Index du Forum

aderfp633 · Inscrit le: 27 Sep 2011 Messages: 7915 Localisation: England

{Hot Docs 2012: 31 reviews and counting}
Featured VideoClose More Video Michael Douglas in Emotional Film Presentation at Cannes 'Great Gatsby' Cast Arrive in Cannes The 19th annual Hot Docs festival runs to May 6 and seats are selling fast. How do you decide what to see? Star writers and critics have pre-screened some of the offerings. Those marked with a are recommended. For screening times see hotdocs.ca.Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry: The festival opener is a captivating portrait of big-bellied dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, by American filmmaker Alison Klayman. The Sundance-endorsed doc explains much about her subject’s controversial activism, his blog- and Twitter-enabled campaigns against the Chinese regime’s brutal intolerance of criticism, and the impact his rebel celebrity has had on his nation’s emerging culture and legions of followers, but not nearly enough about the art and ideas that have earned him heaps of global accolades. Stubborn, witty, insightful, fractious, and empowered by a decade-long dance with American democracy in New York during his student years, Ai is presented in the movie as a fait accompli, a rock star of the art world who has enough time on his hands, clout, money and independence, to give the finger — literally — to his overlords, only to be stunned into silence when he becomes too big a target to evade their wrath. Greg QuillAn Affair of the Heart: Director Sylvia Caminer doesn’t let pop star Rick Springfield off the hook in her documentary about the “Jessie’s Girl” singer and General Hospital star. He admits to some serious character flaws, but they’re lapses his fans clearly forgive him for. Overwhelmingly female in number, the teary throng credit Springfield with making their lives better — even if some of their husbands aren’t completely convinced. It’s a fascinating look at the limitless fan devotion for a singer who hasn’t been on the charts in decades, from giggling middle-aged gals on weekend jaunts to headbangers at a Swedish rock festival. They’re all Rickaholics. Linda BarnardBack to the Square: “Mubarak = Sadness,” reads Cairo wall graffiti scrawled before last year’s Arab Spring uprising that ousted Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, and it was a popular sentiment. But what comes after the cheering, if there is no transition plan and another set of fascist thugs are at the gate? Petr Lom’s unsettling doc looks at the lives of five people in post-revolution Egypt, who are struggling to find freedom and happiness in a new world that still seems a lot like the old one. Peter HowellBallroom Dancer: The faux, over-the-top dramatics of ballroom dancing collides with genuine heartbreak this moving doc from Danish filmmakers Andreas Koefoed and Christian Bonke. They follow former world champion Slavik, who at age 33 is plagued with injuries and nearing the end of his career. A driven perfectionist with an arrogant streak that could cost him everything, Slavik hopes to stage a comeback with Anna, a young unknown who is also his partner off the dance floor. L.B.Big Boys Gone Bananas: Sweden’s Fredrik Gertten has to be a bit bananas himself to go up against the world’s biggest producer of fruits and vegetables. But he also shows considerable cojones in his persistent fight to get his previous documentary Bananas* out to the world. This despite an escalating campaign by Dole to prevent its distribution — indeed, the Los Angeles Film Festival was so fearful of litigation that, to its shame, it only agreed to show the film with an embarrassing disclaimer. This doc-within-a-doc has visual and budget challenges — e.g. overseas conversations with lawyers via shaky, split-screen Skype chats — mostly mitigated by the filmmaker’s willingness to go down a rabbit hole. Ariel TeplitskyBrooklyn Castle: I.S. 318 is an inner-city school where some 70 per cent of students’ families are living below the poverty line, yet they dwell among kings and queens, boasting the most winning junior high chess teams in the U.S. Director Katie Dellamaggiore’s doc, which picked up the audience award winner at SXSW in January, is the kind of uplifting exploration of kids rising above that inspires as it follows a handful of kids, some prodigies, some struggling just to win a game. As schools face cutbacks and slashing of after-school programs, the kids of I.S. 318 are determined to go on and defend their school’s titles and national reputation, learning lessons along the way that they apply to a variety of off-the-board challenges. L.B.The Boxing Girls of Kabul: Ariel Nasr’s uplifting film about a small group of young Afghan women who dream of being Olympic boxers opens with a chilling scene of a woman in a burqa crawling on the field at the Olympic stadium before being executed. The self-assured young women we meet as they train with their wiry ex-Olympian coach insist life is changing for the better; one girl’s father insists daughters and sons must be treated equally and encouraged to excel. But winning a competition calls attention to the female boxers and with that comes the threat of violence. The young athletes come out swinging, but will they pay a price for demanding freedom to compete for their country? L.B.China Heavyweight: As he did with Up the Yangtze, director Yung Chan shows us a corner of Chinese life Westerners would never explore without his questioning camera. This time he follows onetime boxing champ Qi Moxiang,[url=http://woolrich-parkaoutlet.blogspot.com]Woolrich Outlet[/url], now a talent scout for the nation’s Olympic boxing squad, as he travels around rural Sichuan province. He’s looking for the next great fighters among the poor, skinny kids who live there, offering them a chance to attend a special school and, perhaps one day, bring glory to their village. As the kids fight for a better life while struggling to uphold Party ideals, Qi does likewise, training in the hope he can prevail in one last bout himself. L.B.Detropia: Once the shining example of U.S. industrial might, Detroit now can barely keep the lights on and the police force operating. Decades of factory shutdowns, outsourcing of production to China and Mexico, and the decline of the Big Three carmakers are among the official reasons, leaving the hard-pressed residents of Motor City to pick up the shattered pieces of their city and of their lives. Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing aim a compassionate lens. P.H.The Final Member: Expect plenty of awkward shifting in seats among male moviegoers during screenings of Toronto directors Jonah Bekhor’s and Zach Math’s delightfully droll doc about an Icelandic museum curator’s quest to obtain the only missing exhibit from his display of mammal penises — a human being. Sigurdur Hjartarson has two game guys who are set to make the donation: Páll Arason, a 95-year-old Iceland adventurer and legendary lover, and Tom, a Californian who wants to inspire chants of “U.S.A.!” with the donation of his stars-and-stripes tattooed best pal he has affectionately named Elmo. Against a stunning Iceland backdrop, Hjartarson shows off the collection he has spent 37 devoted years building, from the massive sperm whale to the miniscule hamster. Fascinating. L.B.Francophrenia (Or: Don’t Kill Me, I Know Where The Baby Is): Called a “humorous psycho-thriller” by actor James Franco and his co-director Ian Olds, this mash-up of footage from Franco’s guest stint on daytime soap General Hospital as a homicidal art world loon is more of a head scratcher than a revelation. There’s a lot of voice-over paranoid whispering from Franco and a pair of wisecracking men’s room door symbols — but what does it all mean? Maybe that’s the point. L.B.The Frog Princes: Director Stephen Snow, a member of Concordia University’s department of creative arts therapies, has five months to mount a production of the children’s story The Frog and the Princess with a cast of developmentally challenged adults. Though this is drama therapy, Snow bombastically promises throughout that the finished production will be legitimately “good” theatre. It isn’t. Along the way, we get to know a few characters, like 24-year-old Rayman with Down Syndrome determined to leave the family nest. There are a couple of powerful moments and the film raises a genuine issue — i.e., the right of the intellectually challenged to seek truly independent lives. Though well-meaning, Omar Majeed and Ryan Mullins’ film feels manipulative and exploitive, eliciting more cringe-worthy than heart-warming moments, and Snow comes off as a bit of a huckster. Bruce DeMara Herman’s House: “Art is not my thing,” says Herman Wallace, 40 years into Angola Prison solitary confinement for his Black Panther activism. But dreaming works, and so begins his unique collaboration with Jackie Sumell, a befriending New York artist. Intrigued and appalled by the decades he’s spent in a 6-by-9-foot cell, convicted as an accessory to a prison guard murder, she seeks to “free” Wallace by building the house of his mind’s eye, a home he may never live in or even see. A unique life story, directed by Toronto’s Angad Singh Bhalla, that reveals how walls can contain the physical body, but never the spirit. P.H.Her Master’s Voice: U.K. comic ventriloquist Nina Conti is ready to give up the grumpy monkey puppet that made her a star for good, when word comes that her mentor (and ex-lover, the sneaky simian informs us) has died, leaving his now voiceless dummies in her care. Seeking clarity and closure, she hauls the felt-covered clan to Kentucky for some group therapy at the annual Vent Haven ventriloquist convention, filled with an assortment of characters at least as mad as Conti is. Like a darker, funnier version of Being Elmo, Her Master’s Voice makes us wonder whether inside every dummy is a hurting heart. A.T.Indie Game: The Movie: Fresh from their triumphant world debut at Sundance, Winnipeggers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky bring their fascinating study of the driven minds behind the world of indie game creation to Hot Docs. A crowd favourite at the Park City, Utah, festival, Indie Game: The Movie took the best editing prize in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. By turns funny and quite dark, the doc shows this is much more than a game to these dedicated artists of the coded word, by profiling the passionate designers and programmers who devote their lives to creating games while battling self-doubt and seemingly endless challenges. L.B.The Invisible War: Intrepid investigator Kirby Dick and co-director Amy Ziering take on sexual assault in the U.S. military, using official stats and first-person accounts to reveal a shocking amount of abuse and cover-up within this so-called “band of brothers.” As awful as the case histories are, and the victims include both women and men, more terrible still is the lack of official action to stop a crime epidemic that has been widely reported since at least the 1990s. The situation is completely FUBAR, to use military lingo. P.H. Jeff: To most people, Jeffrey Dahmer was the “Milwaukee Monster,” so named for his 17-victim murder spree from 1978-91 that included necrophilia and cannibalism. But to others, including his next-door neighbour and the arresting cop who became famous by association, he was simply “Jeff,” a weird but friendly loner with troubles beyond easy reckoning. Chris James Thompson’s riveting doc seeks not sympathy for Dahmer but rather insights into his crimes, which affected many more people than the ones he killed. P.H.Legend of a Warrior: This time it’s personal for filmmaker Corey Lee as he uses a documentary project to help him reconnect with his dad, martial arts master Frank Lee. Estranged from his dad for years since his parents’ divorce, Lee decides to train with his father again at his Edmonton gym, coming back to the discipline of the ring he experienced as a youngster before his father began leaving his family for long stretches to train a champion fighter in Hong Kong. The elder Lee finally admits his errors and the depth of his own anguish over losing his family, admissions that come as his son grows more elegant and proficient in the elite brand of martial arts his father is known for. L.B.Marley: A leisurely but thorough biodoc of Jamaican reggae great Bob Marley, showing how the humble man became the superstar artist. Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September) canvasses every aspect of Marley’s brief life (he died of cancer at age 36), leaning more towards the personal than the political. Despite a paucity of photos and performance material prior to Marley’s rise to global acclaim in the 1970s, the film sketches a complete portrait of his early struggles in the slums of Trenchtown and his evolving lineups of the Wailers and I-Three backing groups. Everyone’s heard from, including Bunny Wailer, Chris Blackwell, Marley’s widow Rita and a couple of his former mistresses. “You don’t know Bob,” one of them says, smiling at memories. You do now, thanks to this film. P.H.Mom and Me: Quebecois filmmaker Danic Champoux explores the influences on his life growing up across the street from a biker hangout in Sorel, Que., and the very tangential role that Hell’s Angels leader Maurice “Mom” Boucher had on his development into adulthood. (Champoux and Boucher’s son, Francis, were friends.) It’s told in a slyly amusing way, using wildly imaginative animation (some of it quite risqué) and supplemented with live interviews, including renowned Quebec journalist Michel Auger (who narrowly escaped death at the hands of a biker hitman) as well as Champoux’s real mom, his therapist, and so on. It’s a risky and unusual approach but one that pays off, richly funny but also unexpectedly engrossing and insightful. B.D.My Name is Faith: Adoptive parent Tiffany Junker co-directs this poignant documentary about her efforts to heal her daughter, Faith, suffering from “attachment disorder” — an inability to bond or feel empathy — after a young life filled with sexual and physical abuse. The stakes are high for Faith and the other children in the film, many of whom are potential powder kegs of violence without treatment. The film has many uncomfortable moments but the dedication of the parents and therapist Nancy Thomas is both laudable and remarkable, and the film offers a hopeful message. B.D.My Thai Bride: Australian director David Tucker doesn’t take sides in this exploration of the relationship between former Bangkok bar girl Tip and middle-aged Welshman Ted Rees, who sells everything back home and moves to rural Thailand to marry her and start a new life. But the admitted romantic doesn’t get the happy ending he was hoping for. L.B.One Day After Peace: A mother’s quest for peace and peace of mind, this film is jam-packed with raw emotion and complex geopolitical issues. In the aftermath of her son David’s death at the hands of a Palestinian sniper, Israeli resident Robi Damelin returns to her South African homeland to examine the role of its Truth and Reconciliation Commission in allowing that country to overcome its violent past. The question she asks: would this process be useful in the event of an eventual peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian people? While the film leaves the issues largely unresolved — how could it not? — it’s nonetheless a powerful and moving testament to a woman’s courage and the potential for healing in one of the world’s most intractable conflict zones. B.D.Pushwagner: With his obsessive fidgeting, bone-rack physique and face like a crushed pop can, Norweigian artist Pushwagner makes a picture-perfect subject for the standard-issue eccentric artist documentary. This film, though, is anything but. Pushwagner, a painter of almost obscenely detailed, vast tableaux of bureaucratic society run amok, goes along with the film in the firm belief he’s less subject than filmmaker himself. He dictates shots, topics of conversation and even props (“We could have had a quiver, with brushes,” he grumps in one interview scene, before settling on a mini camera, which he deems to be “relevant.”) In the background, the possibility of popular recognition now, finally looms (he’s 72). A watchable, lovably tragic take on the price of artistic commitment. Murray Whyte The Queen of Versailles: Hubris with a capital “H” in thiscomically horrifying “riches to rags” portrait ofFlorida’sJackie Siegel,a former model and forever bimbo on the downslide from excessive living. She married a real estate billionaire and the two started building the largest home in America, modeled after France’s Palace of Versailles. Then the 2008 crash happened, and now she’s down to her last tin of $2,000 caviar. You could call Lauren Greenfield’s doc a cautionary tale, except no sensible person would covet the lifestyle of this shameless couple, who live like monarchs but act like fools. P.H.Radioman: “This is Radioman. He’s world famous,” says Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks as he introduces the scruffy looking, bearded man with a boom box slung around his neck. Radioman is indeed famous and that’s the point of Mary Kerr’s documentary. A former homeless alcoholic, Radio now has more than 100 cameos in Hollywood movies shot in New York City to his credit — along with a free pass to dine at the on-set craft service tables. L.B.Shut Up and Play the Hits: That most unrockist of rock stars, James Murphy, up and decides to disband his wildly popular LCD Soundsystem band in the spring of 2011 and angst ensues. So does a mighty fine film, as Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern follow the embattled Murphy before, during and after LCD’s farewell concert at Madison Square Gardens. Tune-wise, it’s a near greatest hits (although no Daft Punk) with all-access privileges. Meanwhile, pop-cult journo Chuck Klosterman plays both scribe and psychotherapist to Murphy, coaxing a confession that he’s having serious second thoughts about quitting. Bet on a future reunion, but for now it’s time to dance in the theatre aisles. P.H.The Waiting Room: Oakland’s Highland Hospital is a microcosm of what’s wrong with health care in the U.S., the dumping ground for “private” hospitals that only provide service to the well-insured. The film paints a dark picture of crisis as health care professionals and patients struggle in a system that often reaches gridlock because of the lack of beds and doctors. But it does so with traces of humour and huge dollops of humanity. B.D.Welcome to the Machine: The decision by filmmaker Ari Weider and his wife to turn to in-vitro fertilization in their quest to start a family sparks a far-ranging discussion about the increasing role of technology in human civilization, especially a future in which people and machines become ever more intertwined. The anti-technology manifesto of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and intelligent voices on both sides of the debate provide plenty of food for thought, making the film a worthwhile journey. B.D.Wildness: The Silver Platter has welcomed the gay community in Los Angeles’s primarily Latino MacArthur Park area for nearly 50 years. The older transgender and cross-dressing patrons welcome a young crop of upstart performance artists — just as they were welcomed initially by the previous generation who got used to their glam-rags after being told to arrive dressed as males. But change may not be in the best interests of the tiny bar. Performance artist Wu Tsang directs this earnest, passionate look at a neighbourhood gathering place that’s much more than a bar. L.B.The World Before Her: Extreme attitudes towards women in India are laid bare in Nisha Pahuja’s quietly shocking doc. On the one hand, there’s the extremely popular Miss India contest, which turns dirt-poor girls into national superstars overnight — but only a handful of hopefuls ever get to try out, as we see in a beauty boot camp in a Mumbai hotel. On the other hand, there are the fashion-averse teachers of Durga Vahini, the women’s wing of Hindu fundamentalism, who have their own indoctrination sessions designed to make women subservient to men. Both camps believe they’re creating the women of a new India. Pahuja never judges but she doesn’t need to, since her camera reveals all — including a father’s casual admission that he branded his rebel daughter’s foot with hot metal, to teach her a lesson. P.H
_________________
People watching the forthcoming beginning of the German half of the inhabitants of Berlin are no interested in co-optation

Index du Forum -> Les tournois -> Hot Docs 2012: 31 reviews and counting