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| Muscle Shoals wins the Hot Docs Audience Award |
Oscar Talk
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| Blood Brother |
It’s worth keeping Muscle
Shoals and Blood Brother in mind
for upcoming predictions. If you’ll recall, last year’s audience award winner Chasing Ice went on to make the Academy shortlist
of fifteen finalists and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Song. Two of the
documentary feature nominees, The Invisible War and 5 Broken Cameras,
also played at the festival last year and over half of the fifteen shortlisted
films screened at Hot Docs. There’s a strong chance at a few of the nominees
are among the Hot Docs class of 2013.
I’ll admit that there wasn’t a case like last year where I
exited the screening of The Invisible War
and immediately thought I’d seen the Oscar winner. My ambiguous feel for the
Oscars this year could partly be attributed to the fact that none of the
screenings I attended ended with a standing ovation; alternatively, I could be
reluctant to call anything Oscar worthy, since last year’s festival buzz didn’t
entirely translate to Oscars. You might recall that Marley failed to make the shortlist but Ethel did. The Academy gets the dunce cap for that choice.
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| Valentine Road |
Hot Docs 2013, however, arguably saw a handful of films that
enjoyed Marley-like buzz and are
worth remembering. In addition to Muscle
Shoals and Blood Brother, Valentine Road enjoyed heavy praise and
plenty of buzz with the O-word. I missed Valentine
Road, so I can’t comment on the film
itself. One of my favourite films of the festival (if not the year so far) is The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne, which saw great buzz, yet failed to make the top twenty for the audience award. I was surprised by this, since Doris seemed to go over well with the audience at the screening I attended. Doris Payne struck me as the best American doc to have its world premiere at Hot Docs. If Doris Payne doesn't win anything, however, Oscar watchers should at least keep an eye on Halle Berry when she takes on the role of Doris Payne in Who is Doris Payne? Doris is one of the most interesting characters you'll see in a film!
Two other films I would add to the Oscar watchlist are Let the Fire Burn and The Crash Reel. Let the Fire Burn is a compelling archival film, which had many Hot
Docs patrons gabbing about its sensational exposé. The research and presentation
of a clear argument in Let the Fire Burn is
commendable, but I think that its success is eclipsed by the stronger and more
aesthetically ambitious Hot Docs film Our Nixon. Our Nixon might have had a harder time connecting with Toronto
audiences than Fire did, possibly due
to subject matter or due to the active viewing it demands, but I think it’s the
better of the two films. I don’t think Let
the Fire Burn holds up to post-viewing scrutiny, though, as the selectivity
over what was omitted from the film is problematic, but it’s a film to which
one has an extremely intense reaction during the screening, and gut-level
feeling often trumps afterthought when it comes to the Oscars. The Crash Reel, on the other hand, is a terrifically composed film that
goes beyond the images of the archive. Director Lucy Walker, a two-time
nominee for The Tsunami and the Cherry
Blossom and Waste Land, could
find herself back at the Oscars if viewers recognize how intuitively she looked
at her subject and saw a larger story that extended to an interrogation of
extreme sports as a whole. Ditto Blackfish, which takes a seemingly isolated tragedy and zooms out to find a larger, more unsettling story. These films are all marks of a strong festival
regardless of where they travel on the awards circuit.
The Best of the Fest
The Best of the Fest
Interestingly enough, the only quip I have with the
programming at Hot Docs this year is for the selection of The Manor as the opening night film. I found it to be an odd choice
when I caught the press screening prior to the festival, since there isn’t
anything particularly special about the film. Admittedly, there is the novelty
of seeing a local story opening the festival, but I think if one compares The Manor to, say, TIFF’s selection of Looper as the opener for last year, one
sees that a strong film can get a festival off to a great start. The Manor made it seem like we were
championing local content for its own sake. The
Manor certainly got people talking, though, and it was often the film
people wanted to discuss. However, the conversation wasn’t always for the
better, as most people I spoke with shared my opinion that The Manor is good for a first feature, but not on the level for an
international film festival’s opening choice. One fellow moviegoer even went so
far to state that she wouldn’t have even picked the film to open a student
showcase at Ryerson.
Let’s focus on the good, though, since the strength of the
best films outweighed the lesser fish. (Even the duds usually offered something
of value.) No film quite surpassed either of my favourites from Hot Docs 2012, We Are Wisconsin and The Imposter, but there are several films I recommended consistently throughout the festival and would be glad to
champion in the months to come. I think my favourite film of the festival was
one of the first docs I saw, Alan Zweig’s 15Reason to Live. I like 15 Reasons to
Live the best because it had a marvelous ability to examine aspects of our
everyday life that we can cherish to make our lives and the lives of others
more rewarding and fulfilling. I often decry feel-good films, but 15 Reasons to Live is a great,
life-affirming documentary. Rivalling 15 Reasons
are two wildly dissimilar docs that also had me raving to friends and family to
make room in their schedules. The Ghosts in Our Machine and The Life and
Crimes of Doris Payne have two of the most fascinating subjects of the
year, and the treatment given to them by their respective filmmakers is equally
smart and captivating.
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| The Ghosts in Our Machine |
My picks for the best of the fest, in alphabetical order, are:
Oddly enough, the one film that was on my mind most often
during Hot Docs was a film that didn’t even play at the festival. Every time I
considered a five-star rating or pondered whether a film had the goods to win
the title of “Best Documentary”, my mind always wandered to Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell. It was hard to give a
film five stars after doing so for Stories
since nothing matched Polley’s perceptive fusion of form and content. It’s hard
to place a film on the same level as one that redefined how one looks at the art
form. Where else better than Hot Docs to test your appreciation for documentary
film?
Hot Docs 2013 was therefore a successful festival overall.
Hats off to all the programmers, theatre staff, festival workers, and
volunteers for making another great celebration for documentary film!
