Farewell to Hot Docs

The 20th edition of the Hot Docs Festival is over.   It was a dizzying ten days for me as I squeezed in 24 films.  Only one film was disappointing (Fatal Assistance) and I rated the rest of them highly. However, there wasn't one blow-away film for me, as in other years, just solid quality throughout.

It's a great experience to participate in Hot Docs.  You meet lovely people in line, or next to you in the theatre.  You're greeted by numerous helpful volunteers.  The audience gives rousing applause when the credits mention the 700+ volunteers - there's nothing perfunctory about the applause, it's really heartfelt.  You swell with pride for what has been achieved in Toronto when so many film makers praise the festival as the best in the world, primarily because of the engagement of the audience.  Even allowing for a certain amount of generous spirit because they're thrilled their films have been chosen, you can hear the deep respect in their voices.

Canadians have been leaders in documentary film making, possibly stemming from the National Film Board's pioneering work in documentaries and the respect for its many Oscar nominees and winners.  As one of the statements in the pre-film credits puts it:

As jazz is to America, so documentary is to Canada

In the Shadow of the Sun

Having just seen one movie about the inherited disorder thalassemia, Blood Relative, I then went to another movie about albinism.  Albinism, like thalassemia, occurs when a child inherits two recessive genes from parents which result in their body producing no melanin.

Being totally white in equatorial Africa makes you stand out, to say the least. And the equatorial sun is especially hard on people who suffer from sun sensitivity because of the lack of melanin.  Then there's the persecution they face being labelled as a curse or sign of bad luck, resulting in taunt, bullying and beating.

What could be worse for an albino than being considered a sign of bad luck?  Having Tanzanian witch doctors spread the myth that body parts of albinos in magic potions can bring good luck.  This leads to a rash of albino killings and mutilations.  Josephat Torner, a Tanzanian albino undertakes a 4 year journey through villages of Tanzania, delivering the message that albinos are humans just like everyone and that the witch doctor's claims are false.

In the Shadow of the Sun follows Josephat's journey and the efforts (ultimately successful) of another young boy desperate to find a school that will accept him.  The movie also shows clips of President Kikweke speaking out against the killings and beefing up the police response.  In fact, Josephat himself is almost abducted in the middle of the night from his hotel room, saved only by the timely arrival of the police as he's being pushed into a car.

This film is linked with Blood Relative by more than its subject of a genetic disorder.  Just as reliance on religion and praying to the goddess was delaying treatment for a thalassemia patient in Blood Relative, here too belief in religion by people uneducated in the true explanation behind albinism causes them great pain.  It's such a cliche to say it, but education is so important in moving toward a more humane and tolerant world.

Good movie.  Sad, but with shoots of optimism.

Blood Relative

Having recently written a glowing review of The Menstrual Man, here's another tale of an Indian man passionate about making a difference in his country.  Vinay Shetty, or Vinay Uncle as he's known to the children he's helped, has championed the cause of children with thalassemia for 15 years as leader of the Think Foundation.

Thalassemia is an inherited genetic disease which affects the blood's ability to make haemoglobin and is usually found in the Mediterranean, West Asia and North Africa.  Without treatment, children have a low life expectancy, and even those being treated have a stunted growth, looking years younger than their real age.  Those with the disease must receive regular weekly blood transfusions, leading to an iron overload in their system, which in turn must be treated with expensive iron chelation medicine.

In Mumbai, there is no shortage of blood for those transfusions.  Shetty, who attended the film and took questions in the Q&A was asked to name the greatest accomplishment of his foundation so far, and he pointed to that availability of blood.  The next big challenge is the cost of the chelation medication, even though there is a generic version of the drug manufactured in India, and that is the focus of the foundation's fund-raising.  Nevertheless, children born with thalassemia in Mumbai have a life expectancy about 15 years longer than in the rest of India.

Shetty has been working hard to get government help, and since the completion of the movie, the Indian government did announce funding for chelation therapy for those below a certain income level.  That still leaves a band of people too poor to afford chelation but not poor enough to make the cut-off, but "it's a start" says Shetty.  It seemed to me that focussing on getting government support for genetic screening would be important; such screening is not as emotionally appealing as helping specific children with medication and is harder to get donors to step up to funding.

Shetty also works hard at education and outreach.  Tradition still reigns strongly in many Indian households, and we see one mother who believes that praying to the goddess will offer her daughter better protection than chelation therapy.  Shetty works to get her on treatment and back in school.

Thalassemia Major is caused when a child inherits the thalassemia recessive gene from each of its parents.  Shetty is also pushing for testing of siblings before marriage to see if they are carriers of the recessive gene to provide genetic counselling.

I looked up thalassemia after watching this movie.   The disease is most common in  the Mediterranean, West Asia and North Africa.  Genetic counselling, early screening and detection, and subsequent treatment mean it's not a problem in the west, but it's still a much bigger issue in less developed countries like India.  The prevalence of such a genetic disease raises the question of why natural selection has not led to its disappearance.  The reason, not mentioned in the movie, is that carrying the thalassemia recessive gene (known there as having thalassemia minor) confers a degree of protection against malaria, which means that gene is being selected for.  This is rather similar to sickle-cell anemia, which also seems to confer some resistance to malaria, and one article I read said these two diseases are related.  This was all very interesting information, but did not appear in the film.  I'm sure the film was stronger because of the resistance of the temptation to include that information, which would have been a distraction from the film's focus on Shetty's efforts.

The director of this film is award-winning Canadian filmmaker Nimisha Mukerji, niece of Vinay Shetty.  So the film really was about her 'Vinay uncle'!

Great film.

Good Ol' Freda

Freda Kelly then

As a teenager, Freda Kelly became a fervent fan of a local Liverpool band known as the Beatles.  She was convinced they'd make it big - by which she meant they might get to sing on the Empire stage in Liverpool.

When Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, asked her to be the Beatles' fan club secretary, she was in 17-year-old heaven.  Self-described as naive and immature, she had a talent for organization, a passion for answering all the mail addressed to the fan club, uncompromising loyalty to the Beatles, and a deftness in evading Epstein's periodic tantrums.  She was scrupulously honest, eschewing the signature stamp and funneling pictures to be autographed to 'the boys' in their spare moments.  She rescued hair from under the barber chair for those who wanted locks of hair.  She even sent a pillow case home for George to sleep on at the request of one avid fan.  She also believed in boundaries, and there were personal questions that would never be answered and secrets to kept.

Freda Kelly now

Good Ol' Freda follows Freda as she reminisces today about those heady times, revisiting scenes from the past, such as the balcony where the Beatles greeted their delirious Liverpudlian fans at their civic reception, and sorting through old scrapbooks.  Freda never got rich with her job, as evidenced by her modest home (somewhat to the chagrin of her daughter) but she obviously cherishes fond memories of her time.  She acknowledged having crushes on the Beatles, each of them on different days, and when probed about how close her relationship was she smiles coyly and declines to answer.

There was some great music from the era in the movie, though sadly not much Beatles music - presumably rights for Beatles music was beyond the budget of documentary filmmakers.  This was a sweet film and lots of fun to see.

Fatal Assistance

I'm sure there's a fascinating (albeit discouraging) story to be told about the ineffectiveness of massive international aid in Haiti's reconstruction after the earthquake.  The film Fatal Assistance is not it.

Narrated by people addressing 'my dear friend' (were these excerpts from real letters back home or were we the audience being addressed as dear friends?), the film is somewhat incoherent, rife with redundancies and irrelevancies (why was Duvalier's return included in the film without connecting it to the main theme of the story).   That previous run-on sentence is somewhat similar to the tenor of the movie.

William and the Windmill

My friends Sandy and Archie went to see William and the Windmill and contributed this review:

William and the Windmill was an excellent film - very inspiring and a tribute to human ingenuity.  The story is narrated by his mentor from the US who helps William and ultimately gets him from his small town in Malawi to high school and then Dartmouth College in the US after a drought in Malawi put his farming family into hunger and desperation, so they had to take their son out of school.

William, a teenager, was inspired to find a solution to the problems of his family and his village.  He went to the library to continue his learning and found a book about energy.  As a result, he builds a windmill in his small town using locally scrounged materials like his dad's bicycle generator and bottle caps.  Later, he goes back to his home town, and everyone is seeking his advice.  He initiates the building of a new public school because of his passion for education.

When we think about how so many grandiose plans fail, this reminds us how simple low cost solutions championed and executed by local can make such a difference to people's lives.

We particularly liked watching William's reaction to the modern outside world - fascinated but not intimidated.  The film ends when William begins college so his future is still to be seen.

We gave the film a 5/5.  An added bonus was that the film was at our local Fox theatre in the beach, part of Hot Docs effort to expand the footprint of the Festival to new parts of Toronto.  Our only disappointment was that the film makers didn't show up, so we missed having a Q&A.

Note from Lib:  William' story has its origins in the William's talk at TED Global in Arusha Tanzania in 2007.  Tom Reilly on the TED team was instrumental in getting William's book published and was the executive producer of the film.  Participant Films, always attendees at TED, were also involved.  Nice story of TED involvement in getting a story wide publicity. 

The Menstrual Man

If you want to bring sanitary pads to women in conservative, tradition-bound India  - and you're a man - you need a particular brand of vision, ingenuity, persistence, and guts.  A dash of charisma wouldn't hurt.  Muruganantham is such a man.  And The Menstrual Man is his story.

Innovators will tell you that the first ingredient of vision is asking the right questions.  Muruganantham asked two key questions.  Why don't Indian women use sanitary pads?  Cost was the answer.  And does it really matter if they use cloth instead?  Yes it does, because cloth is seldom washed and thoroughly dried in a sterile manner and is thus a conductor of many kinds of infection.  Furthermore, availability of truly sanitary pads might enable women to emerge from the isolation they now face during their menstrual periods.  Thus began his vision: provide sanitary pads for Indian women at a price they can afford.

Then came the ingenuity.  Muruganantham tried many ingenious approaches to the problem, testing with different materials before settling on using cellulose.  When he couldn't convince women to test his product, he personally wore a bladder full of pig blood to simulate having a menstrual period so he could test the pads himself.  He was able to lick the problem of manufacturing by designing a trio of devices, rather than one integrated machine as used in Western plants.

Muruganantham persisted over many years, before he found the solution to making acceptable pads at a third of the usual price, and also providing employment for the rural women running these machines.   He showed guts in persevering when he became an object of derision, and was treated like a pariah by even his wife and mother who both left him.

And then there's his charisma.  Uneducated and proud of it, Muruganantham is a compelling speaker, with a great sense of humour and a vibrant energy that leaps off the screen.  It's his unquenchable enthusiasm that makes this a great movie experience.

The War Room

This film about the War Room (so christened by Hillary) of Clinton's presidential election campaign in 1992 is considered a standard setter in political films.  It was filmed 20 years ago, so it's the same age as the Hot Docs Festival, and it was honoured with Cinema Eye's 2013 Legacy Award at the Festival.

Given little access to Clinton himself, the filmmakers focused on senior campaign strategist James Carville and communications director George Stephanopoulos.  For me, Carville was clearly the dominant character in the film.  A brilliant strategist, intense partisan and fierce competitor,  Carville was responsible for the campaign's unrelenting focus on three key issues: "It's the economy, stupid", "Don't forget healthcare" and "Change vs more of the same".  He is originally introduced in the movie as the Ragin' Cajun and he certainly comes across more as a country bumpkin than a slick political operator.

Stephanopoulos, the boyish preppie with a head full of hair, was a wonderful contrast to Carville.  He was an acolyte at the altar of his heros Clinton and Carville.  His speech honouring Carville on the day before the election bespoke his incredible respect for the man.  And his boyish wonderment that Clinton actually made it and he had to start calling him Mr. President instead of Governor was totally endearing.


As always, the Q&A was as interesting as the film.  Most of the other filmmakers carved their films down from over 200 hours of shooting.  Shot in the days of real (or maybe reel) film, Pennebaker and Hegedus only had a total of 40 hours of film, and lived in mortal fear of being ousted from the war room if they didn't behave discreetly and more or less sink into the background.  I'm really glad they brought this film back to Hot Docs for today's audience to see.  It was great.

More Shorts at Hot Docs

More short films:

The Impermanence of the Ordinary
Patrick Cummins has been photographing ordinary buildings in Toronto since 1968.  His 40,000 images capture the changes in buildings he's photographed multiple times over this period.  Fascinating - encourages one to seek out Cummins' photos and to look at Toronto with a more discerning eye.  Catch the film if you can.

The War at Home
Medium good film about one Canadian solder returning from Afghanistan and fighting to cope with PTSD.  It highlights the troubles in getting help and Dupree's efforts in founding Military Minds to foster PTSD awareness.

The Barrel
Medium good film about children playing in Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela near the oil rigs, and preparing for a paddling race in empty gasoline containers.  Some very nice photography and the child involved has a winning smile and a great attitude toward life.  I didn't think it delivered a well articulated 'punch line'.

Remote Area Medical

A huge truck rolls up and, with military precision, people start unloading equipment for a mobile medical clinic.  Outside, hundreds of people have been waiting hours in the hopes of scoring a ticket that entitles them to medical, dental and/or vision care.  The people are mostly poor, living in a struggling economy.  Somewhere in a developing country?  Nope.  This scene is taking place in the hills of Appalachia, just outside Knoxville Tennessee. 

Stan Brock

Remote Area Medical started when founder Stan Brock lived with Indian tribes in the Amazon and was horrified by their isolation from good medical care. He started Remote Area Medical in 1985 to address their needs.  However, as the organization has recognized the needs in the US, it has evolved to spend 60% of its time delivering health services to Americans who don't have access.

The film raises many questions.  How can the richest country in the world leave so many behind in terms of healthcare?  The filmmakers deliberately avoid politicizing the issues.  "That would have been a different film", they say.  It might also have alienated people on whom RAM depends for support.  In the Q&A, we were told that these people, staunch Republicans all, complain "Why can't we get rid of this Obamacare and get something in place like the Canadian system?", failing to see a connection between their voting patterns and health care issues in the US.

It seemed to me that there was room for creativity in attempting some preventative health education in these locations.  The people waiting in the parking, often camping overnight, were often sitting in pretty spiffy big pick-up trucks and SUVs.  Perhaps allocating some of their scarce money to a healthier lifestyle might have a huge payoff.  As we saw people streaming by whose only acquaintance with dental care was getting teeth pulled (and there were gory shots of piles of rotted, bleeding teeth from the day's work), I couldn't help wondering if adding an educational element to RAM's activities might have a huge payback.  Some creative education techniques, mandatory before you entered for treatment, might lead to better dental hygiene.  It might also have some impact on the woman who received news about a spot on her lung by lighting up a comforting cigarette.

It was a sad movie for a Canadian.  It should be a shocking movie for any American.

15 Reasons to Live

A chance encounter with an old acquaintance who had created a list of 15 reasons to live - such as love, solitude, art, individuality, humour, friendship, intoxication, praise, home, and work - inspired Alan Zweig to film short stories illustrating these themes.  A Montreal man who set out to walk around the world and his loving wife who gave him the room to do that.  The woman who fell in love with a lighthouse and then with the lighthouse keeper, and yearns to return as the museum keeper now that it's no longer operational.  Howard Engel, the Canadian author whose stroke makes it very difficult for him to read, but allows him to keep writing.

These short stories are more developed than the vignettes in The Garden of Eden.  The movie is thoroughly delightful.

Shorts at Hot Docs

Hot Docs screens some delightful shorts at the Festival.  There have been good ones over the years, but this year, I've particularly enjoyed the ones I've seen.

Like a Breath
This just might be my favourite short ever at Hot Docs.  A young woman alternates between performing wonderful modern dance and taking a cornucopia of pills and injections for her cystic fibrosis.  The sound track consists of her laboured breathing.  This 5 minute film really grabbed me.

Pouters
This film was a hilarious 17-minute romp through waste ground near Glasgow, following 'doo men' the dedicated, intense men who fly pigeons for sport.  The idea is to have your hen attract a rival's doo, the male, to your doocot, and then pull a net trap over the doo to capture him.  In an area with high unemployment, it's a cheap sport for people with lots of time on their hands.  Almost as hilarious as the antics of the 'doo men' was the need for subtitles for the thick Glaswegian accent - even with the subtitles there, I sometimes found it hard to separate out the words.  (For more information on 'doo fleein' see this report in the Scotsman.)

Yellow Sticky Notes
8 minutes.  15 sticky notes.  15 to-do lists.  15 animators.   What a great idea!  And what a rich variety of animations of their to-do lists, mixing practicality and whimsy.

The Garden of Eden

The Garden of Eden is a lovely collection of vignettes about the regulars who frequent the so-called Garden of Eden at Sakhne, a lovely spring-fed lake in Israel.  The stories are mostly poignant stories of loss: the rueful divorced man who swims every day to fill the lonely hours between work and bedtime; the wistful Arab with a wife he 'gets along with OK'who gave up too easily on his relationship with the love of his life, a Jewish girl; the ticket-taker who wonders why she took 33 years to leave her abusive husband; the man who still struggles with guilt that he survived a war that killed his brother and best friend.

A charming movie.  I had the good fortune to meet interesting people in line, one of whom had lived near Sakhne and had been there.  He said it was a lovely as it looked in the film.  Now I want to go there too.

Expedition to the End of the World

Climate change opens a passage into a previously inaccessible fjord in Greenland and a diverse group of scientists and artists voyage there to study the animals, search for archeological remains, take samples of the permafrost, and muse on the meaning of life.  I loved the mix of science and art, and the humour and irony so seldom seen in a scientific documentary.

Did it ultimately work?  The scenery was breathtaking - rugged and imposing - while the philosophizing was opaque, at least to me and one of the other characters in the movie.  I think this would have been better at 60 minutes than it was at 90 minutes.

Before the Revolution

The Israelis are showing the film Raid on Entebbe on the outside wall of their embassy in Tehran, and Iranians are watching from the rooftops and balconies, weeping at the death of an Israeli commando and three Israeli hostages and cheering at the ultimate defeat of the Arab hijackers.  Really?  Iranians cheering Israelis?  The movie opens with this story told by a former security guard at the Israeli embassy.  Startling to say the least.

Before the Revolution told a story I'd never heard before, of the close relationship between Iran and Israel during the Shah's reign.  Israel sought a friendship with a neighbour in a region where they felt they could use all the friends they could get.  Iran provided Israel with oil and Israel 'provided Iran with everything else', but especially weapons and infrastructure.

The Israeli community included a variety of people.  Mossad officers who had helped guide the creation of the Iranian secret police and intelligence service were there to co-ordinate intelligence and to hobnob with Iran's powerful generals.  The rest were mostly there to build Iranian infrastructure, to live a highly privileged life in Tehran and to salt away money for their return to Israel.

Director Dan Shadur grew up in Tehran and weaves in family videos and reminiscences to give us a picture of the charmed life of Israelis in Iran, until they ignominiously fled after the return of Khomeni.  As one man put it, it really rankled to have to accept American help for that escape.

Before the Revolution once again underlined the risks of consorting with despots.  You may regret the hands those weapons fall into!

This was another good movie.  Well worth seeing.

Which Way is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington

Tim Hetherington was a tall, lanky man with a craggy handsome face, a winning smile and an uncanny capacity for connecting with people.  A photojournalist who covered conflict zones, his main goal was to connect with people he was photographing.  He felt you had to be more than a photographer, you had to be a participant.

His initial foray was covering the revolution in Liberia, capturing in action the young men whose sole uniform consisted of rust-coloured T-shirts with their cause identified on the front.  And he was hooked - not so much on the process of shooting pictures of the weapons and the gore - but on trying to understand the young men involved.

Although his sympathies tended to lie with underdog rebels, he spent a year with an American platoon deployed in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.  This period solidified his conviction that war created a common bond among men unmatched in the rest of their lives.  His friend and colleague Jim Brabazon remarked in the Q&A following the film that as long as there are young men yearning for such a bond, there will always be the raw material for creating wars.

Hetherington and his colleague Sebastian Junger's film Restrepo was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2010.  Hetherington traded in his combat gear for a tux and walked through a surreal Hollywood with his fantastically beautiful girlfriend.

Despite making a decision to give up the risky life of the conflict journalist, he was irresistibly drawn to Libya to cover the revolution there.  In footage taken in a jeep with other journalist comrades, Tim is heard to ask "Which way is the front line from here?", and this becomes the title of the elegy Junger films in honour of his friend. but sadly lost his life after a piece of shrapnel pierced his femoral artery.  Tim's life could have been saved if one of the journalists of rebels with him had been trained how to deal with such trauma, and in his memory, Junger has started a not-for-profit called RISC - Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues.

In the Q&A, there was discussion about the increase of young untrained freelancers going to conflict zones, and a reference to the fact that major media companies are not buying photos from freelancers.  Brabazon bristled at the idea that this might be because of ethical values of the media.  He pointed out that they'd always buy a great photo after the fact, but didn't want to 'commission' it beforehand, in order to avoid any issues of liability, or the cost of insuring the photojournalist.

This was a very good film indeed and I highly recommend it.  And Restrepo is now very high on my list of 'must see' films too.