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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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Special Ed at Hot Docs: Winnipeg, spelling, and stop motion
Reviewed in this essay: Special Ed, directed by John Paskievich, Canada, 2013 at Hot Docs 2013. Director John Paskievich’s documentary Special Ed follows Ed Ackerman, a filmmaker who creates short stop-motion films that help kids spell. He loves words, enjoys puns, and his old boat-like car is decorated with colourful-painted letters. Then his life is…
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Pussy Riot at Hot Docs: Punk Feminist Performance Art on Trial
Reviewed in this essay: Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer, directed by Maxim Pozdorovkin and Mike Lerner, United Kingdom, 2012. Always difficult for a film reviewer is what to do with a film that’s got a really great story, but is not itself a particularly great film. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t run out and…
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Women and Boxing in Canada: Last Woman Standing at Hot Docs
Reviewed in this essay: Last Woman Standing, directed by Juliet Lammers and Lorraine Price, Canada, 2013 at Hot Docs 2013. The key to a good sports documentary—especially for those of us who don’t feel especially enraptured by the intrigues of competition—is in reminding viewers that sport is actually a field of relationships, and in bringing…
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Health Care in America: Reichert and Zaman’s Remote Area Medical at Hot Docs
Reviewed in this essay: Remote Area Medical, directed by Jeff Reichert & Farihah Zaman, 2013, United States If there’s a single, insurmountable psychic obstacle to a Canadian’s long-standing fantasy of one day moving to New York it is this one: health care. No other facet of American life (save sometimes guns and prisons) makes the…
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Occupy The BBC: The Work of Adam Curtis
A million acts of reportage, programming and documentation have left the BBC with the planet’s most complete video archive of the twentieth century. BBC writer and documentarian Adam Curtis’s technique is to obsessively sift through these uncountable hours of footage looking for connections. He shuffles through the BBC’s memories like its regretful conscience, imbuing each…
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Occupying Prisons: Canada and the Future of Incarceration
Films reviewed in this essay: Herman’s House (Canada, 2012, 81 min.), directed by Angad Singh Bhalla Hunting Bobby Oatway (Canada, 2004, 45 min.), directed by John Kastner As the Canadian government prepares to close Kingston Penitentiary, the oldest pen in the country, Whiggish history-telling has already begun to frame its wake. Virtually all the major…
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The 2012 Hot Docs festival, a Quick TRB Primer
Toronto’s annual festival of documentary and non-fiction film is upon us again, kicking off its 19th year in style tonight, April 26th, with festival opener Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, a portrait of Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei. Dissent is indeed in the air during this year’s Hot Docs, so if you’re looking for a…