The Best of Hot Docs 2011
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The Best of Hot Docs 2011 A doc-lovers’ guide to this year’s festival must-sees BY Jason Anderson and Adam Nayman, April 28, 2011 http://www.eyeweekly.com/film/feature/article/114730--the-best-of-hot-docs-2011 Beauty Day BIG BUZZ FLICKS PROJECT NIM ***** Dir. James Marsh. 93 min The director of Man on Wire returns with something just as astonishing as his Oscar winner. In place of high-wire artist Philippe Petit we have Nim, a chimp raised by humans and taught sign language as part of an experiment by an ambitious Columbia University professor in the 1970s. Loaded with ethical and moral quandaries, the saga is gripping, bizarre and dispiriting in its illustration of the inhumanity of people’s attitudes, to other species and our own. May 5, 9:45pm and May 6, 11am, Isabel Bader. JA BUCK **** Dir. Cindy Meehl. 88 min This Sundance prizewinner is a superior brand of horse tale. Often seeming more like a Zen master than an animal trainer, Buck Brannaman spends his life showing folks a kinder, gentler way of handling even their most skittish colts. The Montana cowboy’s sensitivity and soulfulness is all the more affecting when Cindy Meehl’s film reveals the horrific circumstances of Brannaman’s own early years. May 3, 6:30pm, Bloor; May 5, 1:15pm and May 8, 4:15pm, Isabel Bader. JA BEAUTY DAY **** Dir. Jay Cheel. 90 min If only there’d been a YouTube back when a St. Catharines hoser named Ralph Zavadil was thrilling local cable viewers with the very foolhardy stunts he performed in the guise of Cap’n Video. Though a clip of him breaking his back during one failed stunt won him a measure of pre- internet fame in the early ’90s, it was not Zavadil’s fate to become Johnny Knoxville (or even Steve-O). Funny and endearing, Jay Cheel’s doc gives him the attention he’s due. Apr. 29, 6:45pm, Bader; May 4, 7:30pm, Rooftop series; May 7, 4:15pm, Bader. JA BOBBY FISCHER AGAINST THE WORLD **** Dir. Liz Garbus. 93 min In this slick and satisfying made-for-HBO doc, director Liz Garbus focuses on the American chess superstar’s 1972 matchup with Soviet champ Boris Spassky as the historic moment at which Fischer’s behaviour completes its slide from “unusual” to “difficult” to “batshit crazy.” But rather than portray his later mental instability (and virulent anti-Semitism) as an embarrassing blight on a once-gilded career, Garbus’ film suggests his genius and his psychosis were two sides of the same coin. May 1, 1:30pm, Isabel Bader; May 3, 7pm, Lightbox. JA POM WONDERFUL PRESENTS: THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD *** Dir. Morgan Spurlock. 90 min It feels churlish to complain that the Super Size Me director’s satirical look at how marketing and branding have hijacked our culture is heavy on packaging and light on content. After all, that’s kind of the point. And even if the movie is too amiable to have much bite, Spurlock still presents some valuable and disturbing insights about the increasingly insidious tactics used by our corporate masters. Apr. 28, 6:30pm, Winter Garden; Apr. 29, 4:15pm, Isabel Bader. JA FIGHTVILLE **** See feature. MIGHTY JEROME **** See feature. HOMEGROWN HIGHLIGHTS THE NATIONAL PARKS PROJECT **** Various directors. 127 min To mark the centennial of Parks Canada, a patriotic cadre of 52 filmmakers and musicians—a roster that included everyone from Zacharias Kunuk and Peter Lynch to Shad and Melissa Auf der Maur—went into the wilds to interact with iconic Canadian landscapes. Often mesmerizing, the results are nature films like none you’ve ever seen. Each of the 13 contributions has its virtues, but most startling are Stéphane Lafleur’s nighttime views of Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan, and Jamie Travis’ surreal excursion through Kouchibouguac in New Brunswick, which gives a starring role to Ohbijou singer Casey Mecija. Apr. 30, 9:30pm, Lightbox; May 2, 9:15pm, The Royal. JA INSIDE LARA ROXX *** Dir. Mia Donovan. 81 min A troubled Montrealer working under the nom du porn Lara Roxx was only in America’s adult- film industry for a few months before contracting HIV on set in 2004. The latest doc by Montreal’s Eye Steel Film delves into the personal troubles that preceded and followed Lara’s ill-fated dalliance with the porn world. And though Mia Donovan clearly struggles to keep track of her volatile subject, the director handles the story with admirable sensitivity. May 5, 6:30pm, Bloor; May 6, 9:45pm, Cumberland; May 8, 9:30, Royal. JA THE PIRATE TAPES *** Dir. Matvei Zhivov, Roger Singh, Andrew Moniz, Rock Baijnauth. 72 min Somali-Canadian journalist Mohamed Ashareh very nearly got more than he bargained for when he went undercover among Somalia’s seafaring bandits. His real-life, high-stakes drama among the pirates is the focus of this mostly engrossing film, though the emphasis on Ashareh’s personal adventure sometimes muddles The Pirate Tapes’ ability to convey a wider context. May 1, 9:15pm, Bloor; May 7, 4:15pm, Cumberland; May 8, 9pm, The Fox. JA GRINDERS *** Dir. Matt Gallagher. 75 min Toronto filmmaker Matt Gallagher documents his journeys through this city’s illegal underground poker scene. Players may dream of following in the footsteps of local grinder-made-good Daniel Negreanu—seen in the film at his palatial Las Vegas pad—but Gallagher’s film proves that the reality of their lives is not so sexy. And while some of Grinders’ subjects prove to be more interesting than others as their respective fortunes rise and fall, Gallagher still provides a memorable glimpse of Toronto’s shadiest corners. April 29, 9:45pm, Bader; May 7, 9:30pm, Lightbox; May 8, 6:30pm, The Fox. JA THE FUTURE IS NOW! *** Dir. Gary Burns, Jim Brown. 92 min The team behind the 2006 doc hit Radiant City returns with another effort that blurs the boundary between fact and fiction. A quirky spin on a ’50s-style educational film, The Future Is Now! stars Liane Balaban as a journalist who sends a cynical Everyman on a journey in the hope of giving him some measure of optimism about the modern world. Poet Christian Bök, philosopher Alain de Botton and architect Shigeru Ban are just a few of the bona fide big thinkers he encounters. The film’s daffy humour and intellectual playfulness are easy to savour even if this experiment is only a mixed success. May 5, 9pm, Lightbox; May 7, 1pm, Cumberland. JA POLITICAL ANIMALS BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN *** Dir. Michael Galinsky, Suki Hawley. 94 min They paved paradise and put up a parking lot—or, in this case, an NBA stadium. Battle for Brooklyn examines the Atlantic Yards project in Prospect Heights, New York, through the eyes of a condo dweller displaced by a developer’s unscrupulous multi-million-dollar landgrab. His gradual transformation from aggrieved party to committed activist gives this earnest but unremarkable greed-is-bad doc its shape en route to an inevitably bleak (and Arcade Fire- soundtracked) conclusion. Apr. 30, 7pm, Lightbox; May 1, 1:30pm, Cumberland. AN BETTER THIS WORLD *** Dir. Katie Galloway, Kelly Duane de la Vega. 95 min. There’s a twist in this SXSW-feted documentary about two young Texan activists arrested as domestic terrorists on the eve of the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul. And, as it turns out, it’s a doozy, reframing what begins as a story of dangerously inflamed idealism into an indictment of the by-any-means-necessary mentality underpinning America’s national security initiatives. May 2, 6pm, Lightbox; May 4, 4:15pm, Cumberland. AN HOT COFFEE *** Dir. Susan Saladoff. 92 min Hot Coffee takes its title from the infamous story of an elderly woman who sued McDonald’s after getting scalded by a breakfast beverage. But there’s more here than a simple case study: Susan Saladoff’s film spirals outwards into a wide-angled look at America’s culture of litigiousness, boldly inventorying the ethically dubious ways in which corporations avoid paying out against consumers and employees alike. May 3, 7pm, The Royal; May 5, 1:30pm; Lightbox. AN IF A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT *** Dir. Marshall Curry, Sam Cullman. 85 min. “What is eco-terrorism?” asks a banner glimpsed late in If a Tree Falls. If this smoothly produced doc (co-directed by Marshall Curry, who made the excellent Street Fight) doesn’t quite answer that question, it still serves to clarify the origins and M.O. of the Earth Liberation Front, and the fallout from its increasingly aggressive tactics. May 3, 7pm, Cumberland; May 5, 4:30pm, Lightbox. AN WE WERE HERE **** Dir. David Weissman. 90 min. There’s an almost sci-fi quality to the reminiscences in David Weissman’s wrenching documentary about the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s San Francisco—stories of healthy young men replaced by sickly, degenerating doppelgängers almost overnight. The testimonies in We Were Here are just as visceral as the deathbed imagery, but by showing how the country’s gay community came together in the midst of a terrifying implosion, the film pushes past despair towards hope. May 3, 9:30pm, Lightbox; May 5, 1:45pm, ROM. AN WIEBO’S WAR **** Dir. David York. 94 min Wiebo Ludwig is a polarizing figure, but the film that bears his name is remarkably even- handed. Toronto director David York’s painstakingly etched portrait of the self-styled Christian fundamentalist and alleged Alberta oil-patch pipe-bomber clings closely to its subject, yet leaves plenty of room for the audience to reach their own conclusions about the man, his methods and the ideological entanglement of his cause.