Reviews - Page 91

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

Review: ‘Shella Record – A Reggae Mystery’

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Shella Record: A Reggae Mystery (Canada, 87 minutes) Dir. Chris Flanagan Programme: Canadian Spectrum (World Premiere) As a Ja-Canadian, a catchphrase among some Jamaicans for people who bounce back and forth between the White North and the island–among other things I work on JA-oriented film projects–I was eager to see Chris Flanagan’s first doc. The visual artist, avid record collector, and lover of roots reggae has devoted years to a film about a Jamaican singer who long ago disappeared into obscurity. The obsession began when Flanagan picked up a recording of a song called “Jamaican Fruit of African Roots.” He

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Review: ‘Well Groomed’

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Well Groomed (USA, 87 min.) Dir. Rebecca Stern Programme: Artscapes (International Premiere) Well Groomed is a quirky, fluffy film about what Frank Zappa lyrically referred to as “modified dogs”, bringing attention to the world of creative grooming and the characters at the heart of the competition. Unlike Christopher Guest’s magnificent mockumentary Best in Show that playful and ironically toyed with the inherent ridiculousness of dog shows, Stern’s documentary gives audiences a sympathetic look as this subset that superficially appears even more bonkers than the prancing pure-breads on the main stage. With “creative grooming,” the participants coat their dogs in gaudy hues, glue-on elements

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Review: ‘Hi, AI’

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Hi, AI (Germany, 85 min.) Dir. Isa Willinger Programme: World Showcase (North American Premiere) It’s been six years since Spike Jonze told the story of Theo and Samantha in Her. Cut to 2019 and Isa Willinger offers the story of Chuck and Harmony in Hi, AI One difference between the films, and easily the most unsettling one, is that Her is a science fiction drama with its love story of artificial intelligence, while Hi, AI is a documentary. What once was speculative is now reality. Jonze wasn’t far off while playing with the idea that some humans have stronger relationships with operating systems than they do with

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Review: ‘When We Walk’

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When We Walk (USA, Canada, 79 minutes) Dir. Jason DaSilva Programme: World Showcase (World Premiere) For Jason DaSilva, making When We Walk was an act of desperate love, survival, and confrontation with the abyss. DaSilva’s subjects are himself, his family, and the vicious advancing of the primary progressive multiple sclerosis that’s killing him. On camera, and in voiceover, 40-year old DaSilva addresses the audience, but more importantly, his young son. The film is a declaration of love for the boy and a document of how he lives as the disease escalates. DaSilva’s adoration for his three-year old spikes when his wife, burnt

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Review: ‘The Daughter Tree’

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The Daughter Tree (Canada, 88 min.) Dir. Rama Rau Programme: Canadian Spectrum (World Premiere) Rama Rau’s latest film The Daughter Tree has a near apocalyptic setting: An area of Punjab, India where men vastly outnumber women, primarily due to prenatal gender testing that resulted in vastly disproportionate rates of abortion of female fetuses. In this land, aging men tend the fields and smoke from billowing pipes, ruing their lot and refusing to compromise by going the equivalent of a mail-order route, fearing the social repercussions of marrying differing castes then they do their own loneliness. This stubborn intractability is contrasted by the

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Review: ‘Framing John DeLorean’

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Framing John DeLorean (USA, 109) Dir. Sheena M. Joyce and Don Argott Programme: Special Presentations (International Premiere) “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” says newspaperman Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young) in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The line epitomizes larger than life celebrities who shape American folklore as tabloids and reality blur, and as audiences too often find themselves contended by digestible fictions, rather than facts. The line echoes throughout Sheena M. Joyce and Don Argott’s Framing John DeLorean. In fact, they quote it while chronicling the fascinating, almost too crazy to believe, life story of auto-baron turned

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Review: ‘#FemalePleasure’

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#FemalePleasure (Switzerland/Germany, 97 min.) Dir. Barbara Miller Program: Changing Face of Europe (North American Premier) Barbara Miller’s indictment of the demonization of female sexuality is all over the place–but in a good way. She travels to the U.S., Germany and Italy, Japan and India to support the fact that men’s desire to control women when it comes to sex is absolutely universal. In Brooklyn, New York, Deborah Feldman describes how she left her Chassidic community when she could no longer bear the restrictions on women. Women are consistently devalued and female sexuality in that culture, she says, is considered toxic,

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Review: ‘Symphony of the Ursus Factory’

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Symphony of the Ursus Factory (Poland, 61 min.) Dir. Jaśmina Wójcik Programme: Artscapes (North American Premiere) If there’s a prize for strangest film at Hot Docs, please bestow the golden laurels upon Symphony of the Ursus Factory. This wonderfully bizarre film by Jaśmina Wójcik might be the most audaciously original film of the festival. Falling somewhere between a Phillip Borsos industrial opus and a Pina Bausch dance, Symphony of the Ursus Factory is an ode to the working class that is full of human spirit and the most humane elements of industry. The doc assembles workers, mechanics, engineers, and administrators from the now-defunct Ursus Factory, which

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