Reviews - Page 142

Giving you our points of view on the latest docs in release and on the circuit.

Review: ‘Living the Game’

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Living the Game (Japan, 88 minutes) Dir. Takao Gotsu Programme: Magnificent Obsessions (International Premiere)   A documentary about champions who sit and twiddle their thumbs and fingers, Living the Game explores the tournament rivalries and star personalities of the video game Streetfighter. While Japanese director Takao Gutsu does little to explain the intense commitment of the players and tournament fans, the storytelling is well paced and offers some ponder-worthy notions about competitive performance and personality, Like George Butler and Robert Fiore’s classic bodybuilding documentary,_ Pumping Iron_, this is less about the activity than the exemplary participants. At its centre are

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Review: ‘A Room of Her Own’

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A Room of Her Own: Rai Naito and Light (Japan, 87 minutes) Dir. Yuko Nakamura Programme: Made in Japan (North American Premiere)   An art film, an anxiety therapy diary and a benign stalk-umentary about a reclusive artist and her adoring fan, Yuko Nakamura’s film about artist Rai Naito is an oddity. Delicately shot and edited, unpredictable and occasionally squirm-inducingly precious, it should win some fervent converts and leave others sitting quizzically on the fence. The nominal subject, Rai Naito, is a Nagasaki-born internationally recognised installation artist, painter, sculpture, poet, now in her mid-fifties. Her works are minimalist but loaded

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Review: Raise Your Arms and Twist’

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Raise Your Arms and Twist, Documentary of NMB48 (Japan, 95 min.) Dir. Atsushi Funahashi Programme: Made in Japan (Toronto Premiere)   Atsushi Funahashi’s film Raise Your Arms and Twist explores the pop culture phenomenon of Japanese teen idols: singing and dancing young girls with huge, enthusiastic followings. The girls strive for status within their own groups and engage in fierce competitions with the other ones. NMB48 is Osaka-based and therefore not quite in the same league as Tokyo performers. The doll-like singer/dancers strut their stuff in ultra-choreographed shows that are like adoration rituals for the audience, which consists mainly of

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Review: ‘The Lives of Thérèse’

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The Lives of Thérèse (Les Vies de Thérèse) (France, 55 min.) Dir. Sébastien Lifshitz Programme: Singular Sensation(s) (Toronto Premiere)   How does one depict real death on screen? Filming the final days of Thérèse Clerc, a French feminist and LGBT activist, director Sébastien Lifshitz helps his subject tackle two taboos: aging and dying. Les vies de Thérèse, the winner of the 2016 Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, openly yet sensitively tackles its controversial subject matter. Thérèse Clerc is a passionate and unique figure. Initially accepting life as a typical housewife in the 1950s, she bloomed through a political

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Review: ‘Bee Nation’

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The notion that an Indigenous spelling bee competition could serve as the cohesive force to unite disparate First Nations children across Canada under one nation, as the title of Hot Docs’s 2017 opening film suggests, is perhaps the most obvious of all the liberal consensus threads.

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Review: ‘Sunday Beauty Queen’

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Sunday Beauty Queen (Hong Kong, Philippines, Japan. 95 minutes) Dir: Baby Ruth Villarama Programme: World Showcase (Canadian Premiere)   On Sundays in Hong Kong, many Filipino domestic workers enjoy preparing and staging beauty pageants. What initially seems like a quirky subculture turns out to be a more substantial subject in Sunday Beauty Queen, a big-hearted documentary from Filipino director Baby Ruth Villarama. At the end of a first pageant we see onscreen, when the embroidered gown has been packed and the mauve lipstick wiped off, one of the contestants misses her Sunday night curfew. Promptly fired by her employer, she

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Review: ‘The Challenge’

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The Challenge (France/Italy 70 minutes) Dir Yuri Ancarini Programme: Magnificent Obsessions (Canadian Premiere)   Decadence has rarely looked as gorgeous as it does in The Challenge, Italian video artist and filmmaker Yuri Ancarini’s film, which is nominally about a falconry contest among the super-wealthy sheikhs in the world’s wealthiest per capita country, Quatar. Though the main contest is about whose bird can kill a pigeon better, the film is really a portrait of a state of consciousness held by wealthy young men in white robes and checkered scarves, indulging in games of speed, colour and spectacle against a vast canvas

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Review: ‘About My Liberty’

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About My Liberty (Japan, 165 minutes) Dir. Takahashi Nishihara) By Liam Lacey   In 2015 and 2016, Japan witnessed the biggest student protest movement since the 1960s. The cause was a bill by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party that would allow Japan, for the first time since the country’s surrender in 1945, to send troops to foreign countries. Director Takahash Nishibara’s film focuses on one organisation, Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (SEALD). SEALDs’ leaders, in their early twenties, include two young men, Aki Okuda, Yoshimas Ushida and the one woman, Mana Shibata, well-read, media-savvy activists who carefully

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Review: ‘Maison du Bonheur’

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Maison du Bonheur (Canada, 64 min.) Dir. Sofia Bohdanowicz Programme: World Showcase (North American Premiere)   Taking a trip to Paris, director Sofia Bohdanowicz visits with Juliane Sellam, the grandmother of a colleague, for her second feature film Maison du Bonheur. Sellam, a 77-year old astrologer who has lived in her lovely Montmartre home for half a century, shares with us her everyday life. Intimately capturing Sellam’s enchanting storytelling as well as her charming daily routine, Maison du Bonheur is as much an idiosyncratic portrait of Sellam as it is a personal journey for Bohdanowicz as creator. The film is

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Review: ‘Gilbert’

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Gilbert (USA, 96 min.) Dir. Neil Berkeley Programme: Special Presentations (International Premiere)   Gilbert Gottfried has been compared to Lenny Bruce because like Lenny, he is a taboo-breaking, absurdity puncturing stand-up comic, whose most outrageous gags have landed him in deep shit. There was the 9/11 joke that prompted someone in the audience at a Friar’s Club Hugh Hefner roast to shout, “Too soon!” More recently his Japanese Tsunami tweets lost him a lucrative gig voicing the Aflac Insurance company duck mascot. After that catastrophe, his manager told him, “I don’t think you should be asking about pay rates anymore.”

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