Film Freak Central

Hot Docs '23: All You See

***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

**/****
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

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

**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

***/****
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

***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

***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

***/****
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

***/****
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

**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

**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

***/****
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

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, as they gently squabble about the number of shoes she owns and other domestic issues. Japan's Shigeko and Isao Sugihara might argue more if Isao weren't so hard of hearing that Shigeko saves her breath now. By all appearances, Kamala and Nagarajayya Hampana, from India, are the most content--and horniest--couple; Kamala defied centuries of tradition by marrying below his caste and seems like he'd happily do it all over again. (There's a lovely moment where Nagarajayya starts to cry and Kamala swoops in with the fringes of his scarf to dry her tears.) Isao's near-muteness unfortunately makes the Sugiharas' story a fairly lopsided and vaguely unpleasant one, as Shigeko's disappointed memories of their arranged marriage--of all the men to choose from, she got the runt of the litter--become the dominant perspective on it. It's telling that the cloying claymation interludes, which caricature the couples and labour too obviously to give this geriatric picture some dynamic motion, change in tone for the Sugiharas, depicting them sitting down to eat at a table that keeps growing longer between them. (Isao passes away in a post-script and I really wanted co-directors Yasemin Şamdereli and Nesrin Şamdereli to go back and visit with his widow.) While I can't fault a prismatic look at the institution of marriage for not being all roses and sunshine, I confess that the larger point of The Night of All Nights, particularly its multicultural juxtapositions, evades me, and the film is sort of formally shapeless, getting all of its structural integrity from the build-up to Bill and Norman's nuptials. Long-time marrieds or starry-eyed newlyweds may have better luck with it than this inveterate bachelor, finding it relatable or perhaps even aspirational. That said, I was not unmoved.

Hot Docs '18: The End of Fear

***/****
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

**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

**/****
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

**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

***/****
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

***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?

**/****
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

****/****
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 for getting cuckolded, not because he's blind. After all, so are Peggy and Lauviah. Lauviah had a brother, Hassan, who died in a drowning accident at the age of six. Denis tells a radio interviewer his death made headlines, so I looked it up and discovered that Hassan was not also blind. His parents donated his corneas--not to Lauviah, alas. As I type this, I'm wondering about the ethical propriety of that, were it medically possible. Like any work of direct cinema, Resurrecting Hassan raises as many questions as it answers, though it goes the extra mile in pursuing objective truthfulness by narrowing the camera's field of vision with staggeringly intimate close-ups. It's not Derek Jarman's Blue, but this blotting out of their surroundings does foster empathy for the Hartings, who are quite often literally the blind leading the blind. (They walk the streets in a linked huddle and assist one another at home.) There's a conversation to be had, in a longer, more considered review, about whether scenes like Lauviah--who additionally has some form of autism--petting her cat wrong constitute exploitation. Personally, I was grateful the movie didn't lapse into inspiration porn, and I tend to think of all cinéma vérité as exploitation anyway. (Besides, it's a poignant moment, as the two most isolated figures in the house beg for mutual compassion.) The question to ask is if pointing a camera at this family is cynical, and that's an issue compounded by their being followers of Grigory Grabovoy, a Russian faith healer who claims that human organs can be regenerated at will. To unbury another lede (or drop a bombshell), the Hartings have somehow convinced themselves that Grabovoy's teachings are the key to bringing their son back from the dead, per the title. It's a bizarre set of variables, no doubt, but Denis and Peggy's desire for their own personal Monkey's Paw, deluded though it may be, is only too relatable. Resurrecting Hassan is an inspired and unusually affecting film about grief, which proves an insurmountable burden even for the Hartings, who live lives of constant adaptation.

Hot Docs '17: Recruiting for Jihad

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 gets away with it, I think, because the filmmaker's predicament--he's about to consort with jihadists--inspires genuine curiosity, and because it immediately cracks a window on a world with the potential to be suffocating in its myopia. Norwegian-born Ubaydullah Hussain, the spokesman for a vocally pro-terror organization based in Norway called The Prophet's Ummah, is rumoured, per the title, to be a recruiter for ISIS. Co-director Adil Khan Farooq's interest in him is anthropological: He wants to understand why they're so ideologically opposed when, on paper, they've led parallel lives, having both been born in the mid-'80s and raised among the white, Christian middle-class. The question falls by the wayside in favour of investigative journalism once Hussain pulls back the curtain on his operation for Farooq and partner Ulrik Imtiaz Rolfsen, although it's perhaps answered by a couple of white boys we get to know who found Hussain's cult after losing themselves in the bottle. (If anything, the film fails at adequately addressing why Farooq wasn't radicalized.) While handing out flyers in the street, one of these lost souls is stunned silent when a female passerby harangues him for the subjugation of women in Islam; it's tragically clear that he's out of his depth. Later, we learn of the kid's death in Syria, and Hussain is jealous that he got to die a martyr. Hussain is a magnetic, infuriating subject who favours semantic loopholes in defending his "orthodox" beliefs, as becomes abundantly clear in a closing tête-à-tête during which Farooq points out Hussain's hypocrisies (death to Western civilization/let's order shakes at Mickey D's), checks to see if there's any wiggle room in his ISIS fanboyism, and begs for insight into this mysterious ailment that's allegedly keeping him from recruiting himself. (Alas, some things are between a man and Allah.) Though it would make for a compelling short on its own, in Recruiting for Jihad it's merely the coda to an exasperating but compulsively watchable portrait of religious extremism that may be the quintessential film about how you can't argue with an idiot.

Hot Docs '17: 69 Minutes of 86 Days

**/****
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 such a magnetic pull on the camera that it stoops to her level, coming up for air only when she is whisked skyward by one of her relatives. This devoted observation brings to mind Schindler's List, with Lean's Frozen backpack standing in for the little girl's red coat and, moreover, Larsen becoming Schindler himself. (Aside from feeling bizarrely derivative for a documentary, it gives the movie a slight saviour complex.) Admittedly I awwww'd, several times, and if the swift downfall of Milo Yiannopoulos or 45 giving Assad the biggest noogie Putin would allow showed us anything, it's that irising in on kids galvanizes the powers-that-be; may the film open borders as well as hearts. Where 69 Minutes of 86 Days unequivocally stumbles is in how the individual vignettes, whether by luck or, more likely, by design, are sequenced to progress from day to night and back again a couple of times, which makes the titular 86 days feel like two. A more haphazard structure less slavish to circadian rhythms might've better conveyed the physical and psychological toll of the refugees' trek across Europe. This is an exodus reduced to a road trip.

Hot Docs '17: Ask the Sexpert

***/****
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 worry their widower father's fame, age, and gregariousness could attract ne'er-do-wells. Watsa's a hip dude unfazed by the most cartoonishly filthy questions, the only guy who laughed during a medical conference when a gay doctor facetiously proposed a drug that turns heterosexuals into homosexuals. The kids love him (though some who've never put a face to the name would be stunned to learn how old he is) and Penguin's publishing a book of his material, but he has a particularly vocal detractor in political science professor Dr. Pratiba Naitthani, who says by way of introduction, "I always used to be the monitor of the class. The best person is always the monitor." (Thank you, Judy Hensler.) She's filed an obscenity claim against Watsa's column on the grounds that it's smut in a publication that isn't designated smut, out of sight from minors--and if you think that's reasonable, know that she also objects to diagrams of the human anatomy appearing in classrooms. She's maddeningly obtuse; she asks rhetorically why after thousands of years the civilized world suddenly needs to know about birth control while living in the second-most overpopulated country on Earth. Though Naitthani imposes a lot of dread on the film as both she and Watsa keep checking up on her case, her dissenting voice underscores the value and urgency of Watsa's work. Abstinence-only education of the kind Naitthani endorses doesn't stop teenagers from having sex, it just makes them practise it in ignorance, putting their health and safety at risk. One young man admits that prior to discovering Watsa he didn't even know whether sex is something that's given or taken by force. Yeesh. Naitthani has a humanizing scene where she volunteers that although it looks to us and her mother like she lives alone, her busyness is a constant bedfellow. "I really don't know what's wrong with me," she blurts out with an incredulous laugh. Perhaps she should ask the sexpert.

Hot Docs '17: Hobbyhorse Revolution

***/****
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 an air-show crash or a figure skater's stumble. Slowly, though, the neophyte begins to decipher the nuances; at one point Aisku, the movie's sometimes-petulant lead, chides a beginner for moving her arms too much, and damn if this little note doesn't improve the youngster's game considerably. Hobby-horsing is a strange subculture but no stranger than bronies--and undoubtedly more athletic. The only reason to hate on it is if you're a misogynistic piece of crap. Finland's Hobbyhorse Revolution isn't the phenomenon's origin story, although it does find a common thread among the hobbyhorsists it interviews: they've all been bullied. (There's a particularly chilling ellipsis in cherubic Elsa's story: "There was this one boy... He didn't like that I was cheerful all the time. So he put an end to it.") Although being a hobbyhorsist sometimes exacerbated the abuse, the therapeutic value of the pastime and its egalitarian social scene appear to have made quitting unthinkable. Maybe it's the Scandinavian setting, but throughout Hobbyhorse Revolution I kept flashing back to Lukas Moodysson's extraordinary ode to seventh-grade riot grrls We Are the Best!: They are so many Tina Belchers, and yet there is something quite punk about our hobbyhorsists, who saw where the proverbial goalposts were and moved them for themselves. They're also hilariously profane. I love these dorks, enough to overlook that the movie's own brio never quite rises to their level.

Hot Docs '17: Living the Game

**½/****
directed by Takao Gotsu

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 In surveying a complementary milieu with the same elegant reserve, Living the Game could be a blood relative of the streaming favourite Indie Game: The Movie. Although its chill vibe doesn't feel entirely forthcoming in the age of Gamergate, the pro gamers it profiles may exhibit fewer chips on their shoulders because they all hail from the East (Japan, mostly) rather than the West. These folks are damn near role models--at least that's true of Daigo Umehara, who's grown complacent about having written memoirs and been the subject of a popular manga. Momochi owns these books but hasn't read them. He says he doesn't want to know too much about his potential opponent, which directly contradicts an earlier scene showing the copious notes he's made on the strategies of other players. Momochi lives with bubbly girlfriend Choco, the two of them eking out a living as professional gamers. The more skilled of the two, he helps her train, but his hardass approach is causing their relationship to fray at the edges, as is the couple's lack of a steady, dependable income. Momochi takes centre-stage here, though it's because of Choco's increasingly-fragile smile that his story compels. Another gamer (defeated by Momochi in a controversial victory), the Taiwanese GamerBee, inspires more affection than the morose and testy Momochi as well: A latchkey kid who sought a cure for loneliness at the arcade as a child then came around to embracing videogames again after his beloved father passed away, GamerBee is like a character out of an Edward Yang movie. Living the Game's subjects eventually descend on the Capcom Cup, a competition that awards an impressive $120,000 to the last player standing in a "Street Fighter" tournament. That the outcome is unconventionally anticlimactic might've worried the filmmakers at the time, but it almost seems to have dictated a retroactive ambivalence towards the subject of pro gaming that's slightly stultifying. There's nothing wrong with a little equivocation, of course--this is a documentary, not propaganda. But when Living the Game was over, part of me felt like I'd just watched Shrug Emoji: The Movie.

Hot Docs '16: No Man is an Island

**/****
directed by Tim De Keersmaecker

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers The white sands and turquoise waters of Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost island, have attracted tourists like iron filings in the age of TripAdvisor. It's paradise found, an oasis in the Mediterranean. And it's "the door to Africa," a European outpost at which migrants dock en masse. No Man is an Island alternates between two young refugees who've established themselves there in some capacity. Omar, who fled Tunisia during the Arab Spring, is the Eliza Doolittle-like apprentice to the doctor who heads up the medical centre for new arrivals, while the comparatively laconic Adam, from Ghana, is the houseboy of a man who came to Lampedusa by way of Colombia and seems a little sketchy in his "Miami Vice" digs. Both Omar and Adam are struggling with assimilation--Omar feels out of place, perhaps owing to unresolved feelings about his sexual orientation, whereas Adam is finding it difficult to transcend the jocular racism of his newfound peers--yet nothing particularly dynamic or revelatory comes from paralleling their stories; ultimately, this feels like two discrete documentaries interrupting each other. Director Tim De Keersmaecker develops motifs--recurring images of sea turtles and the Virgin Mary--but his dreamy, elliptical approach robs them of thematic weight. (Reading about Lampedusa, I discovered that it simultaneously rescues some 200 sea turtles a year from the vagaries of the fishing industry.) More superficial than profound, the film is a glorified DSLR demo video when all's said and done, and as sympathetic as Omar and Adam are, this aesthetic really emphasizes the poetry of their surroundings, taking the edge off their rootlessness. No Man is an Island might be a better tourism video than it intends.

Hot Docs '16: Sonita

***½/****
directed by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers By coincidence or zeitgeist design, Sonita is my third consecutive Hot Doc about the disenfranchised's quest for "personhood." Here it's the titular Sonita Alizadeh, an Afghan teenager who fled the Taliban and, as the film begins, is living in a fleapit in Tehran with her sister and young niece; an unseen brother apparently resides nearby, close enough to duck in and trash her belongings while she's out. Sonita's nightmare family expects a lot from her--when they're evicted, her hookah-smoking sister barks, "Go find us a new home! Now!"--and that includes that she will one day soon return to Afghanistan to be sold into marriage. She has dreams of becoming a recording artist, though, and a wilfulness that director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami tries desperately to cultivate without violating the documentarian's Prime Directive of impartial observation. When Sonita's mother extorts Maghami for $2000 to buy her subject six more months in Tehran, Sonita and Maghami get busy and make a video for Sonita's prosaic but politically-charged rap song "Brides for Sale," which goes viral and attracts the attention of a nonprofit that wants to fly Sonita to America, birthplace of her beloved Michael Jackson. (In a memorable sidebar, she's baffled by an Iranian map of the world that colour codes the U.S. as a desert--propaganda at its most diabolical.) Because I didn't follow Alizadeh's story as it happened live, the final third of Sonita played for me like a heist movie, with Sonita tiptoeing back into Afghanistan to retrieve her passport while keeping her final destination on the down-low. But there's a sadness gnawing away at the suspense: Sonita's mother is determined to find a man who will pay nine grand for her so that one of her sons can afford his own $9000 wife (she's the kind of older person who enforces the awful traditions to which she was subjected out of spite), and in Iran Sonita's social circle is drying up because nobody wants to be seen fraternizing with an outlaw (given that women there are technically not permitted to sing)--institutionalized misogyny has left her without a sanctuary. Sonita's victories are by no means Pyrrhic, yet the lonesome final shot shows that freedom and isolation are sometimes uncannily similar.

Hot Docs '16: Unlocking the Cage

**½/****
directed by Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers As an idealistic young lawyer, Harvard law professor Steven Wise went looking for the biggest "underdog" he could possibly represent and realized that animals were it. He founded the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to aid any and all "autonomous" wildlife in cases of abuse, but Unlocking the Cage, the latest from the prolific team of Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker, zeroes in on his efforts to liberate some chimpanzees from the horrid conditions at a state medical school and various cut-rate zoos by getting a judge to grant them "personhood." He's met with incredulity and ridicule by members of the court and media alike, who bristle at his ill-advised correlation of chimps with slaves. (The press is equally reductive when they jokingly accuse Wise of setting in motion a real-life Planet of the Apes.) And Wise's pursuit of habeas corpus for the effectively imprisoned primates has the unintended, Kafka-esque side effect of setting back human rights by forcing a redefinition of personhood that renders ineligible those who "cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities[,] or be held legally accountable for their actions" (i.e., not just chimpanzees but children and the mentally-impaired as well). But Wise is not a stupid or dangerous figure--if anything, the film doesn't find enough wrinkles in his righteousness. Compared to the obsessive subjects of previous Hegedus and/or Pennebaker docs like Bob Dylan, James Carville, or even the Startup.com guys, Wise's single-mindedness is blandly wholesome, and his only advertised idiosyncrasy is his use of the redundant "non-human animals" to denote his clients, which says more about his empathy and push for equality than almost anything else. As an activist doc, Unlocking the Cage may be too timid about going the full PETA for its own good; that Wise's chimps keep dying before he can save them is abstracted if not mitigated on screen by the fact that many of them are only names on a piece of paper, off limits to the filmmakers, and the stock footage Pennebaker/Hegedus have chosen tends to highlight the animals' considerable intelligence rather than their jeopardy. That's not immaterial, but the depiction of Wise's advocacy could use a little more urgency.

Hot Docs '16: The Pearl of Africa

***/****
directed by Jonny von Wallström

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Cleopatra Kambugu and her husband Nelson Kasaija board a train. Although the seats in their sleeping car are discouragingly narrow, Nelson consults the passenger guidelines and sure enough sex is not explicitly forbidden. It's sitcom-cute that he checks, but his impulse to do so also creates a palpable unease; the accumulation of ominous imagery at the start--a barbed-wire fence; a front door, open though not beckoning; the word "Uganda," imposed and imposing over a dismal horizon--suggests there is some Orwellian element from which train travel can only tentatively shield them. Most of Africa but especially Uganda, where Cleopatra is from, is a hotbed of homophobia, and Cleopatra is a trans woman looking to return home after being shamed out of the country. To that end, she and Nelson are making their way to Thailand so she can have gender-reassignment surgery and clear up any ambiguities about her sexual orientation. It seems a little pie-in-the-sky, given how hostile Ugandans appear to be towards any kind of kink (in news footage, one guy spits Leviticus at the camera, the way a particular genre of Christian always does; The Pearl of Africa itself preemptively counters with an opening quotation of Galatians 3:28)--and indeed, it's somewhat disappointing that the film is an incomplete journey, ending on Kambugu's recovery in the immediate aftermath of her operation. But director Jonny von Wallström couldn't have found more charming, loving partners than these two, and he treats them like movie stars, even billing them as if they're actors. For a documentary, in fact, the widescreen-lensed The Pearl of Africa behaves a lot like a narrative feature; when Nelson's waiting for Cleopatra to get out of surgery, Wallström extrapolates his apprehension with a montage of the couple in happier times straight out of She's Having a Baby. It protagonizes them in a disarming way, and while the film could stand to be a bit less infatuated with the pair (it hermetically seals itself in their relationship such that the picture starts to feel shallowly subjective), its empathy is unimpeachable.

Hot Docs '14: The Overnighters

***/****
directed by Jesse Moss

by Angelo Muredda The intersection of the financial crisis and the North Dakota oil boom has turned Williston, ND into an unlikely mecca in the past few years. The influx of unemployed men who've left their homes for a new, thoroughly American, and probably-doomed shot at redemption on the oil fields is the subject of Jesse Moss's Sundance-feted The Overnighters, a complex look at how this mass exodus and uneasy resettlement has brought the residents of Williston to the limits of their compassion and brotherly love. The film focuses on the Herculean efforts of pastor Jay Reinke, who has turned his church into a makeshift home base for the new arrivals--to the chagrin of the facility's neighbours, who are skeptical about the men's scruffy appearance and possible criminal backgrounds, and the open hostility of the town newspaper, which wages war on Reinke's new congregation by publishing a list of former sex offenders harboured in the church as well as in the pastor's own home.

Hot Docs '14: Joy of Man's Desiring

Que ta joie demeure
***/****
directed by Denis Côté

by Angelo Muredda Although it's set in a factory rather than a zoo, Joy of Man's Desiring makes a fitting companion piece to Denis Côté's Bestiaire. Where the minimalist, formally austere Quebec filmmaker's previous documentary unfolded through a series of static frontal tableaux featuring animals displaced into some rather unnatural habitats, surrounded by bars and cages (the most extreme one being Côté's own mise-en-scène), his newest focuses on the alienated humans behind the machines that yield all manner of metal alloys, wood cases, and garments. Following an elfin worker's dramatic monologue about the nature of labour and human intimacy--she's played by an actress, the first of many instances where Côté throws a theatrical dirt bomb into the staid form of nonfiction--the symphonic title sequence sets the tone. It's a montage of self-propelling machines engaged in uncannily human dance moves, more unnerving still when considered in the context of some of the curiously mechanical human behaviour that follows, like when a worker loops around a cart full of boxes, elegantly dispensing a ream of Scotch tape as if he's wrapping a mummy.

Hot Docs '14: Actress

***½/****
directed by Robert Greene

by Angelo Muredda "It wasn't just the character," Brandy Burre muses in voiceover as she watches herself in the kitchen in an artfully-framed dishwashing scene during the opening moments of Robert Greene's Actress: "It's me. I tend to break things." That's an appropriately wily introduction to a documentary that adroitly blends domestic melodrama, biography, and sociological study. "Brandy Burre is Actress," the surprisingly ostentatious (for nonfiction) title card announces, and so it goes: Burre stars as herself, a Master's-holding former supporting player from "The Wire" who took a break from acting after the birth of her first child, and who now seeks to get back in the game at a moment when her long-term relationship appears to be breaking apart like the dishware.

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.

Hot Docs 2012: Only the Young (ds. Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet)

by Angelo Muredda Like a delicate magic trick, Only the Youngis best watched in a state of rapt fascination. An unostentatious feature debut from Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet, the film chronicles a few months in the lives of three impossibly sweet teens in a desert town. Impressively, it does so without signposting major events along the way. Instead, we weave through their relationship and family dramas with only their changing hairstyles as obvious chronological markers, catching everyday lyricism in first car rides and teen girls’ catlike head nudges.

Hot Docs 2012: Summer of Giacomo (d. Alessandro Comodin)

by Angelo Muredda Conceptually sandwiched somewhere between Maren Ade’s terrific Everyone Else and Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Alessandro Comodin’s Summerof Giacomo is a richly textured portrait of dumb love in the grass, times two. As the lengthy credits of electric blue font superimposed on black and scored to languid birdsong suggest, this is chiefly an aesthetic experience, and Comodin delivers a gorgeously lensed (on 16mm) account of twentyish Giacomo and Stefani’s wayward hike through the countryside in search of a river by which to set up camp for the afternoon. The press notes tell us that Stefani is a childhood friend, but that hardly matters: all that we gather and need to gather is that something might have happened at some point, but outside of this hike, it’s over. What we’re left with, then, apart from their pathfinding and inevitable squabble, is a dense sensory record of the seriously goofy and – this is nicely underplayed – deaf Giacomo’s experience. His cochlear implant is briefly glimpsed in the first over-the-shoulder shot of him clanging randomly at a drum set, and you could happily read the film as an experiment in attending to the sounds, both slight and explosive, that pass through the device en route to his dufus skull.

Hot Docs 2012: The World Before Her (d. Nisha Pahuja)

by Angelo Muredda The winner of Hot Docs’ Best Canadian Feature award, granted just two weeks after it snagged top doc honours at Tribeca, Nisha Pahuja’s The World Before Her is a fearless and intricately structured portrait of a nation split down the middle. The film sets out to explore women’s uneasy place in an increasingly modernized and globally inflected but still traditional India by observing how a pair of institutions go about raising girls, and to what end. Pahuja’s riskiest and ultimately smartest move is to juxtapose the personality-making rituals of the Miss India pageant with a Hindu nationalist training camp that prepares young girls to marry young, obey, and take up arms against Muslim and Christian neighbours, should the good fight of a united Hindu nation come to their doorsteps.

Hot Docs 2012: Loose ends

by Angelo Muredda

The Betrayal (d. Karen Winther): The director returns to her spotty history in this intermittently affecting but mostly flat exercise. Winther combs through old journals and interviews both her parents and former friends in her effort to get to the bottom of a colossally stupid and damaging decision, when she was a troubled 15-year-old, to volunteer her far-left friends’ whereabouts to a known neo-Nazi group. As a portrait of 1990s Oslo's political bifurcations, the film is fairly compelling, but Winther is maddeningly vague about her ideological inclination in any phase of her life, and her frequent voiceovers about uncovering why she did what she did grate more than they illuminate. In any case, it's the wrong question. **/**** (Special Presentations)

Hot Docs 2012: ¡Vivan Las Antipodas! (d. Victor Kossakovsky)

by Angelo Muredda “The world spins, but they’re always below us.” That’s one of the many pearls in Victor Kossakovsky’s ¡Vivan Las Antipodas!, a high-concept travelogue that fleetly covers four pairs of dry-land spots at exact opposite ends of the earth. The opening epigraph from Lewis Carroll aside, Kossakovsky gravitates to such homespun maxims rather than headier stuff, and the film is all the more dazzling for it – an intoxicating riff on the Looney Tunes bit where Yosemite Sam digs through an outcrop and lands in China. While he’s interested enough in the locals, particularly the source of that comment, two guys who ferry busted cars over their pontoon bridge in Argentina, the director generally turns his Red camera to beautiful images of animal life, fauna, and architecture, weaving strange textures out of his startling juxtapositions between, for instance, a volcanic rock formation in Hawaii and an elephant’s hide in Botswana.

Hot Docs 2012: Shut Up and Play the Hits (ds. Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern)

by Angelo Muredda “It’s like a sad hipster DJ Revolutionary Road.” That’s recently-retired LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy on first single “Losing My Edge” in Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s by turns ebullient and funereal Shut Up and Play the Hits. “Losing My Edge” is one of the dance-rock act’s infamous “position songs.” You could think of it as a hunted gazelle’s lament before the wolves swoop in, masquerading as a thirtysomething’s off-the-cuff recitation of his musical knowledge before a pack of preternaturally all-knowing twentysomethings who are “actually really, really nice.” It’s probably the best example of Murphy’s uncanny ability to position himself at the edge of things – in this case between the accumulated experience of old-school music appreciation (it’s not for nothing that the last LCD album was called This Is Happening) and new digital ways of knowing by downloading in massive quantities. Credit Lovelace and Southern, then, for positioning their film at the same edge, and delivering a concert film of LCD’s last show at Madison Square Garden that’s a self-consciously dead record of a living wake, announcing itself as a funeral even before the credits.

Hot Docs 2012: The Frog Princes (ds. Omar Majeed and Ryan Mullins)

by Angelo Muredda The Frog Princes is so big-hearted you wish it had more to say than “way to go.” Copping its framing device from Rushmore, the film shadows a theatre troupe over a few months as it prepares for its debut performance of The Frog and the Princess. The hook is that the performers all have developmental disabilities, and are part of an initiative headed by Stephen Snow, a psychotherapist who teaches drama therapy at Concordia. “Steve” to his players, Snow comes across as an amiable guy whose high standards inspire self-confidence and a good work ethic in people from whom society shamefully expects little. There’s joy in seeing actors like cutely named Ray-Man, a young man with Down Syndrome, channel their untapped self-confidence into something tangible. Ray-Man makes a sharp contrast with Tanya, a clinically depressed woman with Prader-Willi Syndrome, whose nastiness and frequent minor meltdowns give the film a welcome edge whenever she’s onscreen.

Hot Docs 2012: Who Cares? (d. Rosie Dransfeld)

by Angelo Muredda A vérité portrait of a group of sex workers in Edmonton, Rosie Dransfeld’s Who Cares? is a sobering and uncondescending look at vulnerable people who work without a safety net on the outskirts of society. The film begins with a pair of police officers on a taskforce called Project Care, which spearheads other departments’ investigations of sex worker murders by registering the DNA of the living, so they can be identified in the event that, as one officer puts it, “something bad should happen.” That’s an alarming concept, and Dransfeld leaves the officer’s euphemism about an intervention that only happens after death hanging uncomfortably. It isn’t that their heart is in the wrong place, the film suggests, as the men express real sympathy and concern for the daily abuse these women face, but that their structural response to the problem leaves these workers invisible and unprotected until they’re gone.