Doc a Day

The Pied Piper of Hützovina

2008-08-04T00:32:00.007-04:00

Every documentary filmmaker has to be at least slightly in love with their subject. You don't have to subscribe to Albert Maysles' "love is all you need" approach to filmmaking, but some kind of love - ranging from universal human empathy to the kind of obsession it sometimes takes to get a film made - is pretty much a requirement.

In The Pied Piper of Hützovina (which I watched via the excellent new on-line rental service Jaman), director Pavla Fleischer takes that to 11. The film is about Eugene Hütz, frontman of the band Gogol Bordello. He's a Ukrainian-born, New York-based punk rocker obsessed with understanding his Roma heritage and reviving Gypsy music. He's also impossibly charismatic - the kind of guy women flutter to like moths to a flame.

Fleischer is one of those moths. She meets Hütz by chance on a car ride in Eastern Europe, falls head over heels, and decides that making a film about him would be a good way to get close to him. This we learn in her somewhat rueful narration over shaky video of that fateful car ride. Young Pavla looks so in love, we just know her fall is going to be harsh.

A year later, Fleischer has gotten Hütz to agree to the film project - a road trip through Ukraine and Russia to explore his roots and meet his musical heroes. But when she and her camera crew meet up with him to start the journey, it quickly becomes clear that Hütz has his own agenda and wants no part of her romantic plan.

To Fleischer's credit, she perseveres, and the film she ends up with isn't bad at all, if a little thin. Hütz delivers on the charisma part, jamming with Roma musicians in the Carpathian mountains, speaking seriously and emotionally about his passion for their music and culture, and arranging visits with various official keepers of the Gypsy music flame, not all of which go the way he expects. But there isn't much of an arc here; he's a guy with a guitar, on a quickie trip, with no goal and little at stake. So the story becomes as much Fleischer's as Hütz's: her disappointment, her attempts to stay connected and rescue her film. She doesn't protect herself or soft-pedal any of it, and her charm and honesty help us forgive the self-indulgence of using filmmaking as a seduction strategy.

I'm sure Fleischer learned a lot in the course of making this film: don't let your personal feelings cloud your judgment as a filmmaker; when you're directing in the field, don't dance until you're finished shooting; think through your structure and scenes before you shoot, or you'll end up having to put yourself in the film to recue it; etc.

She rescued her film pretty well. But on her next project, I bet she'll go easier on the love.

High Tech Soul

2008-08-02T22:51:00.005-04:00

OK, so I'm doing research. And at the moment, this involves watching a bunch of films about dance music and nightclubs. So tonight I'm watching High Tech Soul, which bills itself as "the first documentary to tackle the deep roots of techno music."

What a mess! Clip after clip after clip, no thesis, no story development, and the organizational style of a high-school class presentation. Of absolutely no interest anyone but the most committed fans. I am 25 minutes into the film and there has not yet been a music sequence used as anything more than a few seconds of b-roll. I've heard about the history of Detroit (the first nine minutes), and seen a series of brief clips about DJs, promoters, etc. I still don't know what makes techno techno, what makes it exciting, how it relates to its musical forebears, or why I should care at all.

The best film I've seen about a subgenre of popular music is Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, which addresses both fans and non-fans, doesn't take itself too seriously, and at the same time tries to answer all the common questions about the genre. In comparison, High Tech Soul is strictly amateur hour.

Party Monster: The Shockumentary

2008-08-01T23:41:00.005-04:00

These days, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato are kings of reality TV, producing such shows as "Sex Change Hospital" and "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal." But they started out as documentary filmmakers, getting their first major attention with a doc and then a feature film about New York's king of the "Club Kids," Michael Alig, who's now doing 10-to-20 for killing a fellow partyer. The feature-film version of Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin, is better known, but here at Doc-a-Day, we believe fact is more interesting than fiction, so we looked at Party Monster: The Shockumentary, released in 1998.

The story is a familiar one: gay kid comes to New York from the midwest, drops out of college, gets involved in the downtown party scene, the drugs flow, bad shit happens, and it all ends in tears. Lou Reed built a career on songs about this type of thing, and you can save some time by getting a copy of Transformer and forgetting about this derivative 80s scene.

But I guess if you came along in the 80s, as Bailey and Barbato did, you missed the whole Warhol Factory thing, and this was all you had. And what thin gruel it is. Party Monster feels long at 57 minutes not just because the Club Kids are unidimensional, but because it tells a story that everybody already knows. The film provides no perspective or insight, and lets barely coherent drug addicts - including Alig himself - prattle on and on. There is no art in this film, no metaphor, no psychological insight; just a predictable tabloid story without a single surprise. We've seen it all before on Geraldo, where the Club Kids were apparently frequent guests. Party Monster treads the same ground, scratching no deeper than insights such as "they wanted to make fun of consumer culture and be part of it at the same time." There is a story to be told here, but Bailey and Barbato weren't interested in exploring it. They were just practicing for their brilliant career as reality kings.

Iraq in Fragments

2008-07-20T03:50:00.009-04:00

It's not true. Doc-a-Day is not dead. It's just been sleeping while I worked my fingers to the bone finishing up two contracts while starting a new project. Finally, in this brief window between work and vacation, I've managed to watch a film.

I'd long been meaning to see Iraq in Fragments, which I missed at Hot Docs and during its theatrical run. And so, when reader Contessie mentioned it in a comment last month, I figured it was time.

Directed, photographed, written and scored by James Longley, Iraq in Fragments is an anthology film - three stories, from three different parts of Iraq, documenting the impact of the war on people from three main groups: Sunni in Baghdad, Shia in Sadr City, and Kurds in Kurdistan. The three segments are united primarily by Longley's remarkable cinematography. The first thing you notice is the super-saturated colours - everything is more vivid, more intense than you expect. But that's not the most important thing. The camera roams the streets, constantly shifting point of view from observer to participant. It's as if, in the midst of the chaos, it's impossible not to be a participant.

The style is particularly effective in the first segment, a profile of an 11-year-old boy who works at an auto repair shop in Baghdad. This is a near-perfect short film in itself: intimate, full of surprises and remarkable access. The camera is in the middle of the action, seemingly invisible to the participants, who never give any sense of playing to it. The boy speaks only in voiceover, a technique from the days of film that's sadly little used today, when tape is cheap and all interviews have both sound and picture. The drama is as much in the contrast between what the boy says and what we see happening. Longley clearly stuck around long enough to become part of the scenery. The camera is just there; the boy, his boss and the men who sit around drinking tea and talking politics seem to just go on with their lives, oblivious to it.

Part 2 takes place among the followers of Shia cleric Mukhtada al-Sadr, known as the Mehdi Army. The strength of this piece is the access. Longley gets amazing footage of a nighttime self-flaggelation parade, but even more remarkable is a raid by a group of armed, masked thugs on a street market, where they beat and arrest everyone they suspect of selling alcohol. The scene is punctuated by the constant sound of gunfire - it's terrifying. Later, the wife of one of the arrested men pleads for his release, her child crying from hunger. And all of this is on camera. But on the whole, this segment doesn't work as well as the first one, mainly because there's no central character. At the beginning, a man tells his story in voiceover. We think we'll see him soon enough, but we never do. "Is it him?" we wonder every time the camera settles on a new person... but we never find out. Other voices appear and disappear, but we never really get to know anyone. Longley is a distant observer in the Shia community; it seems like he never got close to anyone, although they let him witness some amazing things.

The third segment, in Kurdish territory, starts off beautifully -- two boys, best friends, playing together and dreaming about the future. Somehow, the scene reminded me of Satyajit Ray, who had a way of capturing the languor and innocence of childhood just before things get serious and ugly. But again, as soon as Longley veers away from the boys, the segment becomes confused and unsatisfying. There's an election. But what does it have to do with the story of the boys? Eventually, he brings the story back to the kid who will never get to medical school... but not as elegantly as he might have.

On the whole, Iraq in Fragments is an incredible achievement, both for its cinematography and the access Longley was able to get. I'm looking forward to seeing Sari's Mother, the fourth chapter of Iraq in Fragments, which he turned into a stand-alone short.

One more thing, to answer Contessie's question in the comments to the previous post. The reason this film works with three separate stories is that Longley doesn't try to interweave them. Each stands alone, and the filmmaker doesn't try to mess around with parallel storylines, segues, etc. The effect of the three stories is cumulative - and, for me at least, this works much better.

Losing My Religion

2008-06-18T12:59:00.005-04:00

Years ago, I tried to make a film consisting of three interlocking stories that shared a theme. It didn't work out so well. The stories had fit together so beautifully in my head and on paper, but on film it just wasn't going to work. They were too different, the thematic links were turning out to be tenuous, I was trying to shoehorn three stories to fit an idea I'd had months before... a recipe for much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth. Thanks to some luck and a supportive team, I was able to salvage the film by re-thinking it completely, but I vowed never to try this again - no more threes.

This is the first thing I thought of when watching Rama Rau's Losing My Religion. The film, made for the doc strand on Omni, the multicultural broadcaster, is an exploration of the way people's faith changes in a new cultural environment. The three subjects are: a woman who came to Canada as a child and has rejected her parents' Ismaili Muslim faith, a Sikh boxer who battled the Canadian Amateur Boxing Association for the right to compete while bearded, and a man from the former Portuguese colony of Goa who's converting from Catholicism to Hinduism after studying the colonial history of this Indian state.

On paper, it works: the apostate, the devout, and the convert - a nice triangle. I can imagine how the proposal was written. But in reality, these stories are so different that it's difficult to see how they belong together in one film. The Ismaili woman argues with her mother and thinks about how she and her Danish husband will raise their soon-to-be-adopted child. There seems to be little at stake for her: her religion was lost long ago, and neither her disappointed but sweet parents nor her secularist husband seem to be making a big issue of it. The boxer simply recounts his (long-ago, it turns out) battle with the boxing authorities, but we learn little about the nature of his devotion to his Sikh faith. Did having to take a stand bring him closer to his faith? Or was he just being stubborn, as befits a young boxer? And the convert... well, his main interest is the history of Goa, which strays very far from the theme of transformation in the diaspora. His motivation and concerns appear to be very different from those of the other subjects, and while he's definitely a familiar type of immigrant intellectual, his change of faith just doesn't strike me as fitting into this film at all.

Losing My Religion is about three very different intellectual and emotional journeys, but it never gives a sense of the internal struggle that people who take faith seriously go through on their way to losing it. Perhaps that's why we don't see the commonality among the three subjects -- the struggle would have been the common element that would have tied them together. Instead, it feels like all they have in common is their South Asian heritage.

Stylistically, the film has its virtues. The boxer is a quirky little man (yes, little - he fights in the light flyweight division) who drives a freakish vintage lowrider. And the camera moves nicely with him as he drives, runs, trains, etc. But there is less opportunity for a cinematic treatment of the other subjects, and they pale in comparison.

So all in all, my advice to any young filmmaker contemplating a film about three unconnected characters: think very, very hard before you shoot a frame. Then find one great character and forget about the rest.

4 Little Girls

2008-06-15T23:46:00.013-04:00

All the discussion about whether I have an obligation to be nice made me question my choice of films. It's easy to fill the blog with posts about so-so Hot Docs screenings and films chosen almost at random from the firehose barrage of docs on TV. But the point of this blog is to learn. And while it's true that as much can be learned from a film's failures as from its successes, it's only true up to a point. Truffaut learned his craft by watching Hitchcock, not Ed Wood.

So I decided it was time to raise the bar and watch some better docs. I turned to the precariously balanced pile of DVDs by the TV, and picked 4 Little Girls, Spike Lee's 1997 film about a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Added bonus: the film was shot by Ellen Kuras, whose directorial debut, The Betrayal, was my hands-down favourite at Hot Docs.

4 Little Girls has an arresting opening sequence: Kuras's beautifully impressionistic shots of the cemetery where the girls are buried, cut with archival footage of protests and photographs of the funeral, and set to "Birmingham Sunday," Joan Baez's haunting song about the bombing. The mood is established, and we have all the background we need. We then meet Maxine and Chris McNair, parents of Denise, one of the four victims. They are the heart of the film, telling deeply personal stories about their own lives as well as their late daughter's, who feels very much alive to them still. Lee uses the extreme close-up to great effect: the faces sometimes fill almost the whole screen, so that we are literally face-to-face with the participants. The handheld close-up is a powerful tool, often as powerful as Errol Morris's Interrotron gaze. (Though I imagine this probably works better on television than on the big screen.)

Lee interweaves the stories of the four girls and their families with the story of Birmingham, one of the most racist, violent cities in the segregated South. He takes us inside the families - parents trying to explain segragation to their young children, slowly getting involved in the civil-rights movement, often prodded by their own teenagers - and the community as a whole, which was in the process of mobilizing for a hard-fought and dangerous challenge to the racists who ran the town. By focusing as much on the social setting as on the families, Lee creates a much richer picture of the community that was targeted than we normally see in this type of countdown-to-the-event historical doc.

This made me think of course of another film I saw recently, Sturla Gunnarsson's Air India 182, which is airing this weekend on CBC. Lee and Gunnarsson make some very different choices: Lee focuses on the families' daily lives and relationships, and on the community; Gunnarsson, on the victims' last few hours, the suspects and the investigation. Lee uses impressionistic imagery - family photographs shot handheld, creating a home-movie effect, archival footage tinted blue; Gunnarsson shoots detailed, literal re-enactments. Both use graphic images of the victims, Lee flash cutting to photos of the girls on the autopsy slab, Gunnarsson showing news footage of bodies being pulled out of the ocean. Both are powerful films, but I think 4 Little Girls is a more complete emotional experience: rather than dwelling on the search for justice, the investigation, the trial -- the Mississippi Burning approach -- Lee chooses to tell the story of the girls and their community, an unembellished, personal and direct approach. Air India 182 is a very competent summary of the story that's appeared in the papers over the last 20 years, with few new revelations. 4 Little Girls is a work of cultural history.

There is one misstep in 4 Little Girls that shows just how powerful a pure look into the past can be. About two thirds of the way through the film, Lee brings up a series of church burnings that happened in the South in the mid-1990s, when the film was being made, and includes comments from three people who had absolutely nothing to do with Birmingham in the 1960s: Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby and (improbably) the late Reggie White, an NFL football player turned preacher. It's a jarring turn, and in his attempt to bring the story into the present day Lee wrenches us out of the world he's so painstakingly created. There's no need to make these explicit connections. When you tell the story well enough, the audience can make its own emotional and thematic connections to the present.

Overall, though, 4 Little Girls is a very satisfying film - cinematic both visually and as an emotional experience.

Standard Operating Procedure

2008-05-28T01:15:00.012-04:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks, quite apart from the hilarity of the comments posted all over this blog by the pseudonymous Winston and my e-mail correspondence with Korbett Matthews, producer-director-writer-cinematographer of The Man Who Crossed the Sahara, who desperately wanted to know my real name, so that he could look up my films and take his revenge. My advice to Korbett: stop obsessing about what other people think of you and make a better film next time. Success is the best revenge.

All this, especially the work I get paid to do, distracted me from posting about the film I'd been looking forward to most this year, Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure.

Morris's previous film, The Fog of War, is one of my favourite docs of all time - as close to a perfect documentary as I have seen. Gates of Heaven and The Thin Blue Line are also on my personal top-10 list. And the buzz around Standard Operating Procedure - reported $5-million budget, a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, a simultaneous book release - suggested this film was expected to make a big impact.

Instead, the film is already gone from theatres here in Toronto. When I saw it two weeks ago, in its second week of release, there were six people in the theatre on a Thursday evening, including my group of four. Across North America, SOP isn't even close to matching the box office success of this year's Canadian doc sleeper hit Up the Yangtze. What went wrong? As far as I can see, a lot more than just the fact that it's damn near impossible to get the public to watch yet another documentary about Iraq.

It's difficult not to judge Standard Operating Procedure against Morris's other work, and by the standards he himself has set. Compared to most films by mere mortals of the documentary world, it's an extremely impressive work: Morris throws his unparalleled interviewing skills and visual imagination at the story, and these things carry it a long way. But it's not his best film. Far from it.

The story is one of the biggest American scandals in modern times, about which everyone thinks they know something. If anyone can make us re-think our opinion, it's Morris, who once proved the innocence of a man convicted in Texas of killing a cop. And just as importantly, it's a story about photographs, which gives Morris a lot more to work with than Alex Gibney had in Taxi to the Dark Side, his Oscar-winning investigation of a killing at Baghram prison in Afghanistan.

Morris attacks the story with his usual mix of interviews, carefully staged re-enactments and metaphoric visuals. The interviews, conducted via his Interrotron device, are by far the best thing about the film. Morris may be the best interviewer working today. His subjects aren't just answering questions; they're invariably telling stories, reflecting, revealing. I have to admit that for a long time I thought the Interrotron was just a gimmick, but after watching a few of Morris's films more carefully recently, I can see its impact, and would love to try using it myself.

But the Interrotron, which really can enhance the connection between interview subject and viewer, is not a magic bullet: I've also seen films that have used a similar device with far less interesting results. The key to Morris's success is that his questions force the subjects to think on camera: you can see them considering a question or changing their mind – that's what makes the interviews dynamic and exciting. The achievement in Standard Operating Procedure is that he gets interesting, revealing answers from the soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib abuses. In Fog of War, his subject was a highly intelligent, charismatic man reflecting on a 60-year career; in SOP, Morris gets similar results from a half-dozen army grunts who've been reviled in the media and have little reason to trust anyone with their story. (I guess it doesn't hurt that Morris paid them for the interviews.) I'd love to watch his rushes and see how he does it.

But here's the problem: there are so damn many of these interviews - something like a dozen - that Morris loses control of the film. A few of the subjects - Sabrina Harman, the lesbian solder; Javal Davis, the African-American one; Tim Dugan, the contract interrogator - are so engaging, I thought each of them was worthy of a film of his or her own. But the result of this embarrassment of riches is an unfocused film: Standard Operating Procedure has too many strands, which Morris never quite brings together. Clocking in at almost two hours, the film has one false ending after another. At least half a dozen times, it feels like the film has reached a natural conclusion, only to lurch onto another point. If only Morris had struck to the central questions: how the events in the photographs came about, what really happened, and why. Instead, he dwells on too many related events, and too many stories from minor players. It's a heavy barrage of claims and ideas, difficult to keep track of, and 90 minutes into the film, rapidly becoming overwhelming. The Thin Blue Line methodically built a case for the innocence of Randall Dale Adams; SOP just doesn't have the same storytelling discipline.

And there's another element that took me out of the story. Morris is famous for his dramatic re-creations. In The Thin Blue Line, they were disciplined and sparse, and used for a specific reason: to examine the conflicting stories told by several eyewitnesses, and to expose the implausibility of some of these accounts. In Fog of War, Morris mostly used metaphoric imagery and archival footage. But now, working with a huge budget, it's as if he's lost all sense of restraint. The torture of Iraqi prisoners is meticulously re-created based on the infamous photos. Actors play soldiers and prisoners, and there is even a close-up of a vicious, snarling dog, complete with scary growl. It doesn't work. Most of these scenes are much too literal, serving only to break the connection between the storyteller (i.e. the interviewee) and the viewer.

I had a discussion this morning with a producer who's pitching a hybrid documentary-dramatization series, and so I had to think about what bothers me about the use of literal dramatization or re-enactment in documentaries. I think the problem is that such a hybrid serves neither documentary nor drama. A retrospective documentary such as this one (as opposed to what Allan King calls an actuality drama) relies on a connection between the storyteller and the viewer, and the engagement of the viewer's imagination. Cutting to an overly literal dramatization breaks that bond, and invariably interferes with the imagination. Full-out drama, with actors and a script, relies on a suspension of disbelief and an immersion in the world created by the filmmaker. Cutting to an interview in the midst of this breaks the suspension of disbelief, and makes the drama feel contrived. A successful blend of the two needs to show just enough to give viewers something to hang their imagination on. In Standard Operating Procedure, Morris shows too much.

Standard Operating Procedure is not a bad film. Morris is too skilled to mess things up completely. But it looks like, in trying to do too much, he lost control of the story. One clue to how things went on this production is in the credits: there are three editors listed, and three "co-editors." Two of the co-editors were the editors of record on five of Morris's best-known films. Reading between the lines, I would guess there was a lot of unhappiness in the Standard Operating Procedure cutting room.

The Man Who Crossed the Sahara

2008-05-14T23:07:00.011-04:00

What happened to Doc-a-Day? It's been more than a week since my last post. So soon after starting my challenge, I've run into a snag: I can't always work and blog at the same time. The next two months or so are going to be a blur of travelling, shooting, screening and writing. The beast of television must be fed. I'll be lucky if I manage a doc a week.

Nevertheless, I do have a film to discuss: The Man Who Crossed the Sahara, by Montreal filmmaker Korbett Matthews, which played at Hot Docs and is having its television premiere on Bravo! in a couple of weeks.

The Man is Frank Cole, a Canadian filmmaker recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records for being the only person to make a solo crossing of the Sahara. Cole documented his journey with a Bolex camera, spent the next ten years trying to finish the film, and then headed back to the Sahara to try another, even longer, solo crossing. This time his luck ran out, and he was murdered by bandits, just 70 km from the start of his journey.

The Man Who Crossed the Sahara tells Cole's story and tries to get at the mystery of why he was the weird, death-obsessed dude that he was.

The challenge in making a film like this is to help the audience connect with a subject who is a) not there to speak for himself, and b) largely unknown. As a viewer, why should I care about this guy? Does the film raise questions for me that I want to see answered? Is there something in the film that I can connect with? Does the film address any universal concerns or themes?

To me, this film doesn't do anything of the sort. It fails to find any answers or to get beneath the surface of Cole's character. And worse, it fails to make me see why Cole is compelling to the filmmaker himself.

On the surface, The Man Who Crossed the Sahara is certainly beautiful: great footage of the desert, a hypnotic soundtrack. But it's not engaging. It's not clear to me why Frank Cole is interesting, why he's worth more than an honourable mention in the Darwin Awards. The scenes from his early films certainly don't give any clues - the clips from A Life and The Mountenays just look amateurish. Life Without Death, his film about his successful Sahara crossing, appears to be more compelling, but there's something artificial and oddly pathetic about a documentary where a guy sets up a camera and then jumps in front of it to act out a scene.

So if it's not Cole's filmmaking, then what can draw us in? It's not his relationship with his family - his parents are stoic Anglos who add some unspoken emotion but no psychological insight. His best friend and some of his artistic collaborators tell a few stories about him, someone makes an oblique reference to some kind of extreme sexual tastes, but there's no psychological probing, no real insight or emotional connection, no controversy, no dialogue. Are his friends and family still trying to figure out why he did what he did? Or are they simply telling a well-practiced tale about a guy who was obsessed with death? There is no emotional arc to this film, it's a one-note story. We are to take it on the filmmaker's word that Cole was interesting, and then we are led down a linear path from the first signs of his death obsession to his violent end in the Sahara.

The kindest thing I can say is that The Man Who Crossed the Sahara is a forbidding film - it does not invite the viewer in. But really, I would go further. It's a film that doesn't know what it's about, that does not ask any hard questions or prove any theme. It's not that it leaves questions unanswered; it doesn't know what questions to ask.

There is one clip that illustrates the central problem with this film: one of Cole's filmmaking pals says, "The fact that he made films is proof to me that he was human." Really? To me, that's proof of nothing at all. And yet Matthews seems to take this as the gospel truth. As a young filmmaker, does he feel that his craft is proof of his own humanity? What's the connection he feels with Cole? From the film, it's impossible to tell. Maybe that's the emptiness at the centre of this film.

Daddy Tran: A Life in 3D

2008-05-05T19:34:00.009-04:00

I've been thinking about what to write about Daddy Tran: A Life in 3D, because it's an interesting case study in the family-film subgenre.

Daddy Tran - cinematographer John Tran's father, Hai - is a character: a diminutive Vietnamese immigrant with a list of obsessions the length of your arm, the biggest of which is photography. He was a professional photographer in North Vietnam, until the post-Vietnam-War situation became untenable and he fled with his wife and three young children, in a leaky boat, through pirate-infested waters. The family eventually settled in Calgary, where Daddy Tran worked in a photo lab and spent every available cent on used cameras, to the consternation of his long-suffering wife. Eventually, he opened a used-camera store, which was a local institution until it closed last year, a victim of the digital revolution. Now retired, Tran spends all his time taking 3D photographs - an odd format that is hard to convey in film. And he haunts his children - including John, the cinematographer, who clearly made the film (with his wife, producer-director Siu Ta), not just as a tribute to a patriarch but as an attempt to come to terms with a difficult man.

The tone of the film is lighthearted - it's a lovely tribute to a man who sacrificed a lot for his family and built a good life in difficult circumstances. But it mainly skims the emotional surface until family members start to talk about Daddy Tran's fears and obsessions (the multiple locks on all the doors in the house, the need to show off his wealth), and his explosive temper. It turns out that everyone is afraid of Hai's moods and caters to his demanding behaviour. This is where the film cries out for a response from Daddy Tran himself... but it doesn't come. It feels like it took all the courage the filmmakers had to even broach the subject in the film. And it's true - I asked John about this; he said he and Siu were too afraid to bring it up with him.

But apparently something really interesting happened after Daddy Tran saw the film (at its Hot Docs premiere): he started talking more to his family about his life, his fears and his temper. Turns out, he may be open to dialogue and change after all. I'd love to see another chapter to this film - Hai Tran a year later, more reflective about his life, his family and his emotions, and dealing with the need to slow down. In Daddy Tran, he never stops moving or talking, as if he can't bear to stop and reflect. I'd like to see what comes out when he's ready.

Parent films are emotionally difficult to make. You have to be ready for anything the parent throws at you and ready to face the consequences (see Mark Wexler in Tell Them Who You Are). With a difficult parent, that's a daunting task. It only seems worth the risk if the filmmaker believes that something good will come out of the process - something more than just a watchable film.

For the Trans, good things are happening, now that the film is finished. But I wish these things were in the film.

International Documentary Challenge

2008-05-03T20:45:00.010-04:00

I was challenged the other day by a reader who felt that Doc-a-Day didn't have a strong enough voice or personality. And it's true - it's one thing to express strongly held opinions, but that doesn't mean one has anything new or valuable to add to the myriad reviews already out there. The intent of this blog is to analyze why films work or don't work, paying special attention to craft and structure, not for any kind of pedantic or didactic purpose, but to force myself to think about films in a more systematic way. I didn't start this blog because I wanted a soapbox, but I think that in the course of seeing and blogging about 15+ films at Hot Docs, I started using it as such.

Now that all that excitement is over, I'd like to get back to the original purpose. That's my documentary challenge.

The real one - the International Documentary Challenge - is a timed filmmaking competition in which teams have five days to make a short doc. It takes me back to where I started - I spent years making short pieces for magazine shows, usually with the same kind of restrictions: one day to shoot, one day to edit. This has given me a special affinity for this kind of competition, and a pretty good idea of what's reasonable to expect from such an exercise. So today's post is really more for the benefit of IDC participants.

This year's 14 Doc Challenge finalists ranged from the pedestrian to the near-magical. The ones that worked best, not surprisingly, had both a strong character and visuals that supported the story.

"Ars Magna," about a master anagramist, found a way to make the letters dance on screen, externalizing the anagramist's thought process. "Ghost Bike," where the central character was an idea - a white bicycle placed near spots where a cyclist had been killed - had a meditative feel and sense of mystery that perfectly fit the subject. "Click Whoosh," about the demise of the Polaroid instant camera, had not just great characters but a distinctive visual style: it used split screens framed in white, like a Polaroid photo, and showed how the photos are different and why they are loved.

The films that didn't work for me tended to be the ones that were poorly designed, or not designed at all. A film from Quebec about ice fishing was simply "a day on the lake," with no strong characters and no theme. "Let's go to the ice-fishing camp and see what we find" is a very risky way to make a film. If you find a strong character and stick to them, you might get something great. But if such a person isn't there, or you spread yourself too thin and just shoot everything that's going on, you end up with not much at all. "All the Eights, 88" had a very engaging character - an 88-year-old widow with a twinkle in her eye, reflecting on the long life already behind her and what lay ahead. But the supporting visuals just didn't cut it: the film kept cutting back to a bingo hall, where she liked to go and where presumably the filmmakers had met her, but this did nothing to deepen or advance the story.

All this makes me think about a one-line lesson that a wise and cranky (why do these two attributes so often go together?) screenwriter gave me years ago: character drives story, story proves theme. If you can't identify these three elements and how they work together, you don't have a good film.

It also reminds me of the lessons I learned in doing short, quick-turnaround pieces: 1) To make an impact in six minutes, it's important to be visually stylish, as with the Polaroid split screens, and the dancing letters. 2) Take the time to shoot as well as you possibly can - in a short piece, boring visuals kill you every time. 3) Hit 'em over the head - with emotion, comedy, a surprise, anything. You have very little time to make an impact.

And yet... really good filmmaking rarely fits any kind of formula. My favourite of this year's Doc Challenge films was an experimental first-person piece by New York filmmaker Eric Daniel Metzgar, which could hold its own at any Images-type experimental-video festival. "Beholder" is a meditative first-person piece about living in New York and seeing the city through a video camera. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between beholder and subject, Metzgar doesn't just cover the character-story-theme bases, he takes us on a ride. And that feeling of being on a ride is what good documentary filmmaking is really about for me.

Blast!

2008-05-01T23:43:00.010-04:00

I feel like I've been writing too much about films I didn't care for, so I'm happy to get back to the tail end of my Hot Docs experience with a review of a documentary that does everything right. Blast!, directed by Paul Devlin, takes an unlikely topic - an astrophysics research project - and turns it into an adventure tale with twists and turns, lively characters, and some lessons about, um... life, the universe and everything.

The film documents a project to launch a balloon into the upper atmosphere with a telescope powerful enough to see into the far corners of the universe. Why a balloon? It's way cheaper than building another Hubble. It also happens to be fun - a kind of hands-on Popular Mechanics project, but with a lot more money and probably a few academic careers at stake. Why do this? Well, the scientists - the director's brother, Mark Devlin, and a Toronto cosmologist named Barth Netterfield - are looking for answers to a few simple questions: how the universe began, how stars are created, how life came to be... basic things like that.

All this sounds like an episode of Nova, of interest to science geeks only. But unlike the makers of The Singing Revolution, Devlin understands a few things about storytelling: building strong characters, having a solid story arc, and stripping down complex ideas to the bare essentials the audience needs to know. This is not a film about space science, though along the way we actually learn a few things about cosmology; it's a film about the thirst for knowledge, ingenuity, obsessiveness, and humans' attempts to know - and control - nature. And of course nature will not be controlled: if the weather doesn't cooperate, the team's very expensive telescope is just so much twisted metal, and years of work go down the drain.

Devlin's two project leaders and their graduate students are drinking from some kind of mysterious well of enthusiasm and optimism (I want to know where this well is located). In the first ten minutes of the film, a crash in Sweden wrecks the telescope's very expensive lens. But the scientists rebuild and start again, this time in Antarctica. Wisely, Devlin sticks with the character-based story, and keeps bringing in the personal, such as his brother Mark's long months away from home, and the effect of this on his young family. At the same time, he keeps a tight rein on the scientific jargon: most of the interviews end up in voiceover, which suggests there was a lot of editing of abstruse interview clips about the science. We learn why the scientists want to look at the universe and what they hope to learn, but we don't get bogged down in the suble differences between dark matter and dark energy.

Ultimately, Devlin lucks out, and the scientists face obstacle after obstacle on their quest to launch the telescope and catch it when it comes down. But it's the character-driven approach that guarantees that we care whether they succeed.

Here's a problem that's inherent in this kind of film, though: scientific progress is slow and incremental, which is not exactly conducive to a satisfying climax. In the end, Blast! feels kind of anti-climactic -- the result of all this hard work is a small advance for other scientists to build on. For an audience accustomed to the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat, this may feel flat. But Blast! is a great window on the world of pure science, where progress is often measured not in light years but in nanometres.

The Singing Revolution

2008-04-30T23:16:00.010-04:00

As I've written before, I have a fascination with Eastern Europe. I've travelled there, and I know a fair bit about the history of the fall of the Soviet Empire. So naturally I had to go see The Singing Revolution, which opened theatrically in Toronto last weekend. I even dragged the long-suffering Mme Holiday along.

The Singing Revolution is about Estonia, a small country across the Baltic Sea from Finland, directly north of Latvia and Lithuania, and formerly the northwest corner of the Soviet Union. In the late '80s and early '90s, Estonia led the way among the Soviet-occupied nations in carving out independence from Moscow, and was the first to actually declare itself an independent state during the August crisis that finished off the Soviet Union in 1991. The Estonians accomplished this in particularly Estonian fashion - quietly but firmly, simply gradually refusing to acknowledge any Soviet authority in their country. And, like the other Baltic nations, they express their national culture in song - hence, the Singing Revolution. The whole story of Baltic independence is magnificent and inspiring: three tiny peoples, nearly defeated over 50 years of brutal occupation, staging a peaceful revolt against the great Russian bear, and winning. It would make a great documentary.

Too bad this one ain't it. The Singing Revolution, produced and directed by James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty, is a pedantic recitation of facts that bleeds all the drama and emotion out of the story. Less than five minutes into the film, I knew we were in for a long night: the filmmakers had started in on a chronological history of Estonia, complete with title cards announcing each year. We hear about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Soviet invasion, the Nazi invasion, the Soviet re-invasion... all told in pedantic, cliché-ridden narration. There is so much storming across borders, I could have sworn I was watching the War Channel. And a whole cascade of Estonian names - leaders of this faction and that one, names that are important only to Estonian historians and schoolchildren studying for a test. There are about a dozen interview subjects who appear throughout the film, but aside from their names and occupations, we are told next to nothing about them until the end credits. Turns out, their stories would have been quite interesting to hear: the guy who spent 30 years in Siberia, the singing revolution leader whose parents had been powerful Estonian Communists, etc. This should have been a film about them, not a laundry list of events out of a high-school textbook.

But what's even worse is that the film takes the narrowest possible view of history. Estonia wasn't the only nation in the former Soviet Union to stand up against the regime in the years after Gorbachev declared glasnost and perestroika. Revolts were happening all over, from Latvia to Uzbekistan. I'm not suggesting that this should have been a film about the fall of the Soviet Union, but by focusing on Estonia to the exlusion of any other former Soviet republics, the filmmakers fail to show how the Estonians are different - why their culture and national character produced the "singing revolution." What's interesting about the Estonians is that, compared to their Baltic neighbours, the Latvians and Lithuanians, they were quietly pragmatic. Instead of making demands and picking fights with Moscow, they simply started acting as if they were independent. That approach is far more interesting if contrasted with what was happening elsewhere.

The film also gives scant credit to Gorbachev for the reforms that made the Estonian national awakening possible, and makes just passing mention of the Russians, led by Boris Yeltsin, who finished off the Soviet Union by standing up to the tanks when the hardliners staged a coup against Gorbachev. The film would have been far more subtle and convincing if we'd heard from some non-Estonians: from Gorbachev, for instance, and from the ethnic-Russian opposition in Estonia, who are charicatured in the film and get all of one brief clip.

Instead, The Singing Revolution takes the narrow view that you'd normally hear only from hardcore Estonian nationalists. Is the rest of the world going to be enlightened by this Estonian-Sunday-school-style history lesson ? Or are we just going to be put to sleep?

Milosevic on Trial

2008-04-30T17:11:00.004-04:00

The Slobodan Milosevic trial was a sorry chapter in the history of international law. Slobo refused to recognize the authority of the tribunal, insisted on representing himself, and dragged out the procedings for four years. In the course of this, the trial judge died and had to be replaced, and finally, Milosevic himself died, rendering the whole thing moot and making the whole process seem like a colossal waste of time.

This is the material that Danish director Michael Christoffersen had to work with for his documentary Milosevic on Trial. Two thousand hours of material, four years of proceedings, a central character who's dead, and no climax.

Christoffersen does what he can. He focuses on the lead prosecutor, Geoffrey Nice, a Brit with a penchant for horrendously clashing shirts and ties, and Milosevic's legal adviser, a Serbian lawyer who worships the ground the disgusting creep walks on. But try as he might, he can't make the story compelling. For courtroom footage he has to rely on the official pool video, which is dull as dirt, shot, apparently, by a Dutch producer and six students. He is not allowed to talk to Milosevic on camera. We don't meet any of the witnesses outside the courtroom... and there aren't enough twists and turns in the trial to make a compelling story.

This is obviously a historically significant event that needed to be documented, and I applaud Christoffersen for sticking with it. I imagine there were times when he thought Milosevic and the judge had taken the smartest way out. But this is not a film that will stand the test of time.

Air India 182: Take 2

2008-04-29T23:56:00.014-04:00

I've been thinking about my review of Air India 182, and talking to colleagues, and I feel more and more that I missed the boat. I never thought I'd be writing reconsiderations, but I am trying to make this blog as honest and useful as I can - and I guess that sometimes means writing an addendum.

From a craft standpoint, Air India 182 is most certainly an impressive film: well thought out, and masterfully shot and edited. But the film's scope is extremely narrow: it tells the story of how the bombing of Air India 182 was carried out, why Canadian authorities were unable to stop it, and the effect it had on the families of the victims. That's it. It provides little context, and gives us nothing new aside from an interview with a CSIS agent. Aside from that one interview, it's a story we've heard many times, albeit usually in bits and pieces, over the last 23 years. And so the question is, after 23 years... that's it?

Surely, with a budget rumoured to be in the range of $2-million, the film could have accomplished more than that. It could have explored in much greater depth the growth of Sikh radicalism in the B.C. temples, and its roots in the Punjab - in other words, the environment in which the plot was hatched, and the culture of fear and silence that protected the perpetrators. It could have looked more closely at the failed investigation, and the lackadaisical attitude of the Canadian government, which sent condolences to the Indian government but not to the families of the hundreds of Canadian victims. In other words, it could have explored the culture that produced the terrorists and the one that allowed them to get away with mass murder. But the film barely touches on these aspects. Director Sturla Gunnarsson, whose wife (and Associate Producer) is a Sikh British Columbian, acknowledged his anger at the Canadian government in media interviews, but in the Q&A at Hot Docs all he had to say was, to paraphrase, CSIS and the RCMP didn't bomb the plane, the terrorists did. It's almost as if Air India 182 goes out of its way not to disturb the peace.

I can't help but think that the $2 million spent on this film could have paid for three or four films with less expensive visuals and more depth.

And another problem: the Ken Burns Effect. No, I'm not talking about the photo-manipulation tool in iMovie. The real Ken Burns Effect is this: when Burns tackles a subject - say, baseball, or the Second World War - it effectively puts the kybosh on any other filmmaker going to PBS for funding for any other story on the same subject. Burns, by eating up huge amounts of money and presenting his film as the definitive story, sucks the oxygen out of the room and - inadvertently, to be sure - shuts down debate. (The Canadian corollary is the People's History effect, but Ken Burns is more famous than Mark Starowicz, and he did it first.) Now that $2 million has been spent on the "definitive" Air India story, how likely is it that anyone else will be able to get funding for a different take?

Man on Wire

2008-04-29T17:43:00.005-04:00

Man on Wire came to Hot Docs having already won some serious hardware. At Sundance last January, it took both the jury prize and the audience award for best documentary. So it wasn't surprising that last Wednesday's Hot Docs screening was jam-packed.

It's not hard to see why the film is popular - the story is irresistible. In 1974 a French street performer pulled off one of the greatest stunts in modern history: he strung a steel cable between the Twin Towers, and high above the morning crowds performed an hourlong high-wire act between what were then the world's tallest buildings. Since then, the stunt has largely been forgotten everywhere except in New York. And of course we all know why it could never be repeated.

The story is amazing. And director James Marsh, a Brit living in New York, has an interesting track record: he moves between documentary and drama, and in the mid-90s made a quirky little film called The Burger and the King: The Life and Cuisine of Elvis Presley. That film apparently ran afoul of the Presley estate, but now, happily, is available on YouTube. So far all this all looks promising indeed.

So, how's the film? To quote Robb Reiner of Anvil: "one word... OK, two words... no, three words:" the film is a great ride. It's is a mix of fantastic interviews, who-woulda-thunk-it archive, and re-enactments that add just the right element of absurdity. It doesn't matter that we know how the story ends. (No spoilers here: we know that Philippe Petit is alive, and that, given that fact, there would be no film had he failed to perform the stunt.) Marsh does a great job of establishing the characters and the stakes, and then following the multiple threads of the story to the climactic moment. It's not just a story of an obsession, but of young love, friendship, and a bank heist - Petit and his team liken the stunt to a bank robbery in which no harm is done.

The subjects are passionate storytellers, some of them clearly oddballs to this day. Petit himself is a sprite who relishes the telling of the story as he relives the greatest accomplishment of his life. And what really puts the film over the top is the footage that Marsh and his team uncovered - never-before-seen 16mm film of Petit and his friends at home in France, practicing wire walking, testing various schemes to get the steel wire from one tower to the other, and generally being exuberant kids.

But ultimately, it's Marsh's storytelling that makes the difference. He makes us care about the characters, and sets out the stakes so well, that ultimately the suspense is not in whether Philippe will live or die, perform the high-wire act or get caught, but in what will happen to him and his friends afterwards. The World Trade Center stunt is a beautiful performance. But the heart of the story is in the lives of the players.

Citizen Havel

2008-04-28T15:45:00.010-04:00

I have a special affinity for Vaclav Havel. I was an undergraduate when hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovaks filled the streets of Prague in peaceful protest, chased out the grey communist bureaucrats, and installed a playwright as president. The Velvet Revolution enthralled me, and after graduation I joined the thousands of North American twentysomethings who headed for Prague. Havel was by far the most interesting of the dissidents and intellectuals who brought down the Communist regimes all over Eastern Europe, and for a time he made his country the most glamorous place to be in the world. So of course I had to see Citizen Havel, a documentary that follows the playwright-president over his ten-year tenure as president of the Czech Republic after the Velvet Divorce.

It's clear from the opening sequence what kind of film we're watching. Citizen Havel is a throwback to the glory days of cinema vérité, a fly-on-the-wall peek inside Havel's office, his summer house, and the grand presidential residence of Prague Castle. And most of it is shot on film. Film! When was the last time we saw cinema vérité shot on film?

The vérité approach is completely rigorous: no music, no effects of any kind, just the quiet drama and humour of life backstage in Havel's most important play, an improvised work in which he plays himself as President. Havel and his advisors wait for word on the presidential election (decided in a vote by Parliament), they plan state visits (Boris Yeltsin's only request is to have a beer at an "authentic Czech pub"), they entertain the Rolling Stones (Ronnie and Keef ask for a restaurant recommendation), etc. Throughout, Havel appears to be completely comfortable with the presence of the camera, hiding nothing - not his wardrobe conundrums, nor the petty rivalries of day-to-day politics - and occasionally slyly making sure the film crew captures a particularly absurd moment. Even when he's on his way to hospital for a potentially lethal procedure, he invites the film crew along. (That produces a priceless scene: before getting down to the business of medicine, Havel, his wife and his doctors sit down and have a drink together. Maker's Mark bourbon.) It's as if he decided that the best way to show the truth of his most famous statement, "truth and love will triumph over hatred and lies," is to live it on camera.

Now, lest I create the wrong impression, it's not like Havel is the Dalai Lama. His rivalry with Thatcherite premier Vaclav Klaus turns petty, and Havel neuroses over whether he can get away with not inviting Klaus to a jazz-club visit with Bill Clinton. After his wife, Olga, a revered figure in the Czech Republic, dies, he soon re-marries, to a sometime actress who, on the surface at least, couldn't be more different. But in the end, all this just adds to Havel's charm: he is completely comfortable with himself, and is happy to prick his own balloon at every opportunity. As a result, the film is as much observational comedy as political drama, and a reminder of the old saying that a portrait is given as much as it is taken.

There is a tragic coda to this story. Director Pavel Koutecky - to whom Havel chose to entrust this portrait - was killed in an accident before he could finish the film, so Citizen Havel was directed in the cutting room by Miroslav Janek. That's a hugely daunting task for someone who wasn't there when the footage was shot, especially when dealing with such historically and culturally significant material. But on the other hand, that kind of limitation forces you to deal with the material in front of you. You can't worry about what you don't have because you weren't there to see it.

The material Koutecky shot for Citizen Havel is unprecedented, and definitely unrepeatable. I can't imagine any other politician, present or future, giving a filmmaker such access without trying to manipulate the result. This is a truly historic film.

Dance with a Serial Killer

2008-04-27T22:27:00.008-04:00

It’s an irresistible premise: a dogged police detective trying to get the goods on a brutal serial killer who’s hiding in plain sight. Dance With a Serial Killer is a true-life policier, like a season-long storyline on Homicide: Life on the Street. How can you go wrong?

The story: a woman is stabbed to death on a busy beach in France. No one hears anything, and there’s nothing in the woman’s life that points to a possible motive. The police zero in on a drifter staying at a nearby homeless shelter, one Francis Heaulme, who admits to having random homicidal urges. But the cops have no evidence to tie him to the crime, and have to let him go. What follows is a two-and-a-half-year cat-and-mouse game between detective Jean-François Abgrall and one of the freakiest, most dangerous homicidal maniacs I’ve ever heard about. Dangerous because there is no pattern, no rhyme or reason to his crimes – just opportunity and a desire to kill.

So, a hero, a villain, and a chase. What more do you need to make a good documentary? Well, actually, a lot. The film simply follows Abgrall around France, interviewing him in the various places where the story unfolded almost 20 years ago: police stations, isolated fields, etc. There are a few interviews with other cops who worked on particular aspects of the case, but that’s it. The filmmakers make virtually no attempt to give us any social or political context. We learn nothing about the justice system that apparently left Abgrall to work on the case virtually alone, nothing about Heaulme beyond the police perspective, and nothing about the French people’s reaction to having a serial killer among them who may have killed more than 40 people.

In other words, the film focuses exclusively on the cat-and-mouse game without telling us anything new about either cats or mice. Abgrall is certainly a great interview and a really smart cop – his explanation of police techniques and the way he pieced the story together are very interesting. But the filmmakers seem to be so enamoured of their detective that they forget about the rest of the story. The lesson of the day? Don't fall in love with your subject so much that you see your story from only one angle.

The Black List

2008-04-25T23:45:00.011-04:00

Coming from a documentary filmmaker, there are few insults worse than “It was all talking heads.” People talking, that’s just not cinematic, they say. Tell the story through action!

To me, when done right, people talking can be just as exciting as the most eye-popping action, the most beautiful cinematography. The Black List is a perfect example.

Director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and interviewer Elvis Mitchell set out to explore the African-American experience, and to rehabilitate the term “black list." They pulled together an incredible line-up of interviewees, from Colin Powell, to Sean “Puffy” Combs, to Toni Morrison. The results are riveting.

I used to be sceptical about Errol Morris’s Interrotron device, which allows the interview subject to look directly into the camera and feel like he or she is talking to the interviewer. Morris’s The Fog of War changed my mind; The Black List has sealed the deal. The subjects, about twenty of them, all beautifully, lovingly lit, sit in front of a plain slate-coloured backdrop and talk directly to the audience – directly to me. It’s hard not to pay attention.

It’s also hard not to pay attention when you’re expecting to see the usual African-American suspects, and the first person who pops up on screen is Slash. Slash! The guitarist from Guns’n’Roses (who also makes an appearance in Anvil! The Story of Anvil). Dude’s black? I would have said Jewish before black. Hell, given the history of G’n’R, anything but black. Turns out Slash’s mother is African-American, and he learned to play guitar while hanging out with his cousins in South-Central. And hey, Slash is actually articulate and interesting. And he’s followed by Toni Morrison. Can you see Slash and Toni Morrison chit-chatting at a party? That would just cause a rift in the space-time continuum. So the film gets off to a great start.

What follows is a list of people who cover the range of the African-American experience: Keenen Ivory Wayans, women’s erotica writer Zane, Kareem-Abdul Jabbar, Suzan-Lori Parks (if I hadn’t seen this film, I never would have known how beautiful her eyes are), Bill T. Jones, etc., etc. Each of them appears on screen for maybe four minutes, and each interview vignette ends with an interesting climax. Who says that an interview film can’t have a decisive moment just like a Cartier-Bresson photograph or a cinema vérité film. (All those people who worked on Wild Blue Yonder should watch The Black List.)

This is a film that works well in the theatre, but is also perfect for TV, the medium of the close-up. It’s just too bad it’ll likely never make it to Canadian TV – too American, too unconnected to the “Canadian” experience, the broadcasters will say.

It's too bad. One of the most memorable moments in the film comes from Chris Rock, who says, ”True equality is the equality to suck like the white man. We want the license to fail and come back, and learn.”

Those of us who work in Canadian TV know a little bit about that. We want to be able to suck like the Americans.

The Glow of White Women

2008-04-24T19:53:00.006-04:00

Yunus Vally is very charming man. He's quite a talker, and he has a lot to say. About growing up Muslim in small-town apartheid South Africa, about relationships between men and women, between black and white, brown and white -- about sexual politics in apartheid-era South Africa. He makes a great documentary subject, but he also happens to be the director of The Glow of White Women, and so he talks... and talks, and talks... unchallenged, for most of 78 minutes.

Here's how it goes: Vally sits in front of a green screen, and talks. He talks to an unseen interviewer, and not to the camera. We see various images behind him (though sometimes we see a plain black background), and we see lots of apartheid-era newsreels, magazine images, etc. And we hear from some other people: white women who slept with black men when it was illegal, the one-time star of a titillating photo-comic-book series, a former censor, etc. They are all participants in Vally's exercise: turning the sexual objectification and dehumanization of black men around... and focusing it on white women. He wants to look honestly at the relationship between the respectable white woman and her sweating, glistening gardener / manservant / driver. We see images of various (white) Miss South Africas, of waiter-races where white audiences watch black men in uniform run with trays of drinks. And lots of people talk about sex. The sex they had, the sex they dreamt about... anything as long as it has to do with sex.

Vally is engaging, the images are both shocking and entertaining, and he clearly had a great compositor who made liberal use of animation software. It's a great way to say a few things that I'm sure black men have wanted to say to white women (and men) for a long time. But it doesn't sustain. The Glow of White Women delivers a serious message in an entertaining package, but it runs out of things to say long before its 78 minutes are up. I lasted just under an hour. The last phrase I heard before I walked out was "I fucked for the struggle."

As Slow As Possible

2008-04-24T01:17:00.012-04:00

The trouble with seeing great films, as I did today (more about this later), is that it makes the defects of the merely average ones stand out even more. I snuck out of Must Read After My Death and ran across the street to catch As Slow As Possible, drama director Scott Smith’s first documentary.

There had been a lot of buzz around this film, and I loved its central metaphor: Ryan Knighton is slowly going blind from retinitis pigmentosa, an illness with an unpredictable course. Now, 15 years after his diagnosis, with his sight nearly completely gone, he travels to Germany to witness a rare and momentous event in the performance of a John Cage piece called As Slow As Possible: the changing of a note.

Nice idea. What about the execution? Well, first off, Knighton is indeed a great film subject. He's articulate, thoughtful, funny and emotional. He's thought (and written) a lot about blindness and how he is dealing with it. And the journey - a blind man travelling alone to a small town in Europe, looking for a church where a specially built organ is supposed to take 639 years to play this John Cage composition - is ripe for all kinds of great documentary moments. So far so good.

But here I go again with another complaint about craft: the shooting is bad and the sound is worse - Smith is no cinematographer. After a nice set-up, the film follows Knighton around Europe like a kid brother shooting a travel video for mom and dad back home. There are some nice scenes because Ryan gets himself into interesting situations: he meets some people who don't believe he's blind; he has an odd conversation with a man in a bear suit. And the film is almost saved by a young boy who appears as if out of nowhere to lead Ryan to the church. The interaction between them is so lovely, it could be the basis for a dramatic short. But for the most part, while there are lots of good interview clips, the film's visuals don't do anything to support its ideas. The film never establishes a visual style (actually, that's not true - the style is "set camera on auto and follow the blind guy"), never uses pictures to set the mood or drive the story forward - it's as if the director didn't think through the look of the film at all.

I am a bit puzzled by all the rave reviews As Slow As Possible has gotten. I think the critics were reviewing Ryan Knighton and his ideas, not the film as a film.

I sense a theme emerging in my doc-a-day exercise: I have little patience with people who think that all it takes to shoot a documentary is picking up a camcorder and pressing record.

Must Read After My Death

2008-04-24T01:09:00.009-04:00

This is an odd film, constructed entirely of audio recordings and home movies. I walked in a few minutes late and missed the beginning, and then ended up leaving early. So take this for what it’s worth.

On the face of it, Must Read After My Death is 100% up my alley: family dysfunction, psychoanalysis, home movies – a trifecta of my top interests. The story, as far as I could make out (and later read): an upper-middle-class American family made hundreds of hours of recordings of its members’ inner lives, first as audio letters between Dad working in Australia and Mom and the kids back home in Connecticut, then as audio diaries made at the prompting of psychotherapists. The family, in a nutshell, is fucked up (in the Philip Larkin sense – I’m not using profanity gratuitously here): Mom and Dad have an open marriage, Dad tells mom in great detail about his “adventures,” Mom has the occasional fling of her own, Dad is obsessed with the kids keeping their rooms neat, and everyone slowly goes mad.

The film consists of these audio recordings, cut with the family’s home movies and photos, and home-movie stock footage – i.e. other people’s home movies. So there’s certainly lots here to make a disturbing and illuminating film. And yet… after 20 minutes of this, I felt like I’d seen enough. Maybe it was because I’d missed the set-up… but 20 minutes should be enough to catch up. Mostly, I think, it was because the film had a sameness to it. It didn’t feel like it was going anywhere, and it didn’t have any kind of reflective quality. With no context, nothing but these deeply disturbed voices from 40 years ago, the film, curiously, didn’t draw me in. The droning minimalist soundtrack didn’t help. It may be that the composer’s intent was to create discomfort; if so, he succeeded, but not to the benefit of the film. The experience of viewing Must Read After My Death felt voyeuristic without being illuminating. I was craving context, more information, a voice beyond the tapes. When I realized that this voice wasn’t coming, I was done.

Wild Blue Yonder

2008-04-22T23:27:00.017-04:00

Sometimes you watch a film and wonder why nobody stopped the filmmaker from releasing it. Wild Blue Yonder is one of those films. It's stunning to me that a film this undisciplined and self-indulgent, with so little to say, has made it into any serious festival at all, much less IDFA, where it premiered, and now Hot Docs. There could be only one reason for this: director Celia Maysles is the daughter of the late David Maysles, and the only remotely interesting part of the film is her dispute with Uncle Albert, the revered octogenarian Albert Maysles, patron saint of cinema vérité filmmakers everywhere. The documentary community, like any other, has a prurient interest in films that air the dirty laundry of its icons.

David Maysles died in 1987, when Celia was seven years old, from a deadly combination of a powerful anti-depressant and an over-the-counter cold medication. Subsequently, there was a nasty lawsuit between David's widow and Albert over David's share of Maysles Films, the company the two brothers founded together. For 17 years, Celia says, no one ever talked to her about her dad. And so, at the age of 24, she decides she needs to try to deal with the emptiness, find out who her father was, and make a film about it. So she turns her camcorder on herself, and goes around talking to people about David. Her greatest desire is to see Blue Yonder, David's unfinished autobiographical film, and use it in her own film. But Albert, who owns the material, says that he's working on his autobiographical project and that he wants to use some of the footage himself. He flatly refuses to let Celia even look at it.

Meanwhile, Celia has long, rambling conversations with her mother, with a woman who was in Grey Gardens (one of the Maysles Brothers' triptych of masterpieces, which was released three years before Celia's birth), with Christo and Jeanne-Claude (the subjects of several of the Maysles' films), etc. Almost all of these conversations go on entirely too long and add nothing to the story. The scenes have no focus and no payoff. It seems the young Ms. Maysles didn't prepare for her filmmaking journey by studying what actually made her father's films work - most of these scenes don't even come close to having a "decisive moment." (The "climax" of one scene with the slightly batty Grey Gardens lady is Celia eating a cracker with cheese.)

Celia also videotapes her own therapy sessions, which provide no additional insight. She reveals in passing that she was hospitalized at 16 for either anorexia or depression. And in the biggest visual cliché in the film, she is shown submerging herself under water in a bathtub. This is on par with the average navel-gazing film-school project; it most certainly is not a festival film.

There is one unintentionally revealing moment: during one of her conversations with Albert, she asks him to take her camera and film her. And suddenly, the shot is beautiful, properly exposed, and somehow interesting. You see immediately what Albert means when he talks about the documentarian's gaze. It's as if the crafty old fox is saying, "Don't forget - whatever this young woman is going to say about me, I'm the real filmmaker here."

In the end, it's not like there isn't a real film to be made here. David Maysles was clearly a fascinating character with a wounded soul, and he left behind an amazing array of material, including audiotapes of his own psychoanalysis sessions. And the lawsuit between David's widow and Albert raises all kinds of interesting issues. David was married to Judy, but he also had a professional marriage with Albert. The dispute is like two widows of a bigamist fighting over who was the #1 wife and rightful heir.

A more mature and skilled filmmaker could have done a lot with this. It calls for a nuanced, carefully written essay film by an adult who is capable of parsing adult emotions and actions. But instead we are subjected to the confused musings of a young woman trying to heal herself - something she really should do in private. My prediction is that ten or fifteen years from now, Celia Maysles will be deeply embarrassed that she ever released this film.

Beautiful Losers

2008-04-21T23:56:00.002-04:00

I lasted just under an hour at this 80-minute film. My attention was already on the wane, when clips from the awful films of sometime festival darling Harmony Korine and commercial director/artist Mike Mills finished me off.

Beautiful Losers is a perfectly well-made film, a record of the lives and careers of a dozen or so artists who emerged from the punk/squatter/skateboard/graffiti scene on the Lower East Side in the 1990s. The artists are mostly interesting and articulate, or occasionally inarticulate in an interesting way. Their work is occasionally interesting too, though for the most part the paintings are not something I’d put on my wall. And that, ultimately, is the problem: if you don’t find the art compelling, you’re likely not going to find this film compelling either. Ultimately, it seems to me, Beautiful Losers is more a visual record of the artists and the community they came out of than a universal story of interest to a broader audience. It will play well at festivals, and find a welcoming home in art galleries. But with its vignette structure and no strong universal theme, it just didn’t hold my interest.

Life. Support. Music.

2008-04-21T23:38:00.010-04:00

Yesterday morning I got an e-mail from a friend suggesting strongly that I go see Life. Support. Music., a film that hadn't been on my radar. She had loved Eric Daniel Metzgar's previous film, she said, which played at Hot Docs in 2006, and this new one sounded amazing.

My friend is discerning and thoughtful. But it was the description in the Hot Docs program that sealed the deal: a film about a guitarist who almost dies from a brain hemorrhage, and his family's herculean efforts to bring him back to health. So off I went.

Life. Support. Music. establishes its storytelling language right away: a bit of pre-bleed footage of Jason Crigler, and then multiple voices telling the story of the fateful night and the immediate aftermath. The voices are mostly of Jason's family - wife, parents, sister - and the four of them appear on screen at the same time, in small frames lined up in a row. This is a film made for the big screen. We understand that the four of them are going to be the ones telling the story; Jason appears in a montage of photographs, from childhood through adolescence, adulthood, marriage, and impending fatherhood. All of that is in the pre-title sequence. It's a remarkable few minutes - inventive and engrossing, establishing Jason's character visually, without anyone having to say "Jason is..."

Like The Betrayal, this is not a cinema vérité film - Metzgar clearly hasn't been a fly on the wall throughout the whole process. But he makes a virtue of necessity, using Jason's sister's diary entries to move quickly through time, and then the family's home videos and footage shot for training purposes by the rehab hospital.

Indeed, it's the hospital video that provides the most shocking moment of the film: the first time we see Jason post-bleed, he is emaciated, limbs twisted, unable to close his mouth or move his eyes. It's hard to fathom that this is the same person we saw earlier. The rest of the film is a journey from this... to... we have no idea where it will end up.

The heart of the film is the interviews with the four family members who take care of Jason and through sheer determination slowly bring him back into consciousness. Gradually, we see him come back, start playing guitar again, and finally ease himself back into the music community that had been his professional and spiritual home before the illness. If there's ever a film that can be said to be a testament to the power of love, this is it.

The film's end credits are unusually short: Metzgar produced, directed, photographed, wrote and edited the film himself. This is not entirely unusual in the U.S. documentary-funding environment, but I've rarely seen someone perform all these roles at the same time on such a high level. I'm usually mistrustful of this kind of filmmaking. To me, one of the great things about making films is the collaborative aspect, and I think that having an outside perspective in the course of the process can often save the filmmaker from him- or herself. But in this case, there is hardly a misstep throughout. The film is visually rigorous, highly emotional and almost never goes off track or lapses into self-indulgence. There is one exception: towards the end, there is a musical montage of shots taken from various earlier scenes. Despite the strong music, the visuals have a sentimental, TV-sitcom feel.

But that's a very small quibble. This is not just a great story; it's really smart filmmaking.

Nerakhoon (The Betrayal)

2008-04-20T13:42:00.012-04:00

Once in a while a film comes along that leaves me feeling deeply humbled, as a filmmaker and as a human. The Betrayal is one such film. I knew I had to see it because of its amazing history - it was made over the course of 23 (!!!) years by the acclaimed cinematographer Ellen Kuras, in close collaboration with its main subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, who ended up as her co-writer and editor. But what I saw on screen was way beyond my expectations. I can think of few films that bring together this degree of creative vision, thoughtful application of craft, and commitment. And it moves me enormously that the relationship between documentarian and subject, which is always potentially problematic(*), turned gradually into one of close collaborators.

It's clear from the opening minutes that we're being taken on a journey. The film opens with shots of boys fishing on the Mekong River, and a myth - a Laotian prediction about the end of the world. We meet Thavi, speaking in the present, and his mother, interviewed in her kitchen, and we are soon immersed in the story of their family. The father, a soldier who worked with the Americans against Vietnamese and Lao Communist forces, is arrested shortly after U.S. forces leave and the Communist Pathet Lao regime takes over. Twelve-year-old Thavi swims across the Mekong River into Thailand, and waits for two years for his family to escape. Eventually, most of the family joins him and they make their way to the United States, where their hardships hardly diminish.

Cinema vérité would have been the easy, default approach to this film. It's certainly worked well in everything from Grey Gardens to Hoop Dreams. But Kuras goes in a totally different direction. Her approach is to focus on the subjects' internal journey, and on the way their memories inform and intersect with present-day reality. The past is represented partly with beautifully composed impressionistic shots filmed by Kuras herself, and partly with shots culled from Vietnamese propaganda films, which she and Phrasavath found in a Laotian archive, projected on a wall, and shot on 16mm film. (This is how documentary filmmaking often goes: a combination of careful planning and absolutely unexpected serendipity.) All this is combined with Thavi's poetic narration, which often has an epic quality, and revealing interviews with him and his mom.

After the film's screening at Hot Docs, Kuras talked about her desire to use dramatic elements but avoid having them look like docudrama (a very different approach from Air India 182, which is all about docudrama). One of her challenges, she said, was to shoot from her subject's point of view and then find a way to bring that person into the scene in an organic way, without having it look like docudrama. Whatever she did, it worked beautifully. I left feeling that I could learn more about filmmaking from The Betrayal than from any other film I'm likely to see at Hot Docs this year. This is a film I want to watch over and over.

(*) As explored in Jennifer Baichwal's The True Meaning of Pictures, which I also saw yesterday and hope to write about soon.

Air India 182

2008-04-19T23:04:00.008-04:00

Sturla Gunnarsson is definitely not one of those people who've had to wait for success. His first film, After the Axe, was nominated for an Oscar in 1982, and since then he's gone on to a stellar career as a director of both documentaries and drama. So it's no surprise that his new film, Air India 182, is masterfully crafted. Though very much a television project - one of those high-profile, big-name productions the CBC's Documentary Unit loves to throw bags of money at - this is a film that looks great on a big screen.

Much has been written and broadcast over the past 23 years about Air India Flight 182, which blew up off the coast of Ireland with 329 people on board in June, 1985 - the worst terrorist attack in North America before 9/11. There have been a few documentaries about it, notably Shelley Saywell's Legacy of Terror, made in 1999, and most recently an episode of the factual series Mayday. But Air India 182, with its A-list director, A-list budget and authoritative title, clearly has ambitions of being the definitive one.

Gunnarsson chooses to tell the story in straightfoward fashion, boiling the story down to the bare essentials: a step-by-step account of the last few hours of the lives of the victims, told by their families, intercut with a reconstruction of the planning and execution of the crime, based on evidence presented at the two trials and the recent judicial inquiry.

The most significant new element that Gunnarsson brings to the film is the dramatic re-enactments, which are very elaborate, well-cast, and at times extremely moving. Score one for the master drama director. Also impressive is the interview with a senior CSIS official (now retired? I don't recall), who provides a lot of context and details about the investigation. How did Gunnarsson get this guy? Normally, CSIS people aren't even allowed to admit they work for CSIS. Score one for the master documentarian. There's no question the film works well on its own terms.

But here's where the discussion goes over post-screening drinks: Where else could this film have gone? Why did Gunnarsson stick to the narrow storyline he chose, instead of A) delving more deeply into mainstream Canada's (non-)reaction to this horrendous crime and the seriously messed up investigation, which produced only one conviction, or B) looking more deeply into the roots of the conflict between extremist Sikhs and the Indian state, the politics of British Columbia's Sikh temples, etc. Based on my quick survey, non-Indian Canadians tend to want to know more about the former, immigrants from India about the latter.

I'm not a fan of judging films based on what I think they should be, rather than what the filmmaker intended. But I do wonder: how many other, more revealing, films could come out of this horrendous event?

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

2008-04-18T17:12:00.011-04:00

Not all of us who toil in some part of the "arts sector" are blessed with instant success. Many of us work hard for years, watch our peers go on to international glory, and wonder if we should put away the paint brush, or the camera, or the violin, and get a "real job." The kind of job our dentist uncle might at least recognize as such, if not entirely approve of. And yet, we persevere. Sooner or later, we figure, it will turn around for us. We'll make something that will break through, that will reveal our genius to the world.

I know plenty of people for whom I doubt it will ever happen, and plenty more in between - those like me, who make an honest living in some semi-artistic, semi-commercial enterprise. Many of us hope for more, but sometimes it's hard to keep the dream alive.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil is for all of us.

The story, in a nutshell: two guys meet in high school at the age of 14. They form a band, practically invent a whole subgenre of heavy metal, sell some records, play a few really big shows, and then fade into obscurity, watching the bands they influenced - Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer - sell millions of records and become superstars. Now, 25 years after their last successful record, it turns out they're still at it: two guys past the age of 50, working joe jobs to feed their families, and still pursuing the rock'n'roll dream. Now, they're about to make one last push for success.

Given the Flying-V guitars, the shoulder-length curly locks, the tight pants... and, oh yeah, the crushingly loud guitars and bombastic lyrics, you'd think this is going to be some kind of real-life This Is Spinal Tap. And certainly there are elements thereof. At the start of the film, guitarist Steve "Lips" Kudlow explains his job at a school-lunch catering company in a manner not unfamiliar to fans of Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins. But then the story turns. Lips and his lifelong best friend, drummer Robb Reiner, reveal more of themselves. They are honest, hard-working guys who love their wives and children, and whose slightly baffled middle-class Jewish families have stuck by them. They know the door is closing on them, if it hasn't closed already (the audience is pretty sure it closed somewhere around 1986), but they just can't bear to give up.

Do Lips and Robb get the Hollywood ending they deserve? Suffice to say the film has a Hollywood structure that befits its Hollywood director, Sacha Gervasi (who made this film because of his own Almost Famous-like history with the band). But it's still a documentary, and E.T. does not necessarily get to go home. Some people I talked to after the screening felt the film was entirely too predictable, that nothing unexpected happened. And as far as the story goes, that may be true. But I disagree: the unexpected thing is the characters - the guys are real, emotional, and completely open with the camera.

The great virtues of this film are not in the structure (which, actually, works very well, as Hollywood structure generally does). They're in the story that comes out in between the expected beats: the strains on the almost 40-year friendship, the pressures and joys of family, and Lips Kudlow's seemingly inexhaustible well of optimism and hope. How can you not root for a guy like that, even if he is a bit of a putz?

Ultimately, a good part of the reason I had a lump in my throat for much of the last third of the film is that it's a story about not giving up. There is great virtue in plugging away at what you love, and trying to get better, and just plain refusing to quit. For anyone who has a bit of Lips and Robb inside them, this is a moving, inspiring film.

P.S. Anvil! The Story of Anvil was the opening-night film at Hot Docs. More from the festival anon.

Compañeras

2008-04-15T22:25:00.006-04:00

I really feel for U.S. documentary filmmakers. There is precious little funding available, broadcasters for the most part don't pre-license independent films, and filmmakers often spend far more time fundraising than making their films. I keep reading about people holding fundraisers for films, kind of like rent parties. In much of the rest of the developed world - i.e. Europe - that would be considered completely undignified. So I admire Americans for their dedication and perseverance. What I don't admire is that, too often, lack of budget is used as an excuse for bad filmmaking.

After suffering through yesterday's doc (which need not be mentioned again), I wanted to see something positive and inspiring. I also didn't have time to watch a feature-length film. So I turned once again to the PVR, and watched Compañeras, which was on PBS's Independent Lens last week. It's about Mariachi Reyna, "America's first all-female mariachi band." (For the filmmakers' sake, I hope there aren't any angry Mexican-American grandmas out there right now who had an all-girl mariachi band in the '30s.) Certainly, the topic alone was enough to get my attention.

Unfortunately, my attention starts to waver pretty quickly. It's clear from the first five minutes that a) the filmmakers didn't have much money - there is precious little good concert footage, and b) the film was shot by someone who could never make a living as a cinematographer. The making-of story is clear: another director forced to pick up the ol' DVX100 because there's no money to hire a real shooter.

And it gets worse. What is this film about? Is it a straight profile? If so, how are the filmmakers going to sustain that for 60 minutes? Will anything actually happen in the course of the film? It's certainly not clear from the first act that it's a film where anything is supposed to happen.

Well, it turns out that, actually, a lot happens. In the course of the hour, a new member wins a tough competition for a spot in the band, and the band leader, the only gringa and the most accomplished musician in the group, is forced out. But we learn about this almost entirely through interviews, and not through vérité scenes. Indeed, what actuality footage there is is painfully badly shot. There is no beginning, middle or end to any scene - just seemingly random shots. The fateful audition looks like it was shot by the band for its own records. There isn't a single scene that shows the women interacting and relating to each other. Structurally, there is no set-up to the story, no stakes set out at the start, no foreshadowing. No storytelling! The lack of scenes means the turning points in the story are entirely dependent on interview clips, and these interviews just don't carry the story. The filmmakers' decision to forego narration just makes things worse.

The filmmakers - co-director/shooter Matthew Buzzell and co-director/producer Elizabeth Massie - say on the Independent Lens website that they had next to no money for this film, had to shoot it between paying gigs, and thus couldn't shoot everything they wanted. OK. But is that an excuse for not having shot anything to build any actual scenes around the two central events of the film? I just don't get it.

The ladies of Mariachi Reyna deserved a better film than this. And clearly the opportunity is still out there for someone to make the great mariachi documentary.

Manufacturing Dissent

2008-04-14T22:41:00.023-04:00

I broke one of my rules tonight. When I started this blog a couple of weeks ago, I said I wouldn't finish watching films I hated. Well, tonight I did. I almost turned it off after a half hour, when I figured that I had the measure of the film and didn't need to see more. But somehow I felt I had to keep watching. I guess I wanted to see how the clips I'd seen when it first came out fit into the film as a whole.

The film was Manufacturing Dissent, an all-out, full-throttle attack on Michael Moore by the Toronto-based husband-and-wife team of Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine.

It's easy to dislike Michael Moore. He twists the truth, he takes cheap shots, he manipulates his subjects, he manipulates his audience... and all these things have made him millions of dollars. Damn that Michael Moore - he lies and he cheats, and he doesn't just get away with it, he wins Oscars for it! Let's face it, if anyone in the documentary business deserves a critical analysis, it's him. So when Manufacturing Dissent came out last year, a lot of people wanted to like it. By the time it had its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs, it had more buzz than a barbershop full of army recruits.

I missed the screening, of course, but then I started hearing from filmmakers who saw it, and the reports weren't good. A few days later, Debbie Melnyk appeared on a panel about personal filmmaking, claiming that it was entirely an accident that the spine of her film turned out to be her chasing Michael Moore around and being repeatedly turned down for an interview, à la Roger and Me. She had never wanted to put herself in the film, she said, but felt she had no choice. Nobody asked her how that could be true when the couple's previous film, Citizen Black, had exactly the same gimmick - Debbie Melnyk being turned down for an interview by Conrad Black.

So, anyway, given all the controversy, I felt that I should watch the film, and I recorded it when it aired on Bravo last week.

Well, now I can say I watched it. Here are the top three things I hated about it:

1) The main problem is not that the film is a polemic (I like a good polemic as much as the next guy), it's that it's a one-note song, with no subtlety, no analysis, and not even an attempt to take Moore's arguments seriously or to consider him as a cultural phenomenon. It's a laundry list of bad things he's done and lies he's told. OK, I got the point after a half hour. Why watch any more? It's my own damn fault that I didn't turn it off at that point.

2) The film is full of shooting-fish-in-a-barrel non-sequiturs. Two young women in Michigan who've never heard of Moore come across as airheads in a streeter that goes on for about 30 seconds too long: is the joke on Moore or on them? A group of college feminists are shown doing some kind of goofy pro-choice cheerleader routine at a protest - how is this related to the film? A young Republican woman says she hasn't seen Farenheit 9/11 because she's too "sensitive." Michael Moore may be the big fish in Melnyk and Caine's barrel, but their shotgun blast hits a lot of minnows too. It all reminds me of, hmmm... what's his name again? That portly documentary guy who always wears a baseball cap.

3) It is appallingly badly shot and lit. One African-American fellow is interviewed with the sun behind him so that his eyes are completely in shadow. The rest of the (many) interviews have no style, no consistency, terrible eyelines, awful backgrounds (you can see one guy's back in a reflection behind him). Amateur hour.

One quote stood out, from a fellow commenting on the right-wing film industry that's sprung up in response to Moore: "The industry is laughably bad. So I don't think that those films mean crap."

I'd put Manufacturing Dissent in that category, too.

Absolut Warhola

2008-04-13T00:57:00.008-04:00

I don't want to fall into the rut of watching Canadian made-for-TV films and often-over-praised American feature docs. So I was pleased when I found an intriguing title on the sale table at BMV. I vaguely remembered that Absolut Warhola had played at Hot Docs a few years ago. Plus, it was cheap, and it was European. After yesterday's foray into the Hollywood life of Haskell Wexler, it seemed like just the thing.

So, a rainy Saturday afternoon, and a German film looking into the roots of Andy Warhol. The filmmakers journey to eastern Slovakia in search of Miková, the village where Warhol's parents were born, and the nearby town of Medzilaborce, home of the Andy Warhol (original name: Warhola) museum.

From the opening frames it's clear that the locals know exactly why this German film crew is there. It's not the first time someone's shown up looking for the Warhola connection, and indeed there's really no other reason for Westerners to visit the area. But the locals - adorable kerchief-wearing old ladies; various cousins, aunts and uncles - don't mind. They are quick to pour the slivovic and put on water for tea.

It's also clear right away that this is a film that would never get financed in the current North American filmmaking environment. The tone is whimsical and meandering. There's a sense of discovery, but no real "story" in the North American sense. Just an accumulation of moments that gives the viewer the opportunity to reflect and interpret.

The village, not surprisingly, is caught in a post-communist time warp. No jobs, an uncertain future, and an uneasy relationship to the unfamilar ideas of freedom and democracy. They know all about the Warhol legend, but can't bring themselves to believe that he was a "you-know-what." ("No homosexuals have ever come from Miková.") Warhol's cousin is sure that Valerie Solanas shot Andy because he refused to marry her. She says her family didn't care much for the paintings he once sent them and gave them to the kids to play with.

All this gives some North American viewers the impression that the film is making fun of a bunch of unsophisticated yokels. Certainly some online reviews have said as much. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Implicit in that interpretation is the idea that there's something embarrassing about these people's lives and thoughts. There isn't. They are of their time and place. They have a perspective on the world that may be unfamiliar to the fancy people of New York and San Francisco, but there's a directness to them and an honesty that you rarely find among the international intelligentsia. I would happily spend a day drinking tea with a 90-year-old woman with a twinkle in her eye who says, "You aren't alone when you have a TV. The house is full of men!"

Indeed, the only people who come across as buffoonish are the educated ones - the director of the Warhol museum, so proud of the Warhol artifacts provided by his estate (Here's the shirt he was baptised in! And here are his glasses!). He laments that the locals won't pay 10 crowns to come to his museum so they can "contemplate art and find a solution to their problelms." And then he explains why the local Gypsies aren't welcome.

To me, this is the best kind of road movie: open to the world, non-judgmental, presenting people just as they are - eccentric, but completely real and comfortable with themselves.

Sure, it meanders a bit, and at 80 minutes it's probably about 15 minutes too long. But Absolut Warhola left me with a good feeling about the world, and made me wish I could buy a plane ticket tomorrow and tour the villages of Middle Europe.

Tell Them Who You Are

2008-04-11T23:15:00.006-04:00

I went back to the stack of eBay DVDs tonight. The film I pulled out was Tell Them Who You Are, Mark Wexler's film about his famous father, cinematographer Haskell Wexler.

I had no idea what to expect - family films can be tricky (though they're often very popular - Mme Holiday says they're the surest way to get a sympathetic audience), and a son turning a camera on his cameraman father... well, the opportunities for disaster are endless. Especially given the fact that Haskell is infamous for fighting with his directors.

And sure enough, the car wreck starts right off the top. Mark: "Dad, can you tell us where we are right now?" Haskell: "If you don't know where the fuck we are right now, just look around. You're making a goddamn documentary." Who's the director here? And how uncomfortable is watching this film going to get?

Well, it gets more uncomfortable. Haskell wants to tell Mark something on camera, and has set up the shot he wants before calling him over. Mark doesn't like the shot. They argue about this for so long, Haskell never gets to say what he wants to say. About a third of the way into the film, you feel these two emotional cripples deserve each other. Mark, who is well over 40, comes across as a boy desperate for his father's approval, which he's emphatically not getting. Haskell? Well, it's soon clear why Milos Forman fired him from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - he's completely insufferable.

And yet, the more uncomfortable the film got, the more I found myself sympathizing with both of them: Mark, who was allowing himself to look like an ass, and Haskell, who had to be more aware than most documentary subjects of the vulnerable position he was putting himself in, given his difficult relationship with his son. Clearly, this process had taken a lot of guts on both their parts.

And sure enough, it does become clear that the film is a process. There's never any big emotional revelation, but by the end of the film Mark and Haskell are working together (though Haskell still won't sign a release). The clearest psychological insight comes from Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, both of whom clearly had father issues of their own. And you finally get a sense that Mark is a lot more clever than he's let on. He's not the fuck-up he sets himself up as - messing up the audio when shooting his dad's birthday party, being schooled in filmmaking 101 on camera. He knows enough to leave his camera rolling when Haskell, off camera, forgets he's wearing a radio mic and tells his friends what he's really thinking. And Mark and editor Robert DeMaio structure the film beautifully, the revelations coming slowly, our sympathy and understanding building towards a lovely finish.

The real emotional climax of the film, though, happens in the DVD extras. Watch the film, then watch Haskell watch the film. It's worth the price of the DVD.

Monster in the Family: The Struggle Continues

2008-04-10T08:26:00.017-04:00

Last fall, CTV aired a two-part documentary called Monster in the Family, which was one of the first things I recorded after mastering the use of my new DVD/hard-disk recorder. I liked part 1 very much (and hadn't realized that it had first aired more than a year earlier), but I never got around to watching part 2 until now.

Interesting story. Too bad it wasn't a 15-minute magazine piece.

The original Monster in the Family was a great investigative piece - the kind that once would have found a home only on the CBC's Fifth Estate. It examined the case of Martin Ferrier, a man whose own mother campaigned to have him declared a dangerous offender, claiming he was an incurable psychopath. Ferrier was even singled out by Stephen Harper in a campaign speech as the kind of guy the Conservatives would lock away forever. The filmmaker, John Kastner, built a solid case arguing that Ferrier wasn't terribly dangerous at all, pointing out that his actual crimes were far less serious than the media had reported, that at worst he was a serial passer of bad cheques and not a serial rapist or wannabe murderer as had been reported. By the end of the film it was clear that it was his mother who was the monster - abandoning him as a child, then later making wild claims about him that were contrary to all the actual hard evidence, and campaigning to keep him locked up. It was a great piece of journalism - taking a closer look at a story that had been widely reported and showing a very different reality. This is crusading television at its best. Would that there were more of it.

And part 2? An epilogue stretched into a TV hour. It picks up Ferrier's story a year after his release, and shows that he is indeed doing much better, staying out of trouble and learning how to live as a free man and a responsible citizen. But there just isn't much there aside from some interviews and b-roll. Ferrier, understandably, doesn't want to call attention to himself by having a camera follow him around. So we don't actually see him interacting with anyone except a volunteer mentor and a sympathetic landlord. We don't see him at work, we don't see him with friends... With the exception of one significant scene towards the end, the film feels entirely like an afterthought.

Kastner had a long and distinguished career as a CBC producer, winning three Emmys and various other honours. He's been an independent for many years now, but somehow, unfortunately, seems stuck still in the current-affairs style of filmmaking. There's heavy narration in the CBC style, we keep hearing him asking questions... I kept expecting the Fifth Estate's Linden McIntyre to step out of the shadows and do a stand-up, except that it was Kastner's voice that we heard throughout. There are lots of standard current-affairs shots, such as the guy being introduced in narration as he's walking down the hall. One might argue that this doc is largely a journalistic enterprise and demands this approach because a lot of information must be delivered. But to me, it just isn't cinematic.

So what to conclude about Monster in the Family: The Struggle Continues? It never should have been a separate film. The original could have been re-edited into a 75-minute feature with a one-year-later final act. But the reality of independent filmmaking is, you make a lot more money from a new one-hour than from a re-cut.

Errol Morris's First Person

2008-04-09T14:55:00.011-04:00

I've been out of town; hence no posts for a few days. Because my flights were relatively short, I took along Errol Morris's First Person series, figuring it would be easier to get through a few half-hour episodes than to try to watch a feature-length doc bit-by-bit.

Morris is one of my favourite filmmakers, largely on the strength of The Fog of War, his biographical film about Robert McNamara, the Vietnam-War-era U.S. Secretary of Defense. That film is essentially a 100-minute interview with McNamara, cut with a mix of archival footage and whimsical images created by Morris. The interview is a dance between McNamara and Morris, who is occasionally heard off-camera, asking a question or challenging McNamara's answer. To me, The Fog of War is one of the great examples of the art of the interview.

First Person ran on the U.S. Bravo channel for 17 episodes around 2000-01, presumably while Morris was between Mr. Death and Fog of War. It's a series of interviews, conducted and shot in the signature Morris style, using his Interrotron contraption, a floating camera, and lots of jump cuts, as well as the requisite Morrissian illustrative shots and archival images. Judging by the four episodes I watched, it's a great example of a doc filmmaker parlaying his creative success into a money-making venture that keeps the rent paid and a few people employed. Occasionally, it reaches a level of deep weirdness that encourages second viewing, but as in most series, the formula usually takes precedence over the subject.

Of the episodes I watched, by far the strangest was Sondra London, a serial dater of serial killers. Morris's camera lingers over her creepy face as she talks lovingly of her jailed paramour-du-jour, known elsewhere as the Gainsville Ripper. We don't learn much here, but watching this woman is a deeply voyeuristic experience. She's a profoundly disturbed nutbar, but how can you not put her on TV?

Another episode engages us on a higher plane. Clyde Roper is a marine biologist who's on a lifelong quest to find and study the semi-mythical giant squid. He's a great storyteller and a serious scientist, as well a charming eccentric - the kind of scientist who performs well on CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks. He also sounds like he could have been an alternate for Morris's Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and perhaps he was. He and Morris clearly have a rapport, and you get the feeling he could easily carry a full-length doc.

I don't have much to say about the other two episodes I watched - famed autistic animal-behaviour expert Temple Grandin, and grandstanding lawyer Andrew Cappocia. In both cases, the show feels formulaic - the former because I just don't find Grandin especially compelling (though the shots of Grandin getting into her, um... hug machine certainly add some weirdness), the latter because the guy's a big self-promoter who doesn't back up his claims and delivers nothing but schtick (turns out, he ended up going to jail).

So, in the end, does the series work? Yes and no. It's a diverting way to spend a half-hour, and Morris's schtick is certainly a lot better than most. His well-practiced tricks - both his interviewing style and his use of images - work pretty well. But I can't help but feel that the series doesn't quite rise above radio with pictures.

Young@Heart

2008-04-03T20:30:00.014-04:00

The final film of this year's Doc Soup* season was a surefire crowd-pleaser. Young@Heart has all the elements: adorable seniors doing improbable things (performing songs by the Ramones and Coldplay, among others), lots of pop music (see above), and a natural story arc (rehearsing new songs for a performance that serves as the film’s climax). The film was made for Britain’s Channel 4, but had its North American premiere at Sundance and was picked up by Fox Searchlight – a sure sign of blockbuster expectations. But is it any good as a film?

It starts off beautifully, with a punk-rock perfomance of the Clash's "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" by a 93-year-old English fireplug named Eileen. But it soon becomes clear that the seniors and their choir director, Bob Cilman, aren't the only characters in the movie. The film's director, Stephen Walker, inserts himself into the film with long-winded and intrusive first-person narration. We learn not just about the subjects, but that making the film has given him "24 grandparents."

Really, Stephen, who cares? We want to know about the singers, not about you. The intrusive first-person narration gives the film a TV feel - the last thing you want when watching a movie on a big screen. And Walker continues to inject himself into the film throughout. Almost never are we allowed to hear the seniors speak without first hearing his (usually awkward) off-camera question. One in situ interview with one of the singers, who is gravely ill, ends with Walker's off-camera voice wishing him a speedy recovery. As a result, a film that has all the potential to be a great cinematic experience quickly starts to feel like a cheesy British TV show, with an over-enthusiastic "presenter" always hovering just barely off-camera.

To be fair, the film has a lot of virtues. Walker never condescends to the subjects, and he mostly manages to show rather than tell. Most importantly he never asks the subjects to explain why they do what they do, but instead allows the answers to become clear in the course of the action. He recognizes what a goldmine he has - the subjects are characters in the true sense of the word: funny, self-aware, and always honest. And for the most part he knows enough to let them carry the film.

There is one stylistic exception: the indifferently-shot vérité is sometimes interrupted by slick music videos. This happens four times in the course of the 110-minute film, and it only works half the time. The first time, a sequence in an old-folks home suddenly morphs into the group performing the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated" as nursing-home residents. It's completely bizarre and delightful. And towards the end, their performance of "Stayin' Alive," complete with geriatric strut, is too hilarious to quibble with. But the other video segments are just plopped in the middle of the film, seemingly without any rhyme or reason. It feels like they should have been DVD extras.

So, on the whole, does the film work? I would say that the director comes this close to ruining it, but somehow the characters hoist the film on their backs and pull it out of the fire. And I should also say that my better half, Mme Holiday, and our friend D.A. disagreed with me completely. They loved the characters, and loved the film because of them. Mme Holiday said she was bothered by the intrusive narration at the beginning but soon stopped paying attention to the director's voice and just enjoyed the film. So who am I to pour cold water on that? I just think the film is a missed opportunity. It could have been so much better.

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* The Hot Docs film festival’s year-round monthly screening series

Classic Albums: Nirvana - Nevermind

2008-04-02T17:38:00.011-04:00

I'm a big sucker for the Classic Albums series. I discovered it on MuchMoreMusic a while back, and was blown away. An album that I actually knew note by note - Deep Purple's Machinehead - was being deconstructed by the heavy metal gods who made it. There was bassist Roger Glover sitting at a mixing console and punching up individual tracks, showing how they got this sound and that effect. All five band members, now pushing 60 and considerably less hairy than in 1972, were telling stories about the greatest piece of work of their lives. It wasn't just rock'n'roll heaven (though the 15-year-old that's still inside me somewhere certainly felt that way), it was a really effective look inside the creative process. (OK, we're not talking Mozart here, but Deep Purple could really play, and the album is a rock'n'roll masterpiece.)

Since then I've heard that Classic Albums actually didn't do all that well in the ratings on VH-1, where it originated, because - it was felt - it was too "Inside Baseball." Turns out, rock fans actually want to know more about what goes on "Behind the Music" than about the music itself. Whatever. Once again I'm out of step with the masses.

Fortunately, the Classic Albums episodes are pretty widely available on DVD. I've picked up a few over the last couple of years, but have largely been disappointed. For some reason, the heart of the story was missing. Queen's A Night at the Opera is a good example. The episode is driven more by the format - going through the album song by song (at least half of which aren't actually any good) - than by the story. And then of course there was the huge hole in the middle - the absence of Freddie Mercury. The bottom line was, it felt less like a documentary and more like a mass-produced TV show.

So when I picked up the episode on Nirvana's Nevermind, I wasn't terribly optimistic. Like Freddy Mercury, Kurt Cobain wasn't around to be interviewed. But something about this show really worked. The surviving band members, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic (looking, in a blue buttoned-down shirt, like a middle-aged accountant) speak intelligently about the time and about Cobain. Butch Vig, the producer, picks out just the right elements of the songs to focus on, and tells good stories from the studio. And the usual array of publicists, A&R people and music journalists for the most part actually add some good anecdotes and analysis.

But I think what works best about the show is this: the rise of Nirvana intercuts effectively with the song progression on the album. The songs are so personal that they allow the story to build, revealing elements of Cobain's character through their content and the way he played them. The show climaxes with Smells Like Teen Spirit, the second-last song on the album, which segues perfectly into the band's becoming an international phenomenon, and leads naturally into the wrap-up, which sums up Cobain's character and foreshadows (though never mentions) his death. All this makes it sound easy. But I bet the director and editor had to wrestle pretty hard to shape all those interviews into a story with a strong emotional climax.

Rockets Redglare

2008-03-31T08:26:00.006-04:00

After watching Bus 174, I went back to the pile of eBay DVDs, and picked one I had taken a chance on because it was cheap and available. Rockets Redglare is a film that premiered at Sundance and played at Hot Docs. The subject is potentially interesting - a New York comedian and character actor with a funny stage name and a dark personal history. So, what the hell. How bad could it be?

The answer, my friends, is "very bad." I lasted about ten minutes before giving up. There's a lot to be said for the DV revolution, which made the means of production available to just about anyone. The problem is that "just about anyone" doesn't necessarily have any filmmaking skills or talent, nor, most unfortunately, the modesty or self-awareness to realize this.

This film was apparently made by a first-time filmmaker with borrowed equipment. Well, number one, he should have borrowed a radio mic along with the camcorder, and maybe a book on camerawork, so that the interviews wouldn't look as awful as they sound. But the muddy sound and picture aren't the worst of it. In the ten minutes I watched, Rockets Redglare doesn't come across as the least bit interesting. The rambling clips from the likes of Steve Buscemi and Jim Jarmusch don't create a sense of mystery or raise any questions - it's as if we're supposed to be interested in his story just because these Gods of Indie Filmmaking were friends with the guy. And finally, there are the clips from Redglare's mid-80s stand-up act, which aren't the least bit funny. So. Bad shooting. Bad sound. No structure. Boring subject. Eject.

As of today, you can find my copy at a certain used-DVD store I frequent. One film that was available at the store was The War Tapes, a very good documentary about the Iraq war that was shot primarily by the soldiers themselves, with cameras supplied by the filmmaker. The soldiers got fantastic footage - intimate, raw and often heartbreaking. Throughout the process, they worked closely with director Deborah Scranton, who was back in the U.S. and communicated with them via e-mail and IM. And they clearly cared a lot about telling their story in the best way possible. That's the film that, from what I've seen, is most emblematic of everything that's good about the DV revolution.

Bus 174

2008-03-30T09:19:00.005-04:00

When I was done with Mozartballs, I went to a pile of DVDs that I'd bought a few months ago on eBay for next to nothing. (Here's a secret that I don't want to spread around too widely: eBay has tons of great documentaries and foreign films that you can get for a song - especially if you can buy a bunch from a single dealer and save on shipping.) The one I was most interested in was Bus 174, a Brazilian film that examines a notorious bus hijacking that was televised live all over the country.

Bus 174 weaves together footage from the multiple cameras that captured every minute of the stand-off, interviews with hostages and police officers, and a meticulously researched examination of the highjacker's life. It starts with a breathtaking aerial shot of Rio, floating over the green of the mountains that surround the city, the mountainside favelas, the famous Copacabana beach, and the middle-class neighbourhood where the stand-off takes place. It's an organic and intriguing beginning that had me riveted. Director José Padilha carefully builds the backdrop for the story: Rio's street-kid problem, the effects of child poverty and homelessness, etc. By the time we get into the hijacking, we have an inkling of what we're in for, but not where we're going. And that's when the film really takes us on a ride.

I won't reveal too much, but the hijacker - who's high, desperate and very angry - turns out to have a history that's both predictable and surprising. The structure is masterful - things that happen during the stand-off lead seamlessly into elements of the backstory, which becomes more and more complex and surprising as the film goes on. And for viewers outside Brazil, who don't know how the story ends, there's edge-of-the-seat suspense.

The film does lose its way a bit here and there. At two hours, it's at least 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, too long. Some points are made over and over and interview subjects are allowed to ramble. This is a common problem with documentaries that aren't subject to the discipline of a broadcast length. I know the disciples of Peter Watkins - who decries the monoculture of "the universal clock" - will disagree with me emphatically. But the lack of any kind of clock just leads to a lack of rigour.

And finally, another thing I found fascinating about the film actually came out in the making-of featurette. To get fresh, insightful interviews from the survivors - who'd been interviewed so much that they had stock answers for everything - Padilha sat them down in a studio with a TV and a remote control. They watched TV footage of the highjacking - which of course they had never seen - and when they felt like stopping the tape, he would ask them questions. It's a great technique.

From the point of view of storytelling and technique, I found Bus 174 one of the most inspiring documentaries I've seen in a long time.

The Cult of Walt

2008-03-29T23:47:00.006-04:00

As I was writing the last post, I started watching a doc on Bravo about Walter Ostanek, the St. Catharines-based polka band leader. It's called The Cult of Walt: Canada's Polka King, and apparently it got a Gemini nomination for best bio. Go figure.

Why do people bother to make such things? The film has no structure, no style, and worse, no soul. The narration is full of cliches such as "perfecting music that is truly timeless" (to pick one that I happened to hear as I was writing this). It rides along on Ostanek's personal charm and the obligatory bits of polka perfomance. But all it does is keep repeating how great the guy is. There's no insight, no probing questions, no attempt to universalize the story or get beneath the surface. Yawn....

Ostanek has been on my radar for years. More than ten years ago I was hired to write a proposal for a doc series with the exact same concept as the BBC's (and CBC's) "Who Do You Think You Are?" I put Walter in the proposal... and the series didn't go. (Maybe if I'd put in Don Cherry instead...) Around the same time, I saw a lovely film at an early Hot Docs, when it was still held in conference rooms at the Park Plaza hotel. It followed Ostanek and his mentor Frank Yankovic on a tour of the Canadian prairies, and it captured the soul of polka, its players and its fans -- retired farmers who would polka for five hours straight, as long as Frankie and Walter could keep playing. That film made me want to learn how to polka. Watching this newer one, I didn't even tap my toes.

Mozartballs

2008-03-29T22:44:00.008-04:00

I got up this morning with nothing on my plate. My better half is away for the weekend, and despite a looming deadline or two I had decided to take the day off. After breakfast, instead of heading out into the sunshine, I picked a DVD from the pile next to the TV, and popped it in.

The film was Mozartballs, by one of Canada's most interesting filmmakers, Larry Weinstein.

Mozartballs was an unexpected contribution to the celebration of Mozart's 250th birthday a couple of years ago. Instead of making yet another earnest bio, Weinstein decided to focus on the fans - Mozart's wackiest, most devoted fans. A woman in Oklahoma who is convinced she's the reincarnation of Wolfgang himself, and her lesbian partner, who is apparently the reincarnation of the love of Mozart's life, one of his generation's leading sopranos. (Hurray! They found each other in this life!) A man who believes that Mozart spoke to him and saved him from suicide. A fellow who writes music "in the style of Mozart" with the help of a computer. And an Austrian cosmonaut who took Wolfgang with him into space.

The thing that most impressed me about this film was how much respect Weinstein showed his wacky subjects. There isn't a single shot in the film that suggests he's making fun of them, and yet the film is full of hilarious moments. In this respect it reminded me of of Gates of Heaven, Errol Morris's great film about a pet cemetery. But just as importantly, the film is beautifully constructed and visually rigorous. It's not just a series of profiles of wacky eccentrics; the characters have an emotional arc, both individually and collectively. By the end of the film, we get it - Mozart helps keep these people alive. May we all have something that we care about so deeply.

Finally, a note about the shooting, by one of Canada's best documentary cinematographers, John Tran. There are two shots I will remember for a long time: a shot starts on black, then pans over to some kids playing in the back yard, seen through a glass door. The shot then moves up, and reveals that the black and the reflection were both parts of a grand piano played by the Mozart-loving astronaut. The kids were seen in a barely distorted reflection in the piano. The other shot puts Ms. Mozart on a ladder, face to face with a painting of the real Mozart and his family. As she reflects on the painting - and gets quite emotional - she's seen in a reflection, framed perfectly in a triangle of black that makes her face clearly visible. John Tran rocks.

So that's number one. A pretty enjoyable beginning.

P.S. I just put in a link to the Amazon page for the film, and as I was browsing through that page, I read a review of the film by one of the subjects, who talks about why she loved the experience and the result. It's quite instructive.

Why Doc a Day?

2008-03-29T22:01:00.005-04:00

I work in documentary film and factual TV in Canada. Been at it for a while... and have lofty creative ambitions, not to mention High Standards. But I find, to my embarrassment, that I have enormous gaps in my knowledge of documentary film. Sure, I've seen my share of films and I have my favourites. I go to film festivals, occasionally get my act together and see the latest theatrically released doc, and sometimes watch films on TV. But I record a lot more films than I end up watching. And I have stacks of commercially released documentaries on DVD that I've been meaning to watch for months, sometimes years... not to mention copies of films by friends and colleagues that - here comes that embarrassment again - I never get around to watching.

So I've decided to try an experiment: I'm going to try - and I emphasize the word "try" - to watch a doc a day for a year, and write about it. I may miss days when I get busy, there certainly will be gaps when I'm away on shoots or on holiday. But I'll give it a shot. I'm taking the yoga approach: it's the intention that counts.

I started this morning, with a kind of marathon. I'm alone in the house this weekend, and what better way to spend the day than watching films. I'm up to three - I got ten minutes into the last one before I turned it off - and I think I'll try to get through at least one more before I call it a night. Oh yeah. That's one way I'm going to make it easier for myself: if I don't like a film, I have no intention of sitting through the whole thing.

And another thing: anything goes. I'm not going to restrict myself to films that are Important - though I'll try to get through the canon - and I will try to watch films by people I know and care about. That will mean watching episodes of factual TV series that some purists would sneer at. But as far as I'm concerned, we're all engaged in the same thing: real people (as opposed to actors) do stuff; we film it and put it on TV.

So here goes. Doc a Day. On average. Thereabouts. Let me know what you think.