Terje Toomistu is the filmmaker of Soviet Hippies, which will have its North American Premiere at the EstDocs Film Festival. The film was produced after Toomistu co-curated a multimedia exhibition about Soviet hippies, which traveled internationally in museums and galleries. She was a Fulbright fellow in UC Berkeley in 2013-2014 and is a visiting researcher at University
On Putin’s Blacklist (Canada, 76 min.) Dir. Boris Ivanov One can’t label a charge of “Fake News” against Boris Ivanov’s timely documentary On Putin’s Blacklist. This documentary raises numerous concerns about Russia’s fall into the dark ages in the era of Vladimir Putin. Ivanov outlines the many reasons for which Russia is a human
Let’s talk about some typical Canadian documentaries. Where do they take place? In rural India, where Hindu girls practice military drills and swear death to their religious enemies while their peers preen for the nation’s biggest beauty pageant a few hours away? In southwest Mexico, where a poetry-spouting intellectual puffs a pipe through a balaclava
California Typewriter (USA, 104 min.) Dir. Doug Nichol There’s a great scene in Fred Zinneman’s Julia featuring Jane Fonda and a typewriter. Fonda, playing writer Lillian Hellman, becomes frustrated while typing at her machine. She gives the typewriter two middle fingers and yells at it. Then she tosses it out the window. This scene
The weight of Canada’s sesquicentennial is being felt across a range of cultural manifestations and CONTACT, Toronto’s month-long photo festival, is no exception. The 20 primary exhibitions and 17 public installations all spotlight Canadian artists, as well as most of the 40 featured shows. “We did think about the anniversary when we were putting together
Human Flow (Germany, 140 min.) Dir. Ai Weiwei “The more immune you are to people’s suffering,” says Princess Dana Firas of Jordan in Human Flow, “that’s very dangerous. “It’s critical for us to maintain this humanity.” Firas speaks with filmmaker and artist Ai Weiwei for his exceptional documentary Human Flow. The film calls attention
Bowhead Whale Hunting with My Ancestors (Canada, 40 min.) Dir. Zacharias Kunuk, Carol Kunnuk Zacharias Kunuk took audiences on a riveting hunt in the Arctic with 2001’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Deemed the best Canadian film ever made in a 2015 poll conducted by the Toronto International Film Festival, Atanarjuat endures as a landmark
Holy Angels (Canada, 14 min.) Dir. Jay Cardinal Villeneuve Number 34. That is the name that Lena Wandering Spirit recalls receiving upon arriving at Holy Angels Residential School. Not an Anglicized name or a colonial name, but a number. A cold two-digit label that defined her in the eyes of her teachers, like something
Globalization and Its Discontents is Knowledge Network's 10-week programme of documentaries from Canada and around the world.
Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing discuss One of Us, an urgent docu-thriller about individuals facing the life-altering decision to leave their conservative Hasidic community.