Hot Docs ‘22: More Brief Encounters With the Best Told Real-Life Stories on the Planet
By Jim Slotek, Thom Ernst, Kim Hughes, Liam Lacey and Bonnie Laufer
The 29th edition of Hot Docs, the world’s largest documentary film festival, arrives today! 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.
Running through May 8 in cinemas across Toronto — as well as online via streaming to audiences across Canada — the Festival offers programming that reflects every corner and concern of our world, with films from Colombia to Croatia to Canada, Armenia to Austria, Serbia to Switzerland, Mexico to Mali and all points in between represented.
In addition to our preview of the event, Original-Cin offers mini-reviews and interview throughout the Fest to help you pick the best stuff to see. Herewith, our second batch of capsule reviews. (Click here for the first roundup).
Andrew Moir’s film follows the last days of a middle-aged Jamaican migrant worker, Delroy Dunkley, who spent half of every year working on a farm in Ontario before being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Developed from an earlier CBC-aired short, Babe, I Hate to Go, the current film focuses less on the issue of migrant workers and more on the last months of the loving relationship between Delroy and his partner, Sophia Malahoo, who he marries during the film. Moir’s direct cinema style filmmaking (the director and crew are invisible) is elegiac and tender but dated in its lack of transparency and sometimes, basic information: Where in Jamaica Delroy lives, and how how big a family Delroy has (Sophia says that shortly after they met he invited her to stay with “his kids” when he worked in Canada). Without chasing down online interviews, we’re left guessing about the relationship between subject and filmmaker, and why Delroy and Sophia would want a film crew into their home and family life during this vulnerable time. LL
Mon, May 2, 5:45 pm, Isabel Bader Theatre; Fri, May 6, 3:30 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 3; online streaming begins May 3, 9 am.
Don’t Come Searching
A visually rich chronicle of nature at its fiercest and a love story to boot, Fire of Love follows Katia and Maurice Krafft, two married French volcanologists who hopscotched the globe to observe, film, and study volcanoes, offering predictions of incoming disasters and assistance in their aftermath. Exactly how the pair met is a mystery but, as narrator Miranda July makes clear, Katia and Maurice’s shared fascination with volcanoes — which they categorized as “red” (with lava, more eye-popping but less dangerous) and “grey” (with ash, savage and deadly) — bonded them until their deaths in June 1991 in Japan, where they had raced to witness an eruption at Mount Unzen, leaving as their legacy “samples, words, hundreds of hours of footage, thousands of photos and a million questions,” says July over haunting footage recorded the day before their demise. Interspersing remarkable film compiled by the couple with clips from numerous French TV appearances (Maurice was like the Joan Embery of volcanoes), director Sara Dosa’s film tells a beguiling story of two people living the most purposeful lives imaginable, even as they were cut short. KH
Fri, Apr 29, 6 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 2; Wed, May 4, 1:15 pm, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema; Fri, May 6, 11:30 am, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema; online streaming begins Apr 30, 9 am.
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 either as a fraud or a hero, as academic Jules Gill-Peterson explains. Director Joynt, who acts in black-and-white 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. LL
Sun, May 1, 8:30 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox; Thu, May 5, 5:45 pm, Varsity 8; online streaming begins May 2, 9 am.
Oakland-based artist and filmmaker Reid Davennport composed this film from handheld footage from his wheelchair, while ruminating on America’s attitude toward disability, inspired partly by a circus tent that suddenly appears in his neighbourhood. As it happens, Davenport comes from Bethel, Connecticut, birthplace of P.T. Barnum, whose circuses put “human curiosities” on display for public entertainment. A few social interactions — a rude transit worker, a patronizing neighbour, unwanted invitations of assistance, an electrical cord across the entrance ramp to his apartment building — stress the everyday drain of living with a disability in a world where people treat you as an inconvenient oddity to be stared at but not seen. LL
Tue, May 3, 5:45 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; Fri, May 6, 1:45 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; online streaming begins May 4 at 9 am.
“We live in a titanic age,” wrote the late Joseph Campbell of the amazing, frightening advances in contemporary 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. LL
Sat, April 30, 5:15 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox; Tue, May 3, 10:45 am, Isabel Bader Theatre ; May 7, 11:45 am, TIFF Bell Lightbox; online streaming begins May 1, 9 am.
My Old School
Not since The Sixth Sense has there been a film with a twist as staggering as the one propelling My Old School. The story concerns Brandon Lee, a new student at a posh Glasgow high school in 1993 who is more than just a little precocious, and who quickly becomes his school’s most popular student before… well, you’ll really have to see the doc. As Lee’s former classmates, now adults, recall in director Jono McLeod’s fascinating and innovative film — which uses a heady mix of vibrant animation, talking-head interviews, and actor Alan Cumming standing in for the protagonist — the experience changed lives while launching countless tabloid headlines. Let’s just say it is astounding what some people are willing to do to follow their dreams. KH
Sun, May 1, 5:15 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; Wed, May 4, 10 am, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema; Sat, May 7, 5:30 pm, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema; online streaming begins May 2 at 9 am.
A real-life political thriller and Sundance prize winner, Navalny is a timely, absorbing profile of the charismatic Russian lawyer, politician, anti-corruption activist and Putin enemy, Alexei Navalny. Canadian director Daniel Roher (Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band) focuses on the dramatic episode of Navalny’s poisoning by a Russian secret service agent, his evacuation to Germany and collaboration with the investigative collective known as Bellingcat to expose his would-be assassin, and his subsequent voluntary return to the Russia where he is currently in prison. While the film may be seen as an extension of Navany’s media-savvy campaign, it’s a stirring example of courageous resistance to tyranny and a demonstration of how the lies of autocrats can be challenged and exposed. LL
Sat, April 30, 6:30 pm, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema; Mon, May 2, 1:30 pm, TIFF Bell Lighbox; Sat, May 7, 2 pm, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema; online streaming begins May 1, 6:30 pm. Read Liam’s full review of Navalny.
The beauty of the late, legendary mime Marcel Marceau’s art is seen from multiple angles — including a dark and inhuman past — in this unusual biography by Maurizius Staerkle Drux. Marceau, who believed in a “world without words,” undivided by language, lost his father to Auschwitz and was a member of the French resistance, smuggling Jewish children to Switzerland (expeditions where silence could mean the difference between life and death). Some of the storytelling occurs after the death of the world’s greatest mime, with his family producing a tribute show, acolytes using his control techniques to battle Parkinson’s, and the director’s own deaf father, who discovered mime as a bridge to the world after seeing Marceau perform. An absolutely uplifting biographical experience. JS
Tues, May 2, 2:45 pm, Varsity 8; Sun, May 8, 8:30 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 2. Online streaming begins Tues, May 3, 9 am.
The Art of Silence
The winner of Sundance’s U.S. documentary prize is an eccentric, split-focus film, intriguing in the details, but unbalanced as a whole. One part involves co-directors Ben Klein and Violet Columbus completing a 30-year-old documentary about the Tianammen Square massacre, following up with three of the student leaders, now living in exile. The other part is a portrait of New York University professor and activist filmmaker Christine Choy (she made the Oscar-nominated Who Killed Vincent Chin?) as an irrepressible, trash-talking force of nature. Choy spent time in New York with some of the student leaders of the protests when they came to New York City in 1989, including living with them briefly in a Long Island seaside safe house, but she subsequently shelved her footage. The filmmakers catch up with three of the protestors, one now a political commentator, one a writer and intellectual, the third a retired business executive, who are reunited in testimony to the U.S. Congress on the 30th anniversary of the massacre, excoriating the U.S. for its economic embrace of China. LL
Sun, May 1, 10:30 , Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema; Thu, May 5, 8:15 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox, 2; Sun, May 8, 7 pm, Varsity 8; online streaming begins May 2, 9 am.
In a world where the struggle between democracy and corrupt autocracy grows ever more dangerous, Matt Sarnecki’s film about the 2018 assassination of 27-year-old Slovakian journalist Jan Kuciak stands out for its bold brutality. Though the story barely made global headlines, the coverup and subsequent expose rocked the country, leading to the resignation of the prime minister. Journalist Kuciak specialized in covering corruption involving politicians and their Mafia-affiliated backers. The conspiracy was exposed through leaked information on a USB key, revealing an outrageous complex of paid assassins, corrupt judges, honey traps, and dirty cops at the highest level. Like last year's Romanian documentary, Collective, it’s a film that disgusts but renews respect for the importance of independent journalism. LL
Sun, May 1, 5 pm, Varsity 8; Thu, May 5, 10:30 am, Isabel Bader Theatre; online streaming begins May 2, 9 am.
Spanish-born celebrity chef José Andrés is singular, a masterful food artist (a term he’d hate) who could easily rest on his laurels, enjoying his loving family and the spoils from his portfolio of critically acclaimed restaurants across the U.S. And yet, with his non-profit humanitarian org World Central Kitchen, Andrés and his dedicated team plunge themselves into disaster zones around the globe to feed people in crisis. And not just sandwiches (though sometimes those) but properly cooked meals incorporating local staples and traditions. Director Ron Howard follows Andrés’ crew from Haiti to Puerto Rico and beyond as they nourish desperate souls battling to survive natural disasters. Andrés is larger than life, and it’s wonderful to witness someone so clearly motivated by compassion. But there is something curiously flat about We Feed People which, while fascinating, feels bereft of Howard’s filmic finesse, like something CNN might have put together. Then again, maybe unadorned storytelling was the point. KH
Sun, May 1, 1:30 pm, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema; Sat, May 7, 2:45 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; Sun, May 8, 4 pm, Varsity 8; online streaming begins May 2, 6:30 pm.