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Concerning Violence by Göran Hugo Olsson
This post is the last in a series on Hot Docs 2014 films that reorganize and reimagine the limits of documentary. Viewers familiar with Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson’s 2011 The Black Power Mixtape will be already acquainted with three of the narrative and formal tropes also present in his follow-up film, Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic…
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Out of Mind, Out of Sight by John Kastner
This post is the third in a series on Hot Docs 2014 films that reorganize and reimagine the limits of documentary. Like John Kastner’s 2013 documentary NCI: Not Criminally Responsible, his follow-up film, Out of Mind, Out of Sight, is also a powerful reminder of what a traditional, made-for-television film can do without experimentation. It can haunt, and it…
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Guidelines by Jean-François Caissy
This post is the second in a series on Hot Docs 2014 films that reorganize and reimagine the limits of documentary. This quiet, patient NFB-produced film by Quebec visual artist and filmmaker Jean-François Caissy watches adolescents in and around a high school in rural Quebec. The film is stitched together as a series of observant…
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The Measure of All Things by Sam Green
This post is the first in a series on Hot Docs 2014 films that reorganize and reimagine the limits of documentary. The Measure of All Things is not so much a screening as a feature-length “live documentary” enacted at the Isabel Bader Theatre early in the festival’s run. U.S. filmmaker Sam Green, best known for his Academy Award-nominated The…
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Really Seeing: An Interview with Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer about All The Broken Things
SP: In your remarkable and moving All The Broken Things, Toronto’s CNE, bear-wrestling, Agent Orange, and Bo’s family life and history all work together to filter sadness, rage, love, regret, guilt, and joy to a pure and human core. What was the writing process like? Did you ever find a tension between the documentary facts…
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Rereading Fear of Flying: On Not Being Pregnant in Mid-Air With Isadora Wing
“One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary…” –Anne Fadiman, “On Rereading” The…
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Portrait of a Record Store: Soundscapes
Soundscapes (572 College Street) is for all intents an art gallery that treats cover-art like Pollocks and Mirós. Step through the ever open front door (10AM-11PM daily) and notice how books, records and CDs are stacked vertically so your neck doesn’t tire from looking down. Observe the two kinds of light, the fluorescent rectangles across…
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CanLit Canon Review #19: Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that have shaped this country. Leonard Cohen’s second and final novel, Beautiful Losers, published in 1966, is experimental and difficult. It is also mesmerizing, though, because of its swoon-worthy writing and enthusiasm for filth. You get this: “Come…
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Canada’s Messy History of Big Ticket Airport Projects, from Mirabel to Porter and Pickering
Porter Airlines made news last year by announcing its purchase of a dozen Bombardier CS-100 jets that it intends to fly from its hub, Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport (BBTCA). Next month City Council will vote on the plan. Last June, the federal government decided to revive the Pickering airport project, first announced in 1972…
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Brecht Resurrected in Toronto: Sarah Sheard’s Krank
Reviewed in this essay: Krank: Love in the New Dark Times, by Sarah Sheard (Seraphim Editions, 2012) Gestalt therapist Ainsley Giddings just wants a sabbatical year free of entanglements to write her book. The protagonist of Toronto writer Sarah Sheard’s fourth novel – her first in over a decade – has recently left a difficult…
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Culture Hawker Chronicles: Charles Barangan and B.M.V. Annex
In this series, Trevor Abes gets to know the people behind the counter at Toronto’s music stores, book shops, and art galleries. A Torontonian since 2009, Winnipeg-born Charlie Barangan wrote for the second season of the web series Clutch and co-founded Irradiated Panda Films, the group behind the IPF-funded Asset premiering this week. He works at…
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A Personal History of Indigenous Education: Verna Kirkness’s Creating Space
Reviewed in this essay: Creating Space: My Life and Work in Indigenous Education by Verna Kirkness. Published by the University of Manitoba Press (September 2013). In 1950, children on the Fisher River Indian reserve went to residential school after grade eight. One child on the reserve, however, had to stay behind. Residential schools only admitted status…