Reviews - Page 95

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

Review: ‘Cavebirds’

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Cavebirds (Canada, 81 minute.) Dir Emily Gan Programme: Canadian Spectrum (World Premiere) Montreal-based Emily Gan’s debut feature is a first-person essay film around an unusual subject: bird spit. To be more specific, the saliva of small swallow-like birds, which in hardened form is the prized ingredient in the Chinese traditional delicacy of bird’s nest soup. Gan’s film focuses on her father, Hok-Wah (Howard) a soft-spoken gentle man who has suffered from a lifelong weak heart. In his retirement, he has a quixotic plan to reconnect to his family’s past and provide for his children and their children: He moves back

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Review: ‘Prey’

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Prey (Canada, 85 min) Dir. Matt Gallagher Programme: Canadian Spectrum (World Premiere) The subject of Prey is a civil lawsuit against the Basilian Fathers of Toronto, which took place last year, over their part in concealing and abetting William Hodgson “Hod” Marshall, a Catholic priest, high school teacher and serial sexual abuser, who died in 2014 at the age of 92. What distinguished the case was that the defendant was seeking punitive damages, for the first time in Canada, from a Church institution. The crux of the matter was that Marshall’s crimes had been reported a half-dozen times over the years, yet

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Review: ‘Beloved’

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Hot Docs 2019 [4369] [tara-hakim] Hakim, Tara _Beloved_ is a feast for the eyes and heart. {image_1} Beloved (Iran, 54 min.) Dir. Yaser Talebi Programme: World Showcase (Canadian Premiere) Beautifully filmed with an unlikely subject, Beloved is a feast for the eyes and heart. Directed and filmed by Yaser Talebi, the film follows Firouzrh Khordishi, an eighty-two-year-old herder in the northern mountains of Iran, across the seasons as she tells the story of her life. When she was just 14, her mother arranged for her to be married to a herder who was much older than her and with whom she had

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Review: ‘Our Dance of Revolution’

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Our Dance of Revolution (Canada, 102 min.) Dir. Phillip Pike Programme: Canadian Spectrum (World Premier) At last, there is a documentary that does justice to the influential LGBTQ+ activists of colour who helped shape Toronto’s political landscape. Phillip Pike has gathered archival footage and some of the community’s best minds and most passionate advocates to tell the stories of how black activists lived, partied and most important, organized. The film opens with Black Lives Matter (BLM), led by Black queer women, disrupting the Pride Parade in 2016 via a 30-minute sit-in. Pike’s premise is that BLM did not come out of nowhere but

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Review: ‘Conviction’

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Conviction (Canada, 78 minutes) Dir. Nance Ackerman, Ariella Pahlke, Teresa MacInnes Programme: Canadian Spectrum A film about Canadian women prisoners made over a couple of years, Conviction is a touchingly personal view of inmate life, if somewhat scattered in its focus. The project involves three filmmakers who, we are told in an early title card, went into two Nova Scotia women’s prisons with art supplies, a musical therapist and filmmaking tools with the intent “to understand why” women are the fastest-growing population of prisoners worldwide. The question, once posed, is then mysteriously dropped. Instead, we see women prisoners singing, writing haikus, performing

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Review: ‘A Place of Tide and Time’

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A Place of Tide and Time (Canada, 78 min.) Dir. Sébastien Rist, Aude Leroux-Lévesque Programme: Canadian Spectrum (World Premiere) Audiences at Hot Docs 2016 should remember Sébastien Rist and Aude Leroux-Lévesque’s extraordinarily moving feature debut Living with Giants. The doc, which won a special jury prize from Hot Docs, transported audiences to Inukjuak, Quebec where the filmmakers observed the life of a young Inuk man, Paulusie, and the everyday reality he experienced in the remote village. The filmmakers’ new doc, A Place of Tide and Time, is a fine companion piece to Living with Giants as it whisks audiences to another isolated community in

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Review: ‘Five Feminist Minutes’

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When the five-minute concept was first embraced by cultural activists, its theory was simple: multiple performances of that length by diverse creators was guaranteed to keep an audience interested. And if you didn’t like something, the next act started before you knew it. Montreal’s Tangent Performance Gallery and later Toronto’s Women’s Cultural Building made it work in the early ‘80s and before the decade was out, Nightwood Theatre had established the Five-Minute Feminist Cabaret as a major annual fundraiser. Rina Fraticelli, who came to the National Film Board’s famous women’s Studio D as Executive Producer in 1987, had seen first-hand

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Review: ‘The Wandering Chef’

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The Wandering Chef (South Korea, 90 min.) Dir. Hye-Ryeong Park Programme: World Showcase (World Premiere) Korean celebrity chef Jiho Im has wandered around all his life. It started when he was twelve and ran away from home to wander the country and encounter its people. He’s been wandering ever since. “I wondered around a lot. People criticized me for not being able to stay in one place for long. No one knew I was searching for something. Only I knew.” In a heart-warming ode to family and the healing power of food, director Hye-Ryeong Park, in The Wandering Chef, takes us

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Review: ‘There Are No Fakes’

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There are No Fakes (Canada, 114 min) Dir. Jamie Kastner Programme: Artscapes (World Premiere) Jamie Kastner’s engaging, smartly modulated, new documentary, There Are No Fakes, includes a 1962 CBC television clip of the then thirtyish Anishinaabe artist, Norval Morrisseau, being interviewed by glamorous young June Callwood, on the occasion of his first major gallery show at Toronto’s Pollock Gallery. The scene is a reminder of how long it has been since Morrisseau’s paintings and the Woodlands school he founded, have become imprinted on the popular imagination as emblematic of Canadian Indigenous art. Concerns about Morrisseau forgeries have risen over the years and, in

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Review: ‘The Rest’

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The Rest (Germany, 78 min.) Dir. Ai Weiwei Programme: Special Presentations (North American Premiere) Ai Weiwei’s 2017 doc Human Flow is one of the most extraordinary portraits of the global migration crisis ever put on film. The globetrotting scale of the film captures the enormity of the problem at hand as Ai toured a whopping 23 countries to collect some of the stories of the 65 million refugees on the move worldwide. Cut to a few years later and the problem has worsened with nearly 70 million people seeking refuge with fewer options for new homelands as conservatism inspires nations to close

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