Festivals: Hot Docs
Hot Docs 2024 Review: IMMORTALS Follows Iraqi Youth on the Frontlines
Swiss director Maja Tschumi presents a compelling exploration of the lives of Iraq's youth navigating the post-US invasion landscape, through the lens of the pivotal 2019 October Revolution.
SATAN WANTS YOU Interview: Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams Talk Moral Panics
Moral panics have been with us as a species since time immemorial. From the persecution of European pagans at the end of the Roman empire in the Fourth Century, to the Salem witch trials in New England in the 17th...
Hot Docs 2023 Review: ANGEL APPLICANT Reveals the Art of Survival
Ken A. Meyer directed, created an emotionally engaging, culturally relevant, and socially influential double portrait of artist Paul Klee and himself, dealing with the same disease.
Hot Docs 2022 Review: GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE, Lovely Contemplation on Nature, Filmmaking, Human Existence
Jacquelyn Mills' documentary is one of the loveliest feature debuts in years.
Friday One Sheet: A BROKEN HOUSE
New key art from Akiko Stehrenberger is always a thing to celebrate; here for Jimmy Goldblum's short documentary, A Broken House (Hiraeth). A Syrian Architecture student in the United States, who smashed his own models meticulously handmade of his Damascus...
Friday One Sheet: ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE
You may not guess that this week's poster is for a documentary on police body cameras. It is striking, nonetheless. The One Sheet resembles Mercury orbiting the sun (indeed, it could very well be a minimal poster art for Danny...
Hot Docs 2021 Review: MAU Designs Rules For Life
Watching the Bergman Brothers' wide-reaching, yet fleet documentary, Mau, on the life and career of Canadian super-star architect and designer Bruce Mau, I could not help but think of the final scene of Shaolin Soccer. After having won the big...
Hot Docs 2021 Review: WUHAN WUHAN Is An Engaging Display Of Empathy
Yung Chang's quietly effective documentary Wuhan Wuhan is both a time travelling machine and an empathy machine. Straddling the cinematic line between Frederick Wiseman and Robert Altman, high praise that is both obvious and merited, Chang's film takes us back to February...
Friday One Sheet: A Tale Of Two Surf Docs, BANGLA SURF GIRLS and NO SURF ON MARS
Today is a study of contrast in posters for surfing documentaries. The first, Bangla Surf Girls, is a study in blue and pink and pastel for a crowd pleasing story of three female teenagers from Bangladesh who trade domestic drudgery...
Hot Docs 2020 Review: THE WALRUS AND THE WHISTLEBLOWER, Attachment and Amusement
I doubt there is any Ontarian of a certain age who couldn't sing you the jingle for Marineland. The commercial was in regular rotation when I was growing up in Toronto: images of whales, walrus, deer, and other wildlife and...
Friday One Sheet: ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENEZUELA
The HotDocs film festival in Toronto opened yesterday, in its virtual edition, and it seems fitting to offer key art from a documentary. The poster for Once Upon A Time In Venezuela simply frames a still from the film, two...
Hot Docs 2020 Exclusive: Premiering The Trailer For DOPE IS DEATH, Fighting Heroin Addiction and The System in 1970s New York
Hot Docs Film Festival has gone digital this Spring in wake of the pandemic shaking most of the World to its knees. Starting on May 28th films can be screened online including the Canadian premiere of Mia Donovan`s Dope is...
Hot Docs 2019 Review: HONEYLAND Intertwines Humanity and Mother Earth in a Melancholy, Universal Story
We first meet Haditze walking precariously cliff-side to harvest a wild colony of bees. With the sun gorgeously settling in on the valley, she makes her way back to the isolated homestead she keeps with her infirm octogenarian mother. It...
Hot Docs 2019 Review: COLD CASE HAMMARSKJÖLD Is Hella-Good Storytelling
"This could either be the world's biggest murder mystery, or the world's most idiotic conspiracy theory." Two years before the JFK assassination, on the 18th of September 1961, the world was shocked by the suspicious death of the second serving...
Friday One Sheet: PUSH
Hot Docs is coming to Toronto, and what better way to celebrate that than with a documentary on the increasing urban-global housing crisis (of which several Canadian cities qualify). Fredrik Gertten's documentary examines the 'gentrification' issue in a variety of...
Hot Docs 2018 Review: THE RUSSIAN JOB Makes You Laugh on the Inside
How is this for an elevator pitch: What if Roy Andersson directed Roger & Me? No pitch is necessary, because a collaboration between a Czech journalist, Petr Horký, and freelance photographer (and regular contributor to the New York Times) Milan...
Hot Docs 2018 Review: CERES Connects Children to the Land
With so much of the worlds population living in cities, where all the food comes from the grocery store, or some variant of urban market, immediate, highly proximate documentaries such as Janet Van den Bran's Ceres are essential. She follows...
Hot Docs 2018 Review: TUNGRUS, 15 Minutes of Tragicomic Absurdity
"If anybody wants to adopt a rooster, do your research, and as with all pets, be prepared for life to become hell." Tungrus examines the perils of pet ownership in a middle-class Mumbai flat, when a family adopts a 2...
Hot Docs 2018 Review: SHIRKERS, Weaponized Narcissism
Sandi Tan is the writer, director, narrator, and star of Shirkers, the documentary slash true crime story of her first film (also called Shirkers) which she made with her high school pals, and a mysterious American benefactor. The benefactor, named...
Hot Docs 2018 Review: DREAMING MURAKAMI, Found In Translation
The perfect sentence does not exist. Language is a way of thinking, but it is a boundary, not the infinite. Perhaps, there is a perfect thought. Or a perfect dream. There is very likely a perfect musical note. Language remains...
