BRITISH COLUMBIA — Katherine Dodds The Communist Joke Book Vancouver Screen Siren Leah Mallen met UK director Ben Lewis (of BBC Art Safari fame), at an art conference in Ottawa. Lewis had pitched a feature doc idea at IDFA, for a historical account of communist jokes. As for Mallen, she was fascinated by the concept of how the fall of communism was
Documentary Culture
I didn’t get a chance to go to a large number of Hot Docs this year, but the ones I did get to see were looked at with the critical eye of a DOP. Docs with great visual content stand out from average fare. Some films, especially those shot on small camcorders, can be distractingly
The 18th annual Images Festival boasted a fresh artistic programmer—Jeremy Rigsby, courtesy of Windsor’s renowned Media City—and a stronger emphasis on internationalism. Along with that commitment to international content, this year’s festival showcased an exhaustive potpourri of documentary strategies and impulses, although not that many formally-straightforward documentaries. The emphasis on documenting and its problematics was
Many of us belong to that category of citizens poetically described as the “walking worried.” (Adelphia Communications: $2.5 billion bankruptcy.) We are those who realize that things have gone awry, but are not sure why, nor how they’ve become so squirrelly. (Conseco: $6.5 billion bankruptcy.) But in between being a taxi service for the kids,
Toronto’s film community was galvanized this spring by the lively presence of Errol Morris at Hot Docs, where he received that festival’s Outstanding Achievement Award. It’s just one of many honours that have been showered on this gifted filmmaker whose works include the Stephen Hawking portrait A Brief History of Time, the dark and funny “pet
Need an inspirational shot in the arm? Ever wonder how to bend technology to your will? Or how to explore complex questions of identity, politics, death? Then spend some time with a master in Catherine Lupton’s Chris Marker: Memories of the Future. In this accessible, compact volume, Lupton details Chris Marker’s entire oeuvre as writer, critic,
Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro’s Murderball, a bracingly unsentimental look at the culture of quadriplegic rugby, is not only mainstream documentary filmmaking of a high order, but also undoubtedly the best movie ever inspired by a story in Maxim magazine. A successful premiere at the 2005 Sundance festival, where the film was fêted with the Audience
This is a story about love—love between a man and a woman from vastly different worlds, love of family and love of multi-cultural Toronto. A good storyteller has the ability to gently open us up, touch our hearts and enhance the way we look at the world. But for real professionals, like Germany’s First Hand
As the lights went up in the small Berkeley auditorium, there was a stunned moment of silence, then several hands rose in the air: “Will this be on PBS?” It was a question I had been asked at almost every stop on my tour through California in 2003, during the weeks following the US invasion
“In a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.” — Joseph Brodsky On May 29, 1985, in the final of the annual tournament to decide Europe’s best football team, reigning champions, Liverpool, met Juventus of Turin at Heysel Stadium in Brussels. Thousands travelled to watch their heroes play. Kick-off was postponed