Festivals
Playing out like a convoluted suspense yarn dreamed up by some cigar-chomping Hollywood suit, I Will Be Murdered tells the story of the events leading up to the death of Guatemalan lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg in 2009 who was found shot 5 times by the side of the road near his home. At his funeral, a close friend began to distribute a DVD entitled “My Testimony” that features Rosenberg claiming that if the viewer is watching the video, then he had been killed at the hands of President Álvaro Colom. The film, of course, became a viral sensation, inciting heavily attended protests demanding...
In the Cape Flats of South Africa, life is an ongoing struggle. Many people resort to drugs, as an escape from daily life or as a means to make money. Braaim is one of them. He’s a husband, a father, and the leader of a local gang, the NTK. An endless turf war rages between his gang and two others as each of them tries to control the drug trade in the area. While Braaim tries to stay alive, his wife wonders if it’s time for her to leave. Unable to find a better way in life, and on the...
Growing up in Scotland, Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain dreamed of making it big in hip hop music. Both talented rappers, mixing a sound like the Beastie Boys with a lyrical style similar to Eminem, it seemed like a sure thing. Attempting to get a deal proved useless. People thought it was a joke that two Scottish kids wanted to rap. One after another, labels refused to even listen to their music, until they decided to pretend that they were from California. Putting on fake accents and branding themselves as Silibil n’ Brains, the duo were quickly picked up and...
After Dr. George Tiller was murdered by anti-choice activists in 2009, the number of US doctors able to do late term abortions dwindled to four. A contentious issue even amongst pro-choice supporters, these third-trimester abortions often come to the aid of women who are in impossible circumstances, yet because they occur after the 24-week mark when a baby may have a chance of surviving outside the womb, the doctors who perform the procedures are in constant threat of being targeted as Dr. Tiller was. The film examines the issue further and looks at why these four doctors continue to put...
A doc examining the sex trade as no other one has done before, Buying Sex looks at the state of prostitution laws in Canada and how they affect everyone involved. The issue is a complex one, with women on each side squaring off . On one side, sex workers argue for a model of decriminalization, a capitalist free market of consensual sellers who are able to practice their trade in a safe place that would protect them from abusive buyers. On the other side, ex-sex workers calling themselves abolitionists want a zero-tolerance policy that would criminalize the buyers with the idea...
Last of the Black Sea Piratesfollows a group of men, well, er, “pirates” living on an idyllic tropical island. These men, who are essentially homeless ex-cons, are led by a man named Captain Jack (not a typo, that’s really his name) in a hunt for gold that has been lost for a century or so. Without a specific map or real sense of the gold’s location, Jack’s crew spend their days digging holes and blowing bits off the island in hopes that at the bottom of every pit will be something shiny. Right, so these guys are nuts. It’s like...
A conversation with Kirk Marcolina and Matthew Pond, Directors of The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne
At first glance, there’s nothing about Doris Payne that screams “jewel thief”. But this 82-year old African-American woman from West Virginia has in fact stolen at least $2 million in jewels in a career that’s spanned five decades. I recently spoke with directors Kirk Marcolina and Matthew Pond about their new documentary The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne, and their experiences working with Doris to bring her story to the screen. Doris is obviously quite an actor. Were there times when you felt you were taken in by her? Kirk Marcolina: Without a doubt. I feel like every day...
“Kiss me. I have a mental disability” On February 6, 1995, Nina Leichter jumped from a window on the 11th floor of her family’s home in New York City. She was 63-years-old. Nina had suffered from manic depression for a many years, but her suicide came as a surprise to her family and friends. Sixteen years after her death, Nina’s daughter Kathy musters up the courage to listen to the audio tapes she left behind. The tapes chronicle Nina’s thoughts on her mood fluctuations, the support groups she attended, her various drug treatments and the affect it was all having...
I am not a particularly imposing person. I’ve been told I have a warm smile and people just seem to be able to open up and talk to me. So when Shawney Cohen stepped into the Hot Docs industry lounge for our interview it was a surprise to me that he seemed to be a bit unsettled by my presence. It wasn’t actually me, of course, but the idea of talking to a journalist about his film, The Manor, which is an intimate portrait of his family who also happens to own a strip club (the titular “manor”) in Guelph,...
Brothers Aarne and Lasse Aatsinki live with their families in Finnish Lapland where they’re “cowboys” – actually reindeer herders who take care of the last wild reindeer in the country. They rely on the reindeer for everything from work to transportation to food, living amongst them in the wilderness. The film follows Aarne, Lasse, their wives and kids for the span of a year as they live a life pretty much cut off from the rest of the world (save for the odd tourist looking for a ride on a reindeer-pulled sled), living off the land yet still as reliant...
When Cathy & Martin Ward decided that they wanted to adopt a child, they had no idea that they’d end up with five instead. Dealing with an adoption agency in the Ukraine, they initially agreed to a summer-long visit from siblings Alyona and Snezhana, but once they found out that the sisters were two of five siblings living in an orphanage (a sixth sister had already been adopted locally), they started the process to bring all of them to their home in Surrey, BC. This included a lot of financial sacrifice for the one income family, with Martin eventually having to...
Arunachalam Muruganantham has become an unlikely hero to women in rural India. The self-professed “uneducated” small town boy became interested in the fact that his wife, like most other Indian women, used rags to staunch her monthly menstrual flow rather than the sanitary napkins that women in the Western world take for granted. After learning that 70% of reproductive diseases suffered by Indian women stem from unsanitary menstrual practices (the majority were using cloth, husk, sand and even ash), and that 23% of Indian girls drop out of school at the onset of menses, he threw all of his energy...
