Hot Docs '22: Our Picks for the World’s Biggest & Best Documentary Film Festival
By Original-Cin Staff
There is genuine excitement in the air as the world slowly returns to post(ish)-pandemic normal, with people cautiously heading to events at communal venues. Into this giddy (and hopefully not tentative) fray comes the annual Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival — Hot Docs as it is known colloquially — North America’s largest documentary festival and conference and an absolute mind-bending must for fans of non-fiction film.
With 226 documentaries from 63 countries (chosen from a total of 2,563 submissions), 49 percent directed by women, the Festival truly has something for everyone. Its 29th edition happens April 28 through May 8 in cinemas across Toronto — as well as online to audiences throughout Canada — and offers programming that reflects every corner and concern of our world.
Indeed, event organizers compiled a list of films grouped by themes, and the category numbers creeped into double digits: films about activism, American, Canadian, African, Asian, European and Australian culture, capitalism and big business, aging and mortality, disability, education, ecology and the environment, faith and spirituality, health, crime and justice, immigration, food and agriculture, Indigenous issues, media, gender and sexuality, mental health, pop culture, visual arts, sports and recreation, war and science among others.
Some 63 films are making world premieres at Hot Docs while another 47 are making international premieres. Further grouped into programs such as Special Presentations, Canadian Spectrum, Artscapes and so on, the films represent a visual smorgasbord to be approached by topic, place of origin, date of screening or some combination of the three. Honestly, the Festival fun facts alone are astonishing.
Single tickets and packages can be purchased and/or redeemed online at www.hotdocs.ca or in person at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema Box Office (506 Bloor Street West). Single tickets are $19 to regular Festival screenings and $22 to Special Presentations and events. A Festival 6-Pack is $99, a Festival 12-Pack is $189, and a Festival 20-Pack is $269. Hot Docs offers free tickets for all screenings before 5:00 pm to those 60+ and students with valid photo I.D., available online the day of the screening, subject to availability.
The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks
Original-Cin writers are binging as many titles as possible to help readers navigate the glut. Herewith are previews of films we’re excited to see and why. In coming days, we will also offer reviews, interviews and other Hot Docs highlights.
Our best advice: read us for sure, but also take a chance on titles that pique your interest for whatever reason. With films from Colombia to Croatia, Armenia to Austria, Serbia to Switzerland, Mexico to Mali and all points in between represented, you just never know what you'll find.
Films We Can’t Wait to See
Jim Slotek
Syrian-born Canadian filmmaker Noura Kevorkian thought she was embarking on a feel-good doc in the late ‘00s when she began filming the relationship between the family of a Syrian migrant worker named Maria and a righteous and humane Lebanese-Christian potato farmer named Mousa who hired them yearly. Then other stuff happened — including a brutal civil war and the birth of ISIS. Over more than 10 years, we watch as a beautiful countryside becomes a barren refugee camp, and the people we’ve come to know experience hardship, fear and resiliency. It’s like intimate time-lapse photography of a prolonged, ongoing tragedy.
Read our interview with Batata director Noura Kevorkian
The history of amateur sports’ attitude toward women athletes goes beyond injustice and into the perverse, as we discover in this film by Phyllis Ellis (Toxic Beauty) — dating back to rituals where athletes essentially paraded nude in front of officials who’d certify their femininity visually. In the decades since, sports bodies turned to chromosome tests and testosterone levels in their obsession to decide who was a woman, culminating in the South African runner Caster Semenya, whose natural androgen level disqualified her. Ellis’ film focuses on four athletes who similarly ran afoul of institutional ideas of what a woman is.
The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks
This film by Reg Harkema (Super Duper Alice Cooper, Monkey Warfare) plays like a rock doc. The groundbreaking troupe — Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson — is even interviewed at the Queen St. Toronto club that launched them in the ‘80s, with drums and sound equipment as a backdrop. There’s drama (much is made of the schism that occurred when Foley became a sitcom star), and an overarching polyamorous “love story” theme. But the real gold is the archival material, going back to their origins in Calgary’s Loose Moose theatre and Toronto’s Theatresports, and parts in between. It’s home-movie heaven for KITH fans, who await their upcoming reboot series on Prime Video.
Read our interview with Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks director Reg Harkema
Thom Ernst
Attica is a rage-inducing dive into one of America’s ugliest exposes into institutionalized racism. The 1971 organized uprising of inmates at the Attica Penitentiary protesting the treatment of Black inmates garnered world-wide attention. But their message of entrenched racism and brutal treatment of its Black inmates got lost in the bravura of prison officials, police, and even the President who took to the world stage as though it were an opportunity to publicly display an unyielding might against resistance. The result became a real-life horror. Directors Traci Curry and Stanley Nelson combine hard-hitting footage of the riot, with eyewitness testimonies to create a shocking account of events during and after the five-day standoff. For the privilege it might hardly seem possible that the world watched while these atrocities unfolded. For others, these atrocities are all too familiar. Attica is not just a time-capsule documentary but a passport into examining a failed system that thrives even today.
SAM NOW
Delightful is not a word you’d expect to hear describing a film about a 14-year-old boy abandoned by his otherwise loving mother. But in director Reed Harkness’ SAM NOW, the delight comes from Sam, the filmmaker’s charismatic half-brother. Harkness captures the heart of his family in good times and bad reaching back through home footage shot on Super 8 of a SAM THEN before giving us the SAM NOW. Reed chronicles the search for the woman who one day disappeared from their lives without so much as a goodbye or a note. It’s a tough tale bound to incite strong feelings from its viewers that don’t necessarily jibe with the film’s participants. And there are truths in the movie that pop up in unexpected places from unexpected people. SAM NOW is frustrating, heartfelt, and indeed, delightful.
A film as yet unseen, but one I look forward to. You might wonder why I or anyone would purposefully delve into the bleak history of someone’s abuse and trauma. Well, some queries need no answer. But since I raised the question, I will attempt to answer. For me, it’s the chance at a glimpse of understanding how some survive the worst life has to give. Stories of human endurance and struggle are far from being dark and relentless. Instead, they are inspiring and ultimately empowering. I imagine that possibility in director Tracey Arcabasso Smith’s personal journey in her film, Relative.
Kim Hughes
Director Ron Howard shadows Spanish-born celebrity chef José Andrés as he and his crack humanitarian org World Central Kitchen hopscotch to disaster areas around the globe with the goal of feeding people in times of crisis, via makeshift kitchens serving up food reflecting local culture. Andrés’ larger-than-life personality is the axis upon which this 89-minute doc, making its international premiere, spins.
At best, we take pigeons for granted, merely seeing them as fellow urban denizens with wings. Yet pigeon history is rich and vibrant, and to those fanciers who race them internationally, they are resplendent creatures unlike any others. Following one of the most lucrative bird races on the planet (you read right), this co-Irish/English/Thai film, making its world premiere, brings this unique sport with its many dramas into focus. Though it doesn’t quite answer the seemingly unanswerable question of how the heck pigeons unfailingly navigate themselves home.
Make People Better
Liam Lacey
“We live in a titanic age,” wrote the late Joseph Campbell of the amazing, frightening advances in technology. One of the areas where humans are on the periphery of playing God is in the world of designing humans through gene manipulation, a “not if but when” proposition. Director Cody Sheehy follows the story in 2018, when Chinese scientist Dr. He Jiankui altered the genetic structure of twin girls to prevent them from developing the HIV virus, a modification that will be passed on to their children, the shock of the international community and, eventually, imprisonment in China. A polished, multi-thread documentary follows both the journalistic expose, both sides of the ethical debate and the geo-political implications of this rogue breakthrough scientific moment.
Questions around transgender history, truth and deception, performance and authenticity, get an insightful airing in Framing Agnes, the new film by Canadian director Chase Joynt (co-director of No Ordinary Man). This hybrid film uses contemporary transgender actors to dramatize interviews with transgender people from the past, from a rediscovered archive of interviews from UCLA sociologist Harold Garfield. Specifically, the film is inspired by the case of Agnes Torres who, in 1959, obtained gender-confirmation surgery by falsely convincing doctors she was born intersex, casting her as either a fraud or a hero, as academic Jules Gill-Peterson explains. Director Joynt, who acts in black-and-white as a Mike Wallace-style interviewer in past sequences, explores the lives of other transgender people from the UCLA files, and the parallel lives of the actors and the characters who play them.
Framing Agnes
In a world where the battle between transparent democracy and corrupt autocracy grows more fraught, Matt Sarnecki’s film of the shooting of 27-year-old Slovakian journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova stands out as a grotesque example of the attempt, and failure, to crush criticism. Though the story barely made global headlines, the coverup and subsequent expose rocked the country as nothing had since the fall of communism. Kuciak specialized in covering corruption between politicians and Mafia-affiliated businessmen in defrauding the European Union. Key to breaking the story was leaked information on a USB key revealing a complex web of paid assassins, corrupt judges, honey traps, and dirty cops at the highest level, with a remarkable number of culprits caught on video. Like last year's Romanian documentary, Collective, it’s a film that both disgusts and inspires.
Bonnie Laufer
Documentary veteran (and the pride of Canada) Jennifer Baichwal brings us Into The Weeds, the doc chosen to open the Festival. It’s been 13 years since Baichwal has had this honor, having opened Hot Docs in 2009 with Act of God. This time around Baichwal tackles the big guns and presents the powerful story of Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, a former Bay Area groundskeeper who takes on a multinational agrochemical corporation after a cancer diagnosis. Heartbreaking and inspiring, Baichwal sticks to her familiar themes of harming the environment but this one really hits home when you listen to Johnson’s story and many others who are awaiting their death sentence due to coming in contact with this deadly chemical.
Read our interview with Into The Weeds director Jennifer Baichwal
What a trip down memory lane! Still Working 9 to 5 takes us back to the hit 1980 movie 9 to 5 starring the legendary threesome of Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton. This enjoyable and fascinating look back at the film includes current interviews with its stars and creators while pointing out what a huge impact the film had on the women’s movement, equal pay and abuse in the workplace. Just think, 40 years after 9 to 5 was released, working women are still fighting for the same serious issues the film tried to get across. Bonus: Make sure you watch until the very end and LISTEN to those final credits. Kelly Clarkson and Dolly Parton revisit Dolly’s Oscar winning song, 9 to 5 and it is glorious!
How Saba Kept Singing
Warning: Have a Kleenex box handy while watching. This documentary focuses on the amazing life of David Wisnia, a Holocaust survivor whose life was spared because of his magnificent signing voice. Together with his loving grandson Avi and filmmaker Sara Teskler, we go on the journey of David’s life revisiting Auschwitz and the actual bunker he slept in. The movie is not only inspirational but a must-watch for younger generations to keep these stories alive as we lose more and more Holocasut survivors every day. Oh yeah, it is produced by Hilary and Chelsea Clinton.
Read our interview with How Saba Kept Singing Director Sara Taksler