Film Freak Central

Hot Docs '13: When I Walk

***/****
directed by Jason DaSilva

by Angelo Muredda Midway through When I Walk, Jason DaSilva's seven-year record of his experience since an early diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at age 25, the filmmaker wonders what his future will be, his life an ever-moving series of targets since illness and disability became a part of it. It's to DaSilva's great credit that that curiosity about what will become of him is developed in more than prurient ways with an unexpected but welcome detour into what it means to struggle through the normal checkpoints of a committed relationship--babies and all--when one also has a degenerative illness with an uncertain endgame. That isn't to say we should celebrate the film simply for being something other than a depressive's video diary of his body gone awry, but that DaSilva's hook is honestly come by and cannily placed. What's more, it pays off to the extent that DaSilva is a mordantly funny subject, candid about his bodily quirks, his vanities, and his anxieties.

Hot Docs '13: Fuck for Forest

***½/****
directed by Michael Marczak

by Angelo Muredda "Don't you think we're already fucked anyway?" a twentysomething European reveller bathed in neon light asks an environmentalist recruiter early on in Fuck for Forest, Michael Marczak's gorgeously-lensed and strangely resonant nature documentary about a very strange pack of wild animals, the titular porn collective-cum-NGO. It's a decent question, but you don't get the sense that the sweet young Berliners to whom it's directed have much of a clue about how to answer. Their approach to saving the world, which Marczak never openly laughs at but never quite endorses either, is to turn the surprisingly good coin they make from their vaguely nature-themed amateur pornography into angel investments towards causes they believe in. A gently detached observer who drops in on the audio track only for occasional Jules and Jim-inspired backgrounders on our daffy leads, Marczak is an ideal mock-tour guide for the group's journey to Peru, where they scope out a group of locals who want to preserve the Amazon.

Hot Docs '13: Remote Area Medical

***½/****
directed by Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman

by Angelo Muredda When he was seriously injured in the jungle thirty years ago, broadcaster and philanthropist Stan Brock tells an interviewer in Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman's powerful Remote Area Medical, the nearest doctor was over 26 days' worth of travel away--23 more than if he'd been on the moon, as an astronaut once told him. You can tell that Brock has massaged that anecdote into a homily with repetition, but rather than seeming slick, his pitch for greater medical care for those stuck in remote areas and extreme conditions has an air of earned righteousness about it, the sound of human decency filtered through experience. That same spirit of professionalism and earnestness pervades Reichert and Zaman's film, which profiles not the volunteer pop-up clinics Brock initially founded in faraway parts of the world but one right in his adoptive home of Tennessee, where hundreds of uninsured working-poor citizens line up days in advance for a fighting shot at care.

Hot Docs '13: NCR: Not Criminally Responsible

***/****
directed by John Kastner

by Angelo Muredda The ending of Taxi Driver could well be the start of John Kastner's NCR: Not Criminally Responsible. Where Scorsese's paranoiac dream closes with Travis Bickle returning to his cab after his bloodbath as either an undeserving hero or a delusional phantom, Kastner's film opens with an admirably complex consideration of what it means--for everyone from victim to convict to society at large--to reintegrate into Canadian culture a violent criminal who's been found not culpable for his actions. Kastner begins with the conditional release of Sean Clifton, a previously undiagnosed and ostensibly nonviolent Cornwall man who one day stabbed a young woman in a Walmart parking lot. Despite their spiritual belief in the power of rehabilitation and the doctors' assurances that Clifton is now medicated, the victim's family is understandably vexed. And, despite our own best liberal intentions, so are we.

Hot Docs '13: Shooting Bigfoot

***/****
directed by Morgan Matthews

by Angelo Muredda There's a Weakerthans song called "Bigfoot!" about a Manitoba ferry operator who was harassed by local media for disclosing his alleged encounter with the furry legend. It's an oddly affecting little thing, especially around the chorus, where the man insists--likely just to himself--that he won't go through it all again "when the visions that I've seen will believe me." If nothing else, Morgan Matthews's genre-crossing Shooting Bigfoot confirms that the loneliness and hermeticism of the poor Manitoban's life after Bigfoot--defined by a vision he can't possibly share, for obvious reasons--is pretty standard stuff in the cult of sightings. Mixing Werner Herzog's eccentric profiles with both Christopher Guest's institutional satire and an unexpected but not unwelcome helping of The Blair Witch Project, the film starts as an arm's-length survey of Bigfoot culture before fully immersing itself in its manic compilation of signs and wonders. 

Hot Docs '13: Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer

**½/****
directed by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin

by Angelo Muredda Civil disobedience is about as uncinematic as political protests get, so credit Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin for making Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer a more or less compelling paean to the troupe's fortitude against Russian orthodoxy. The film chronicles the ongoing legal battle that ensued from the feminist collective's 15-second guerrilla performance of a song called "God Shit" at the altar of St. Christ Church in Moscow. The impromptu number, captured in fuzzy cellphone video that's the most stirring footage in the movie by a mile, got masked performers Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Ekaterina Samutsevich, and Mariya Alyokhina a 3-year sentence at a penal colony for simultaneously dumping on the Orthodox Church and Putin. That such a minor demonstration could inspire such a heavy-handed state response is just one of the hooks the filmmakers exploit to strong effect in their look at how deeply religious values are embedded in Putin's Russia, which turns relatively minor acts of punk rebellion into the most vital expressions of political dissent.

Hot Docs '13: Downloaded

***/****
directed by Alex Winter

by Angelo Muredda Who would have expected both Bill and Ted to become a pair of slick documentarians about media revolutions? Just last year there was the Keanu Reeves-produced Side by Side, and now, Alex Winter's Downloaded, an engaging if overly twee sort-of prequel to The Social Network about the formation and early death of Napster. Downloaded moves at a good clip, establishing early on both the company's miraculous birth over a bunch of IRC chats between nerdy cofounders Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker (interviewed in a ridiculous penthouse suite that Facebook built) and the larger systemic changes in information-management that produced their baby, the first major decentralized file-sharing system. Winter gets utopian about the spirit of exchange that ensued when campus-dwellers started trading their Nirvana concerts and Sugar Ray singles in the late-Nineties, but you can forgive him for getting misty-eyed: It's easy in retrospect to forget just how easy and inevitable library consolidation through downloading became when Napster took off.

Hot Docs ’13: Interior. Leather Bar.

*/****
directed by James Franco and Travis Mathews

by Angelo Muredda Whatever goodwill James Franco built up with his mesmerizing turn in Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is bulldozed by Interior. Leather Bar., his second infuriating Hot Docs appearance in as many years. Ostensibly a recreation of a lost 8-minute sequence from William Friedkin's Cruising that was to show Al Pacino's undercover detective intimately crowdsourcing a gay S&M bar for a serial killer, this is nothing short of an incompetent lecture on queer theory and the importance of being a heterosexual ally to the community from a vain graduate student and, even worse, a tourist.

Hot Docs ’13: The Manor

**½/****
directed by Shawney Cohen

by Angelo Muredda "I call myself a filmmaker," Shawney Cohen muses off the top of his debut feature The Manor, "but I've actually been a strip-club manager for longer." Family inheritances have long proven fertile ground for emerging documentarians, like Sarah Polley with Stories We Tell just last year. Still, Cohen has a distinctive enough angle here, given the unusual visual dynamics of his family (dad's overweight, mom has an eating disorder) and its business, the titular Guelph club that Cohen's father has been running for over 30 years.