Hot Docs
In the United States, 49 million people live with “food insecurity”, which is a fancy, non-threatening term for the very real-life circumstance of not knowing where their next meal will come from. To break that staggering number down even further, that’s one in four of all children currently living the US. Now, statistics are easy – easy to remember, easy to use and even easier to shrug off. The documentary Finding North seeks to make it impossible to shrug off statistics about food insecurity by putting a human face on the issue. The film puts its focus on two stories....
Currently screening at the 2012 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, My Name Is Faith is the heartbreaking and inspiring story of Faith, a 12-year-old girl suffering from Attachment Disorder. This disorder occurs when an infant does not bond properly with their mother. This can result in some frightening behaviour from the children. Their ability to trust another person is severely affected, and they tend to lash out with violence in order to force people away from them. Just before the world premiere screening at Hot Docs, I had the opportunity to speak with Faith’s mother (and the film’s director)...
The Imposter is one of those films that stretches the bounds of plausibility so much that it can only work as a documentary. If the story was fictionalized, nobody would buy the premise, because it really seems like there’s no possible way any of that stuff could really have happened. I mean, really. In 1994, a 13-year-old boy named Nicholas Barclay disappears in San Antonio, Texas. After an evening out playing basketball with friends, he simply never returns home. Nicholas has run away before, but this time, it’s different. After enduring the hell of not knowing what happened to their son...
In his very personal film, Legend of a Warrior, director Corey Lee uses the process of making a documentary about his father as a means to achieving a closer relationship with him. It mostly works. Lee is estranged from his dad, Frank Lee, a martial artist who runs a training gym in Edmonton. Sifu Frank, as he is known by his students (sifu is the Cantonese word for master / teacher / father) spent much of Corey’s childhood in Asia, training his most talented fighters, giving them the attention that Corey wished he had received. Frank wasn’t just some martial arts guy...
In Herman’s House, director Angad Singh Bhalla explores the strange relationship between imprisoned Black Panther Herman Wallace and artist Jackie Sumell. Sumell was profoundly moved by an interaction with Robert King, who along with Wallace and a third prisoner, Albert Woodfox, made up the Angola 3 — men who were all sent to solitary confinement in 1972 for killing a prison guard. King was released in 2001 after a lengthy appeals process, but the other two men are still there. After hearing about Wallace’s case (he’s now spent nearly the past 40 years in a six-by-nine foot prison cell), Sumell decides...
One of the most enjoyable music documentaries I’ve seen in some time, Beware of Mr. Baker is a brilliant portrait of a man who is, by all accounts (and I mean all) completely f***ing insane. The man in question is Ginger Baker, the legendary drummer of the band Cream (which also launched the career of his now better known former bandmate, Eric Clapton), among many others. The film opens with Baker hitting director Jay Bulger with his cane, leaving him with a bloody nose. It sets the tone for the madness that is to come. Cream only lasted for a couple...
Drug testing is an important part of getting medicine to market. In some cases, these tests can result in the saving of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives, but Off Label tells seven intensely personal stories that call into question whether the costs involved in perfecting those potentially life-saving drugs are worth it. Looking at the stories of 22-year-old Iraq war veteran, a man who was experimented on while he was in prison; a young couple doing drug studies to pay for their wedding, a bipolar woman who lives in a Bigfoot Museum and takes 18 prescriptions a day, two professional...
Beauty is Embarrassing is a film about the life and work of Wayne White. For those unfamiliar with White, his career as a cartoonist led to his involvement in the creation of the television show Pee Wee’s Playhouse, which in turn led to his designing some of the most iconic images in pop culture. The film opens with a scrapbook of Wayne White’s better known achievements such as his animation work for Pee Wee’s Playhouse and the Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight Tonight video. It then moves on to an introduction to his family life and snippets of his touring lecture. During...
The Frog Princes, an incredibly touching film, follows a theatre troupe made up of developmentally disabled adults as they mount a production of "The Frog and the Princess." Toronto Film Scene's Katarina Gligorijevic talks to filmmakers Ryan Mullins and Omar Majeed who work at the prolific, politically and socially minded Montreal documentary company EyeSteelFilm about the making of this very special Canadian film, screening this year at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival....
If ever there was a sequel to a documentary, this is it. Bones Brigade: An Autobiography picks up almost exactly where Dogtown and Z-Boys leaves off as Stacy Peralta, self-appointed historian of skateboarding, steps behind the camera again (and a little in front, too) to tell the continuing story of the people who made the sport what it is today. After Peralta achieved fame and fortune as a member of the Zephyr Competition Team (the titular ‘Z-Boys’ of the original film), he began to produce a line of skateboards with his business partner, George Powell. Peralta had a bigger vision,...
In North America, disabled people of all kinds are marginalized. We dart our eyes away and try not to stare as we see the handicapped on busses, in shopping malls or at restaurants. We don’t welcome them into our “normal” world because they make us feel uncomfortable, and as a result we feel like it’s okay to treat them as less than human. So when films come along that openly discuss the lives of those who a simply a little different, I get very excited. When the people in that film also happen to be part of a Finnish punk...
In 1970, David Siegel started a real estate development company that went on to become the largest timeshare company in the world. When he met and married Jackie, a buxom beauty queen he adored, things in his life started to get… bigger. The couple has lived a life of excess in every possible sense of the word, culminating in the building of a 90,000 square foot home for their large family. The Queen of Versailles follows this couple through booming business and into near financial ruin after the 2008 financial crisis, chronicling their struggles as they try to avoid bankruptcy....
