HotDocs Tagged Articles at Cinematical

When you get half-way through a festival and find yourself liking every film, you begin to wonder if you're not being critical enough. Were they all really that good? Did excitement cloud the picky nature of judgment? It can happen. How many times do we go see a movie with a crowd who loves it, then watch it on our own and hate it? As much as we can gripe and moan about the foibles of Hollywood, it's not entirely difficult to get swept up in excitement. (Or, for that matter, distaste.)

Inevitably, a film will pop up into the mix and you'll realize: no, you're not being too kind. Some are bad, and some fail. Hitting the half-way mark at HotDocs, I got the balancing slap of failed promise, some more worthy picks, and only one true stinker. Read on for docs about the one-and-only Thelonious Monk, living in the public eye, and more.

Film festivals are an interesting organism. On the one hand, they bring together big-buzz films and match them with lesser-known fare from all corners of the Earth, offering a rather eclectic and irresistible mixture. On the other hand, it's often hard to traverse the selections and always pick decent fare. Most often, great picks are intermingled with a number of eye-rolling doozies, and no matter what you do to try and avoid them, they inevitably pop up. But Hot Docs is different. For the last three years, I've been overindulging in documentaries, and like I touched on in my recent rant, I've liked almost every film I've seen.

It's a pretty rare phenomenon, and it says a lot about the quality offered in North America's largest documentary film festival. And it's not just me. This year, the Hot Docs audience increased by 42% over last year, reaching an estimated 122,000 people. Does this mark a change in attitudes towards documentaries? I can only hope...

In this dispatch, you can read about pre-teen filmmakers, a love story about brothels and quadriplegia, the Borat aftermath, Korean stuntmen, art criticism merged with murder, and the female orgasm. How's that for variety?

The true mark of a good film festival is going to see a myriad of films, really digging them, and then seeing a whole slew of others win the year's awards. It's a finely honed talent to miss all the award-winners, and yes, it can certainly be quite aggravating to always pick films that don't get the award love they deserve. However, it also means that there are too many goodies to choose from.

On Friday night, Hot Docs announced this year's award winners -- a group of excellent docs that were certainly buzzed about during the festival -- and once again, a whole slew of films I wasn't able to catch for you. Since the winners won't pop up in the dispatches I'll share with you all this week, read on to not only read what they are, but also what they're about, and any other information I can scrounge together. Check it all out after the jump.

Over the last week, I've been busy attending Hot Docs, one of the coolest film festivals you can attend, and the largest documentary fest in North America. Screening after screening, I sat there watching excellent films (which you will hear about soon!), and watching packed houses visibly moved by them. One of the sentiments you'll most often hear: "Thank you." Q&A after Q&A, audiences thank the filmmakers for what they've created, and the lives they've shown on the big screen. Yet most will get very little play outside of the festival circuit.

This baffles me.

I understand why some people aren't into documentaries -- they want escape and entertainment in their films, and only attend movies that will give them that. I know quite a few people who see nothing but the biggest releases for this very reason. But the thing is -- they aren't the only type of moviegoer out there; moreover, we're living in a society where voyeurism sells. We follow the Tweets of the famous, overindulge in "reality" TV, ingest gossip on a daily basis, delight in exposes, read the news, watch real people become celebrities, follow each other's every move through the Internet ... yet we won't go out and see a documentary.

People, they're good. They're heart-warming, heart-wrenching, and laughter-inducing. They'll teach you something and make you think, but they'll also inspire and entertain you. Hot Docs is the only festival I've ever attended (or group of movies I have ever watched) where I like almost every one, and love more than I ever thought possible -- Dear Zachary, Protagonist, Girls Rock!, Billy the Kid, Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse... There's a wonderful and vast world outside of Michael Moore.

They are, simply, so very worth your time. So next time you're thinking of watching some ridiculous reality show, just say no and choose a documentary instead.

Toronto's Hot Docs film festival kicked off last night, and among the acclaimed documentaries playing there is Best Worst Movie, which we reviewed at SXSW last March. The short synopsis: Michael Paul Stephenson was embarrassed to star in Troll 2 as a young lad, only to find himself and other members of the cast coming to terms with the film's growing cult popularity years later. The long version: life's a funny thing.

The Toronto Star's Peter Howell, in covering the film and its inspiration, has premiered the latest trailer for it -- see if you can't spot our very own Scott Weinberg in it (hint: he's not the super-genial dentist).

For any of you lucky readers in or around Toronto, it's showing tonight, tomorrow night, and Sunday afternoon. For more information, here's the official Hot Docs page and the official website.

Sturla Gunnarsson introducing Air India 182.

Last year was the easy selection of Hot Docs. I got to see a ton of films, and most of them were pretty damned uplifting. I laughed at the sheer awesomeness of Billy the Kid, cheered for Girls Rock!, got a huge craving for tea with All in This Tea, got some art on with A Walk Into the Sea, gaped at Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse, and was in awe of Jessica Yu's Protagonist.

It wasn't a smile fest this year. This time around, the theme was death, tragedy, and all sorts of seriousness. Most of them were pretty damn good, but it's been an exhausting week and a half seeing these films, thinking about them, and then writing about them. I still wish scheduling had permitted me to dip into the worlds of Wesley Willis and Kathy Acker, and some of the other docs I was itching to see. I have a feeling they would've helped matters a little.

We always champion the documentaries that do their best to separate emotion from filmmaking. While we recognize that a documentary can never be completely unbiased, we praise the films in which a hard-hitting subject can resonate without the director's emotions overtly influencing the portrayal. But I would argue that sometimes that skewed perspective is not only necessary, but required. With Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, Kurt Kuenne bares his heart and soul. He shows his biased and emotional viewpoint, and that pulls the film out of the realms of the normal documentary and into something infinitely more memorable and inspiring.

*Note: Readers have commented that IMDb has spoilers, so check it out at your own risk!

As Erik Davis noted in his review earlier this year from Slamdance, Dear Zachary is a film to go into with as little knowledge of the story as possible, so like him, I'm continuing the review after the jump. That being said, what follows definitely isn't a spoilerfest. I will remain tight-lipped on many of the twists and turns that the film takes, so if you don't mind learning the basic story, continue on.

"When I look at JJ, it makes me believe in the possibility of redemption."

Redemption. Reversals. Grey area. These are the things that make the idea of a binary, black and white life so very flawed. There is a certain comfort in the thought of a world that is cut and dry and free from confusion, but it is something we can never achieve. In between each yes and no, in between each bit of good and bad, there is grey area and the possibility for change. But unless we are faced with the wonderful shades of life that lie between, it's easy to dismiss them. However, it wasn't so easy for the pro-death penalty man who uttered the phrase above, and the many others in Chicago who were shocked to discover that their beloved poet and church member JJ Jameson was also Norman Porter -- a man convicted of two murders who had escaped from prison twenty years earlier.

Sorry, ASFR (alt.sex.fetish.robot) fans, this isn't a story of robot love. Mechanical Love has a more humanist approach, tapping not into the sexual world of Real Dolls and non-human sexual outlets, but rather the desire and need for companionship.

Phie Ambo's Mechanical Love begins by noting that soon the elderly will outnumber children for the first time in human history. Obviously, this leads to questions about how these people will be cared for -- and I don't just mean how they will get fed and provided shelter, but also who will give them actual care and attention. The older generations already have a limited number of ways to get personal interaction, even though it is something that is necessary to continue their drive to live. In response to these changes and concerns, there are engineers like Professor Ishiguro who are developing robots not for work or sex, but for human companionship.

There is one moment in Tanaz Eshaghian's Be Like Others that starts by plucking at our insistent hopes for happiness. Hungry for love and affection from his family, Ali Askar tells a story about being thrilled when his father insisted that Ali have breakfast with him. While it was such a simple action, it was one with insistence that Ali had never seen before. This act seemed full of the loving camaraderie and acceptance that the young man had dreamed of. His father poured them tea, but Ali refused to drink it; he realized that this wasn't a warm act of fatherly love. This wasn't a breakthrough moment in their relationship. Ali's father was trying to kill him with rat poison. His father would rather kill his son than allow him to get the sex change that he yearns for.

But it is more complicated than a transsexual wanting a sex change. In Iran, this matter is complicated because homosexuality is punishable by death, and transgendered lifestyles are not an option. However, sex changes are not only permitted legally -- they are also subsidized by the government. It is this strange path of religious, political, and social ruling that Eshaghian focuses on in Be Like Others. She does not argue the particulars of this strange rationale, but rather shows the life and world of those who live it -- lives that reveal a flawed and chilling system for dealing with differing gender preferences and sexuality.