Festivals
Pug is a young boy living in Baltimore with his mother and siblings, dreaming of the day he can join the 12 O’Clock Boys. They’re a group of dirt bike riders who travel through the streets of Baltimore, clashing with police and ignoring the fact that what they’re doing is illegal. The film follows Pug over the course of three years as he slowly becomes a part of this dirt bike culture, changing his behaviour while his mother struggles to deal with him. 12 O’Clock Boys walks a fine line between inspiring and infuriating. The recklessness of this gang of...
Set in Karachi, Pakistan, These Birds Walk focuses on The Edhi Home and Ambulance Centre, a refuge for the many runaway and abandoned children who would otherwise be living on the streets. The Centre provides shelter, food and love, from the adult attendants as well as the other children, that these kids so sorely need. The aging founder of the home sees it as his true calling and still takes pride in being there for his young charges as well as mentoring a young ambulance driver who was once homeless himself, perhaps earmarking him as his successor. The film is able...
lex Winter is no “noob”. Having spent the late ‘90s in BBS and newsgroups (remember those?), he was perfectly positioned to be right in the thick of the technology boom and its resulting legal uproar. Just like the rest of us, however, he was hearing a decidedly one-sided story. It’s obvious that his love of technology stood him in good stead in tackling one of the biggest stories of the century in his latest film, Downloaded, which tells the story of peer-to-peer file sharing pioneer Napster from the inside. Winter originally got involved with Napster creators Shawn Fanning and Sean...
Mary and Myself is an animated short film that tells the story of two Japanese women performing a piece from The Vagina Monologues. The film chronicles the rehearsal and performance process, but more importantly looks at the way friendship and cultural connection can heal old wounds. The two women in this story are rehearsing a monologue on Japanese comfort women. The film mixes whimsical animation with stark archival photographs of comfort women with snippets of the monologue itself. The combination makes for a light-hearted look at a horrifying piece of Japanese history, in which thousands of women were forced into...
Continental tells the story of Steve Ostrow, the owner of The Continental Baths, the largest and most famous of the New York bath houses from 1968 to 1975. Struggling with the legality of homosexuality at the time, the Continental became a safe harbor for gay men in America – at a time when they had to bribe police and make deals with the mob to keep their doors open. The film talks to Ostrow about his time owning the bath house, as well as many of the Continental’s regulars, talent and staff. This is a movie about the world’s largest...
Director Matt Anderson traveled around the globe to bring the story of our ruined environment to the screen in Fall And Winter. Through interviews with various philosophers, bio-architects, psychologists, and journalists, the film explores our history and how man has been destroying the world around him for longer than we first thought. The overall message is one of inevitable change. Man must make a return to nature, and this documentary attempts to offer ways in which we can all prepare for this change. Environmental documentaries are one of the most important voices in film today. By exposing the world to...
“Because the world is so fucked up.” Fuck For Forest quite literally takes PETA’s I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur campaign and goes all the way. Michal Marczak, winner of the Emerging Artist Award at Hot Docs 2011, returns this year with Fuck For Forest, a look into the lives of a group of activists who sell subscription access to their pornographic website to help prevent de-forestation of the Rainforest. The website, also titled Fuck For Forest (NSFW, naturally) is the brain-child of activists and lovers, Tommy Hol Ellingsen and Leona Johansson. Marczak follows the couple around Berlin, observing...
It seems hard to believe that any person could live in a space smaller than 100 square feet, but many individuals in the tiny house movement are doing just that. Christopher Smith decided to be one of them, so with the help of his girlfriend Merete Mueller, the two begin construction on their own tiny home, even though they’ve never built anything before. Through construction, the couple start to learn what the word home means to them, and interviews with other people living in tiny homes explores the various reasons why this movement has begun to get a large following....
Canadian actress Babz Chula has been fighting cancer for a long, long time. Not knowing if she can take another round of chemotherapy, she convinces her friend (and the film’s director) to join her on a trip to India to be treated at an ayurvedic clinic. After six weeks of treatment, Babz seems transformed but returns home only to discover her cancer has spread and she only has weeks to live. Babz insists that Wheeler continue filming, if only to chronicle her last weeks, days and moments surrounded by her family. Chi is a heartbreaking movie, but it is only...
Danna Arabahiana is a painter who lives off the grid in Brazil, at one with nature. Galumphing chronicles Danna’s daily life as she goes about making coconut oil and beeswax candles, tending to her garden, painting, fixing her pipes, sweeping her rustic home, making her food – simply living her life on her own terms. Her life seems strange to many and the locals wonder about her, living off the grid with one solar panel (for the first year she had none), but for Danna this is the only way to live. Danna is an artist in every sense of...
A little more than a decade ago, a young woman was stabbed in a parking lot in Cornwall, Ontario by a man known as the town misfit. The woman survived the attack and the man, who had previously been completely non-violent was found to have a severe mental illness, was found “Not Criminally Responsible” for his crime and was confined to a forensic psychiatric facility to work on controlling his issues. Director John Kastner looks at what it means to be deemed NCR through the eyes of Sean Clifton, the man who went after 22-year-old Julie with a knife on that...
The frozen fjords of Northeast Greenland have long been blocked to even the most hearty of explorers due to a maze of impassable inlets. Thanks to global warming however, the North Pole is slowly melting and for a few weeks each year, a narrow path materializes allowing for everyone from scientists to artists to adventure-seekers to make the trek to experience some of the world’s oldest terrain. Director Daniel Dencik follows one such group as they board a schooner and set out to discover the mysteries of life using scientific method, existentialism, a sense of humour, and a little Metallica...
