get rid of a pest, it will get bigger," says the prison warden, Agustin, who gets his jollies out of hurting the detainees and isn't shy about it on camera. 'On the president's orders,' in other words, Modequillo created his own version of ICE, substituting junkies for migrants–and on one level, the film feels as if it's intended as a counterweight to Trump's characteristically mindless praise of fellow media-hating despot Duterte at a 2017 summit in Manila. On another level, like a lot of current documentaries (including the two I've already covered for this year's Hot Docs), On the President's Orders suggests a creative solution to critiquing a subject who's just too overexposed and partisan for any documentarian to have a real shot at being heard. We're in a redux of the Bush era, in that sense.

Hot Docs ’19: The World or Nothing

May 3, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019

***/****
directed by Ingrid Veninger

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda On the surface, Ingrid Veninger's first documentary feature The World or Nothing seems a departure from her scrappy, micro-budget semi-autobiographical work to date. A slice-of-life portrait of Rupert and Rubildo Ridinza, late twenty-something twins trying to make it big in Barcelona as YouTube celebrities without losing their connection to the family they left behind in Cuba, the film seems distant from early projects that starred members of Veninger's family, their characters typically displaced on European trips that test and form them. Though Veninger's latest follows a different family unit at a somewhat safer distance, it shares her earlier work's flinty but genial sensibility, as well as its thematic preoccupation with outsider artists engaged in the sometimes-indelicate art of self-promotion.

Hot Docs ’19: Maxima

April 29, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019

**½/****
directed by Claudia Sparrow

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Shot with a little of that Jennifer Baichwal flair for Martian landscapes, Maxima is an almost tediously straightforward yet galvanizing précis of one Peruvian woman’s struggle to keep the bulldozers away from her homestead. Having ransacked a huge patch of the Andes for its gold, the Yanacocha mining company wants to spread their tentacles as far as the Tragadero Grande, where Máxima Acuña has lived since purchasing the territory in 1994. In 1995, Yanacocha zoned for their proposed Conga Expansion Project in a deal that falsely included Tragadero Grande, and in 2011, Máxima was arrested for squatting on her own land following a violent confrontation with the police that left her battered and bruised and without a roof over her head, since the cops demolished her hut. Refusing to be cowed, Máxima accepted that the alternative to handing over her deed in the wake of this incident would be a years-long legal battle that still hasn’t been settled by the end of the film, making all of her victories along the way frustratingly Pyrrhic. But they are victories, moral as much as personal: Máxima’s stubbornness is protecting the surrounding lakes that nourish the lowlands, which Yanacocha would pollute with 96,000 tons of toxic waste per day. (That number, courtesy of fellow activist Milton Sánchez, sounds high to me–maybe something was lost in translation–but really, what would be an acceptable figure other than zero?) “It’s almost like a slow death sentence,” Máxima says. “There won’t be any clean drinking water for the communities.”

Hot Docs ’19: Killing Patient Zero

April 26, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019

**½/****
directed by Laurie Lynd

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda “Everyone was praying it was going to be something we could give up,” editor and interviewee Michael Denneny says in a sobering moment in Laurie Lynd’s Killing Patient Zero, which offers a moving if somewhat scattershot account of the collision between sexual liberation, panic, and state indifference in the early days of the AIDS crisis while fleshing out the life of so-called “patient zero,” Gaétan Dugas. Based on Richard McKay’s book on Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant remembered here for his charisma and frankness about his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was pathologized as an illness in North America, Lynd’s film is most effective as a reparative intervention into its subject’s cruel afterlife as the media’s favoured scapegoat in false summaries of the early transmission of HIV. Yet the documentary’s emotional impact is dulled by Lynd’s vestigial gestures to the source text (from which McKay awkwardly reads via a teleprompter), his overly familiar style (which cribs its score from The Social Network and its interview setup from Errol Morris), and his curious compulsion to frequently sideline Dugas’s story to make way for talking-head interviews with a who’s who of queer celebrities, such as Fran Lebowitz and B. Ruby Rich.

Hot Docs ’19: On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship

April 25, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019

***/****
directed by Karen Stokkendal Poulsen

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers It’s telling that the reality of Myanmar as a kind of Hell on Earth has subverted Hollywood’s couple attempts to set a white-saviour narrative there (John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo), and Karen Stokkendal Poulsen’s illuminating On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship shows how hopeful roads out of that Hell have come to dead ends. On the surface a pro forma mix of talking heads, archival footage, and a little bit of scenic tourism, the piece distinguishes itself with its high-profile interview subjects and a structure that gives certain ironies their due for those only passingly familiar with the country’s history. (Like me.) From 1962 until 2011, the once and future Burma was under military rule, having violently resisted a brief democratic uprising in the late-’80s led by Aung San Suu Kyi, who was subsequently imprisoned in her home for close to two decades. But with strict sanctions placed on all its prominent generals in the U.S. and Europe, the military decided to rehabilitate their international reputation by rebranding the government a democracy.

Hot Docs ’18: The Night of All Nights

May 6, 20182018, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

Die Nacht der Nächte**/****directed by Yasemin Şamdereli and Nesrin Şamdereli Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Basically the interstitial interviews from When Harry Met Sally... writ large and given an international twist, The Night of All Nights sees four elderly couples reminiscing on their marriage--though as the film opens Americans Bill Novak and Norman MacArthur, who've been together since 1962, are only finally getting to tie the knot. Germans Hildegard and Heinz-Siegfried Rotthäuser are probably the most sitcom-perfect subjects,…

Hot Docs ’18: The End of Fear

May 5, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018, Netherlands

***/****
directed by Barbara Visser

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Barnett Newman's divisive abstract painting "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III" becomes both a forensic site and a compelling structural absence in Dutch conceptual artist Barbara Visser's debut feature The End of Fear. What might have been an annoyingly palatable art doc about Gerard Jan van Bladeren's vandalism of the painting in 1986 (van Bladeren was so outraged by the work's abrasive shock of red, dramatic asymmetry, and obstinate refusal of representationalism that he decided he had to slash it) and subsequent failed restoration becomes something more slippery and interesting care of Visser's puckishness as not only a filmmaker but also a presence on screen, where we see her coolly hiring a hungry grad student to create a close reproduction of her own, apparently in the filmmaker's name. Though the project suffers at times from the preciousness of its noncommittal form–spanning everything from the expected talking heads lecturing about the painting's mixed critical reception and tabloid history to process-based interludes of Visser's hired gun hard at work, to abstract top-down tableaux of unnamed, black-clad gallery workers mapping out the painting's history on the jet-black floor with masking tape and archival photos–for the most part its free-roaming approach to questions of valuation, ownership, and work in contemporary art feels playful in the right way, opening up a number of avenues for discussion out of what feels like genuine curiosity.

Hot Docs ’18: McQueen

May 5, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

**½/****
directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s McQueen opens, as any look at Alexander McQueen, the queer, working-class, Stratford-raised ruffian turned couturier might well be expected to, with an aesthetic contradiction. The opening credit sequence, which unfolds as a series of smooth pans and tilts across extreme close-ups of baroque, CG-kissed headgear and flower-enmeshed skulls, soon gives way to ratty old videotape of the designer in his pre-Givenchy days, punning on “haute couture” and looking more like a hired hand than like one of the most influential designers of the late twentieth century. The contrast arguably makes for an easy rhetorical move and a reductive treatment of a mercurial man. But in McQueen’s case, the clichéd approach to the departed artist as a divided self–a schlubby guy who made impossible clothes for people who might never have been in his orbit in another life–feels appropriate and true, and marks a fair introduction to the equal attention the filmmakers pay to Lee, the unassuming and devoted family member, friend, learner, and tailor, and McQueen, the image-maker who channelled his own dark history and mental-health struggles into his creations.

Hot Docs ’18: 306 Hollywood

May 4, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

**/****
directed by Elan Bogarín & Jonathan Bogarín

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Grief becomes an occasion for pontificating about the nature of memory and archives in 306 Hollywood, Elan and Jonathan Bogarín's surprisingly aloof portrait of their charming grandmother's trash palace of a home in the months and years after her death. Following an academic talking head's advice that "Physical evidence helps to preserve a memory"–and a less convincing authority's insistence that a dead person's soul lingers in their newly-vacated home for about eleven months after their death–the filmmakers take it upon themselves to turn their grandmother's house inside-out, the better to immortalize her through the spectral traces they log on camera. The Bogaríns, who appear onscreen in both archival and present-day footage and who take turns narrating the more essayistic stretches of the film, insist upon framing their project as a work of archaeology, library science, and grief work at various points. Too often, though, the result feels like a pair of talented visual and film artists' distant elevator pitch for a feature, a portfolio of their respective aesthetic inclinations and intellectual influences rather than a cohesive text with something pressing to say about loss and detritus.

Hot Docs ’18: We Could Be Heroes

May 4, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018, Morocco, Qatar, Sports, Tunisia

**½/****
directed by Hind Bensari

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Oy, that title. It thankfully proves somewhat ironic, although disability docs would be wise going forward to avoid sentimental trigger words like “heroes,” Bowie homage or not, if they don’t want to be stigmatized as inspiration porn. The problem with We Could Be Heroes is that it’s easier to peg what it isn’t than what it is. Director Hind Bensari follows Moroccan athlete Azzedine Nouiri as he trains for the 2016 Rio Paralympics. He’d already set a world-record for shot put at the 2012 games, but some extracurricular research tells me that Englishman Scott Jones bested him just a year later. Bensari prefers an elliptical, direct-cinema approach that forgoes these expositional niceties, which I think is a misstep when we see wheelchair user Nouiri ambulatory without any sort of elucidation. There are spectrums of disability that transcend the naked eye, but try telling that to the idiots who memed a woman in a wheelchair standing up to reach a bottle up high in a liquor store with jokes about her faking it. Nouiri is not faking it–classified as an F34 athlete (meaning he has “moderate to severe hypertonia in both legs”), he credits his disability, in a rare autobiographical aside, to keeping him off drugs in his junkie neighbourhood, though that begs the intervention of a filmmaker follow-up question, too. (“Why?”) Bensari respects her subjects’ reserve to the point of seeming incurious to a near perverse degree. As a conspicuously-disabled individual who’s subjected to 20 Questions pretty much every time he leaves the house, I wish more people were like her; as someone tasked with reviewing We Could Be Heroes, I wish she were less reverential. She has a habit of lingering long enough to normalize her subjects, which some may find suitably profound, but not a Frederick Wiseman length of time, which would allow the idiosyncratic details of the challenges they face to emerge organically.

Hot Docs ’18: Transformer

May 1, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

***/****
directed by Michael Del Monte

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Bodybuilder and ex-marine Janae Marie Kroczaleski’s negotiation of the gender-fraught world of weightlifting after coming out as trans is given a refreshingly straightforward, fly-on-the-wall treatment in Michael Del Monte’s Transformer. The story of a world-championship-winning power builder, affectionately nicknamed “Kroc,” taking some critical early steps in presenting herself socially and professionally as a woman after a long and successful career in two of the most masculinist professions possible reads on paper like the stuff of an exploitative human-interest story. But Del Monte resists the temptation to amp up the inherent drama of a perfectly well-adjusted and engaging person’s life, or to linger, as other woke cis appropriators of trans stories have done, on the metaphorical dimensions of his subject’s transformation by fixating on either her past or the moment of transition. Instead, he recruits Janae as a collaborator in her story in the present, allowing her frank voice and the particular issues she faces today–about whether to maintain or tweak her muscular frame through clothes and exercise regimes, for instance, or whether to undergo vocal-cord surgery–to steer him in more fruitful directions.

Hot Docs ’18: Golden Dawn Girls

April 30, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Finland, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018, Norway

***½/****
directed by Håvard Bustnes

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers The eponymous Golden Dawn girls are three women connected by marriage or blood to Greece’s relatively new but steadily growing Golden Dawn party. They’ve taken centre stage in the absence of the party’s male superintendents, who are all incarcerated. (As Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes says at the outset: More on that later.) The Golden Dawn party evolved from a far-right newspaper into a fascist movement, though its affiliates rabidly resist the Nazi stigma. Nazis, they say, were German–this is Greece. Nazis were National Socialists, Golden Dawn-ers are Social Nationalists. My favourite defense comes from Dafni, mother of jailed member Panagiotis Iliopoulos, who insists that her son couldn’t be a Nazi because he was born after WWII. In footage from a TV interview, Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris claims complete ignorance of this “Hitler” fellow when questioned about his “Sieg Heil” tattoo–“hail victory” simply seemed like a good message to spread via his arm. Asked why he had it written in German instead of Greek, then, he says the German font was an aesthetic preference. They have an answer for everything–never a good one, but typically one so literal-minded it shuts down discourse. Bustnes valiantly tries, over and over, to get them to budge, to confront their reflection–the image they present to the world.

Hot Docs ’18: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

April 29, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

**/****
directed by Morgan Neville

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda It says a lot about the ideological thinness of the Resistance™ against the current American administration that the basic dignity of a lifelong conservative-values Republican gets elevated to the most rarefied heights in Morgan Neville's Won't You Be My Neighbor?. Though nominally a celebration of the life and storied career of children's broadcaster Fred Rogers, anchored in present-day talking-head interviews with collaborators and friends that threaten at times to bludgeon the delicate and achingly sincere archival footage of Rogers's show "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood", Neville's film has a bit more teeth as a manifesto for how children's educational programming that resists the trends of busyness, noise, and violence can function as a form of public service, instilling values like neighbourly stewardship and mutual respect.

Hot Docs ’17: Resurrecting Hassan

May 6, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Chile, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2017

****/****directed by Carlo Guillermo Proto Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Denis Harting, his childhood sweetheart Peggy, and their daughter Lauviah busk together as a capella singers on the Montreal metro. Peggy prefers performing outside to inside: "It's more fun and it's more money. And people are a bit goofier." She says this to her secret boyfriend, Philou, during one of their transatlantic phone calls, which she's becoming increasingly brazen about. If you're going to pity Denis, pity him…

Hot Docs ’17: Recruiting for Jihad

May 3, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2017, Norway

Making Jihadists***½/****directed by Adel Khan Farooq & Ulrik Imtiaz Rolfsen Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers There's a popular film and TV trope that's become a Twitter meme where a freeze-frame of someone in a compromising position is accompanied by a record-scratch on the soundtrack and a narrator intoning, "Hey, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation." So it's cringeworthy when a new movie opens like this (even sans record-scratch), yet Recruiting for Jihad…

Hot Docs ’17: 69 Minutes of 86 Days

May 1, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2017, Norway

**/****directed by Egil Håskjold Larsen Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Following a flow of Syrian refugees from Greece to Sweden, 69 Minutes of 86 Days is formally unusual but sentimental in a way that feels very familiar. Director Egil Håskjold Larsen's (for all intents and purposes) invisible Steadicam cruises a tent-lined port in Greece, an eye-level drone looking for a muse. Roughly eleven minutes into the picture, there she is: Lean, an adorable tyke who comes to exert…

Hot Docs ’17: Ask the Sexpert

April 29, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2017, India

***/****directed by Vaishali Sinha Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers This is a breezy, lighthearted documentary that nevertheless had me on pins and needles from the moment it introduced an antagonist. Former gynaecologist Dr. Mahinder Watsa, the eponymous "sexpert," is India's answer to Dr. Ruth. At 91, he writes a popular advice column for the MUMBAI MIRROR and continues to see patients as a sex therapist, sometimes off the street without an appointment--to the consternation of his children, who…

Hot Docs ’17: Hobbyhorse Revolution

April 27, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Finland, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2017

***/****directed by Selma Vilhunen Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Hobbyhorsists. They are predominantly young women, tweens and teens alike, who pretend to ride broomstick horses. The horses have names, idiosyncrasies, even lifespans (in a poetic externalization of personal growth, one girl's closet seems to double as a mausoleum for hobbyhorses), and they're billed alongside their riders in dressage tournaments that are surreal spectacles of girls bunny-hopping over fences while the crowd watches on tenterhooks, the way you dread…