North America's largest documentary film festival just announced its full line-up and schedule. Hot Docs returns to Toronto in its 23rd year, and as per usual, it features a massive number of titles for lovers of non-fiction cinema: 232 features and shorts from 51 countries, to be exact.
Offering a slew of new docs, including Jay Cheel's time travel reverie How To Build A Time Machine, De Palma, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's feature interview with the film director on his 50 year career, ESPN's epic 7.5 hour OJ Simpson: Made In America, The Ross Brothers 'pep rally' doc Contempory Color and Ferne Perlstein's The Last Laugh, a primer on how to (or not to) make jokes about the Holocuast featuring Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Sarah Sliverman and surviors of Nazi internment camps.
Scroll through the gallery below for a ScreenAnarchy centric overview of what to look out for if you are in Toronto between April 28th and May 8th and are looking to take in some of the best documentary films (and experimental hybrids) playing around the world.
Hot Docs also acts as a 'best of' from Sundance, and indeed there are screenings of Werner Herzog's Lo and Behold, Weiner (the oh so aptly named fallen politician), the outlandish New Zealand mystery Tickled, Kirsten Johnson's 25 year travelogue, Cameraperson.
Also, Matt Johnson's NASA shot, genre defying, Operation Avalanche, delightfully finagled its way into the line-up.
Furthermore, the festival has been doing superb work in terms of documentary retrospectives, this year highlighting Steve James (Hoop Dreams, The Interuptors, Life Itself) as well as a look back at Madonna's groundbreaking Truth or Dare, which turns 25 this year(!).
And for fans of do or die DIY cinema, the festival is screening Chris Smith's 1999 classic American Movie, a humourous and inspiring look at the making of Mark Borchardt's Coven (which doesn't rhyme with 'oven.')
How To Build A Time Machine
Canadian director Jay Cheel previously introduced the world to Captain Video, a quirky St. Catherines hoser who pre-dated the Jackass boys with his body mangling stunts on Cable Access TV, with Beauty Day. He returns with a meditation on Time Travel, father-son relationships, and devotion to ones life pursuits. Cheel brings a real sense of craft and visual splendor in this wide-screen documentary that follows both physicist Ronald Mallett (who was at one point to be the subject of a Spike Lee doc) and animator-slash-craftsman Rob Niosi (Peewee's Playhouse, CBC) as he builds a replica of the main prop from the 1960 George Pal classic, H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.
Contemporary Color
The prolific Ross Brothers have been putting out exceptional Fred Wiseman-esque fly-on-the-wall docs year after year, note the diversity and quality of their last three, Tchoupitoulas, The River, and Western.
Colour guard, is a competitive art form that has evolved out of military tradition, which fuses athletic team sport, acrobatics and pep rally. Contemporary Color Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne organized this large scale art project that The Ross Brothers shoot, an event that features pop-musical performances synchronized to North America's best "color guard" teams.
The Last Laugh
This documentary tries to get to the bottom of how far is too far for a joke to go. Case in point, how does one make jokes of the Holocaust? Various comedians, from Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks to Sarah Silverman and Gilbert Gottfried all have different takes. Mix in actual Holocaust survivors, critical thinkers, and meditation on free speech, and you've got yourself a literal, cinematic take on Godwin's Law.
De Palma
If you are a regular and sharp eyed festival goer at the Toronto International Film Festival, you might spot Brian De Palma frequenting public screenings often. Director Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow examine the idiosyncratic auteur of voyeurism, sleaze, the split screen and the Hitchcock homage. The man has a 50 year career worth looking back on.
Beware The Slenderman
The Slenderman started out as an internet meme in 2009, a thin, unnaturally tall man with a blank face, wearing a black suit, but things got real scary in 2014 when two 12-year-old girls, lured their friend into the woods with the intent to stab her to death.
Irene Taylor Brodsky's doc looks to examine the nature of odd-ball and unfiltered information on the web and how it can go inexplicably, horribly wrong, when exposed to very young children.
Lo And Behold
Subtitled "Reveries In A Connected World," iconoclast director Werner Herzog takes on the whole of the Internet, from cyberbullying to artificial intelligence in 98 minutes of interviews, ideas, and his idiosyncratic style of voice over. He tracks down some nutters and quirky scientists through 10 chapters makes you look at the world of instant global communication in a slightly different way.
Operation Avalanche
Our own Ben Umstead labelled guerrilla-shot period-conspiracy faux-doc Operation Avalanche both a love letter to cinema, and a warning on the obsessive nature inherent in filmmaking.
Matt Johnson's The Dirties turned a lot of heads in his verite look at two bullied cinephile kids as they progress their way towards becoming school shooters, and he has upped the ante here by surreptitiously filming a right on NASA's property, by pretending to be a tourist.
O.J. Simpson: Made In America
Those who have been watching the The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, and wish to take a break from John Travolta, Cuba Gooding Jr. and 'Ross from Friends', can do so, but it is a big break!
ESPN's 5 episode, 7.5 hour documentary on the subject of the most famous televised trial in America is described by the HotDocs programme as "part riveting biopic, part legal thriller, this addictive, binge-worthy series is must-see viewing for fans of true crime hits like Serial and Making a Murderer."
Nuts!
Penny Lane’s look at the use of Goat gonads to improve virility is a lovely film, full of quirky animation and old-timey storytelling. Lively animation pulls together this Sundance Award–winning story of science, politics, miracles and fraud.
All These Sleepless Nights
Roaming Warsaw’s summer streets from public squares to makeshift clubs, two adventurous young friends explore the boundaries of childhood and adulthood while pushing life to the limit, their unfettered vitality bursting through a city still emerging from its traumatic past.
A Center-Sud Tale
A great thing about documentaries, is that they let you feel a time and place, in this particular case, a neighborhood. A Center-Sud Tale is an urban fairy tale of generosity, creativity and love in Montreal's poorest neighbourhood is shown through the lens of a lifelong resident who calls it home. Focusing on his mother and children, their family finds virtue in their forced frugality.
Weiner
The downfall doc can often be dreary, and our own Jason Gorber expected something along the lines of Alex Gibney’s overly arch Client 9, about Eliot Spitzer’s fall from grace, when he caught Weiner at Sundance. Instead, in scant few weeks during Anthony Weiner’s 2013 mayoral campaign, filmmakers Elyse Steinberg and Josh Kriegman capture both the compelling image of the man and his secondary downfall, an amazing tumble caught almost in real time.
Tickled
A journalist pursues a story on “competitive endurance tickling” after seeing a bizarre video online, but his inquiries are met with such hostility that he doggedly digs deeper. What he finds is bigger and more bizarre than anything you're likely to imagine.
Fear Itself
Constructed entirely from existing horror films, Fear Itself is a personal journey through fear and cinema that asks whether horror movies know us better than we know ourselves.
Angry Inuk
Angry Inuk is about how Inuit hunters in tiny remote communities in the high arctic are negatively affected by animal rights groups protesting against the Canadian east coast seal hunt that happens a thousand kilometres away.
Director Alethea Arnaquq-Baril uses her filmmaking skills to organize and embolden a new tech-savvy generation of Inuit to stand up for their rights. Establishing #sealfie on Instagram and skillfully employing social media, they lobby legislators and expose misinformation.
Koneline
When the festival guide says the doc was shot in Cinemascope, well, then that doc gets our interest, every time.
Director Nettie Wild takes a wide-screen look at the people and the land of Northern British Columbia where the Tahltan First Nation has lived for centuries and are now competing with Copper and Gold Miners, as well as big-game hunter outfits who refer to the region as "Canada's Serengeti."
Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru
Academy Award winning director, and Hot Docs regular, Joe Berlinger (Whitey, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Paradise Lost Trilogy, Brother's Keeper ) takes a look at superstar motivational speaker Tony Robbins and goes back-stage on his "Date With Destiny" seminar which drew huge crowds of curious, or hopeful, or deluded attendees.
As part of their "Big Ideas" series, there will be an extended on-stage discussion between Berlinger and Robins during one of the screenings at the festival.
Brothers
There are two films playing at Hot Docs with the title Brothers.
The first is a Boyhood style affair shot over eight years in Norway. Two boys have their lives captured by their filmmaker mom, who wanted to document their emerging personalities from toddlers to teens.
The second is involves octogenarian siblings, who managed to escape a Soviet gulag in their youth and relocate to Poland, but are unable to escape each other in old age.
They both sound excellent, so why not see both?
Cameraperson
Our own Jason Gorber raved that this was "the best film I saw Sundance!" Kirsten Johnson’s travelogue through 25 years of filmmaking is both exhilarating and enlightening, providing one of the most sage and savvy looks at how nonfiction cinema is shaped by those that make it. It’s a post-modern tour-de-force, and what’s outside the frame or between the cuts is often even more compelling.