Hot Docs Preview: Phenomenal Organs, Fearless Teen Activists Propel Fab Festival
Five young organists from around the world compete for a $100,000 prize at Montreal’s Notre Dame Basilica at Canada’s International Organ Competition. Director Stacey Tenenbaum (Shiners) focuses on the personalities, including an African-American youth with a winner’s swagger, a Chinese woman who studies Tai Chi with her coach, a father and a young German teen prodigy. Some more history of this grandly complex instrument or explanation of the judging would have been welcome, but this works well enough as an entertainingly edited competition film. Screening: Tue, Apr 30, 9 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 3; Fri, May 3, 10 am, Isabel Bader Theatre. – Liam Lacey
A heroic story to shame xenophobes, The Infiltrators portrays how, in 2012, a group of undocumented teenaged immigrants hatched a plan to get their members deliberately imprisoned in Florida’s for-profit Broward Transitional Centre. They used their people on the inside to help other detainees, some of whom had spent years without any legal help or charges against them. Mixing extensive re-enactments, news footage, phone recordings and live interviews with the participants, The Infiltrators tells a great story that should be better known. How this hasn’t been snapped up as a Hollywood script is a mystery. Screening Sun, May 5, 10:15 am, TIFF Bell Lightbox 2. – LL
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