The One Day Doc Contest: Watch a French Orchard Saved From Freezing in Real Time
By Jim Slotek
With 80 or more annual film festivals - from street-level-DIY films to the gold standard of TIFF - Torontonians always have plenty of opportunity to see filmmakers evolve.
And “guerilla filmmaking,” sending people out to make a film with limited resources and a ticking clock, has always had a place in the panoply of festivals.
Which brings me to One Day Doc contest, a highlight of Saturday’s Art of Documentary Film Festival at the Innis Town Hall Theatre.
An array of outdoor heaters is all that stands between a crop of peaches and apricots and disaster.
The festival, sponsored by SetReady Film Rentals, put out a global call for documentaries shot in 24 hours or less, and was inundated with more than 100 submissions. Seven were chosen. One of them – a French film called Late Frost – was one of the most tense seven minutes I’ve seen onscreen.
The place is Muespach, Alsace, where temperatures have incrementally been rising in recent years, a perilous turn of events for organic fruit growers Frédérique and Frédéric Schwab. Early warm spells mean worrisomely early buds of peaches and apricots, and vulnerability to a killing frost.
Late Frost consists entirely of Frédérique and Frédéric determinedly fueling outdoor heaters throughout their orchard, then spending the night watching the time and temperature, waiting for 0-degrees to send them on a mission to fire up the heaters.
The mission begins at 4 a.m. and ends hours after sunrise. In between, director Flavien Kressman gives us beautiful long distance shots of the crop-saving flames, like city lights in a rural setting.
Frédéric Schwab checks the fruit buds for frost damage.
Though Late Frost, was easily my favourite, there are more One Day entries in completion, including a couple of Canadian ones – Jack the Bass is a frenetically edited short profile of 21-year-old Toronto jazz bassist Jack Johnston, whose love affair with the instrument began at age 14 when he heard his first Jaco Pastorius album. In a flurry of images, Jack the Bass takes us through the TTC, rehearsals with bandmates, concert scenes and busking at Dundas Square.
And the Quebec-made Resilience by Nicolas Varillon gives us a taste of what drives Muay Thai boxer Lea, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse whose aggression (and occasional paralysis) in the ring serves as both a frightening challenge and deep therapy.
The ambitious first-time documentary event includes a main program of curated films, and two “In Conversation” sessions. The first is with Rayka Zehtabchi, whose documentary Period. End of Sentence – about the fight against stigmatization of menstruation in India – won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Film.
Also taking part in In Conversation are Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson, whose Compy Films is most famous for the award-winning non-doc Scarborough, but has also produced acclaimed documentaries like Take Light and the animated doc Love Letters From Everest.
AOD Films is a new Academy-funded initiative that started this year, dedicated to funding, producing, and licensing original films from current and past documentary students.
The Art of Documentary Film Festival runs Saturday, July 15, from 11am - 9pm, at Innis Town Hall Theatre. Tickets are $49, available HERE.