Planetary may have been the most important film at the festival in terms of our species and its relation with our tender planet, but Alex Winter’s documentary, Deep Web, brings to the screen the topical, and argumentative subject of internet privacy. The digital frontier is turning into the latest battleground, a wild west shootout,…
Category: Film Festivals
Hot Docs 2015: Journey with Prabhat – Samarth Dixit & Jessica Sadana
Film preservation, and cinematic history are a huge part of Western culture, as we restore, and catalogue our seemingly endless collection of films, so I was rather interested to see how things played out in other countries. Prabhat Studios was a big and well-recognized Indian studio when talkies came along. After that, though it fell…
Hot Docs 2015: Welcome to Leith – Michael Beach Nichols & Chrisopher K. Walker
It will be interesting if this review doesn’t become a tirade, as I’ve never understood racism, and think that those who go around spouting it, are all manner of moronic. So, I settled in to be as objective and open-minded as I could, which proved to be not very. The first time Craig Cobb, and…
Hot Docs 2015: Attacking the Devil – Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime – Jacqui Morris & David Morris
Yesterday, I discovered a new hero. His name is Harold Evans. I love films about newspapers, and when they introduce me to people I should have heard of and haven’t and when they are wrapped up in amazing stories that deals with objective journalism , working to get the truth out, and working for justice…
Hot Docs 2015: (T)error – David Felix Sutcliffe and Lyric R. Cabral
Screening tonight at the Lightbox at 9:45pm is this thriller of a documentary, that pulls the curtain back from the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts within the continental United States and the revelation that it isn’t all as above-board and by the book as the public would like to believe. Saeed, alias Shariff, an ex-con has been working…
Hot Docs 2015: Tuk-Tuk – Romany Saad
Screening today at the Scotiabank theatre at 9:15 is this vibrant and intriguing look at the streets of Cairo, through the eyes of three young boys. Bika, Abdullah and Sharon are young, energetic, and hardworking, driving their motorized rickshaws, tuk-tuks, through the busy back streets and throughways of the city. Definitely not old enough to…
Hot Docs 2015: Raiders! – Jeremy Coon & Tim Skousen
Screening today at the Hart House theatre at 9:30 is a documentary that completely encapsulated my youth and filled me with awe, and a fire to create. Back in 1981, a film came along that changed many a young viewer, myself included, Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. It affected a number of…
Hot Docs – A Woman Like Me – Alex Sichel, Elizabeth Giamatti
When Alex Sichel is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she immediately envisions another woman – a different version of herself – who undergoes the same journey, but in the spirit of living through it, rather than dying from it. Ever the filmmaker, Alex embarks on a mission to tell her own story, through both voices –…
Hot Docs 2015: Circus Dynasty – Anders Riis-Hansen
Screening today at the Lightbox theatre at 6:30 (rush tickets only, I’m afraid) is this magical, and heart-touching love story set against the back drop of one of Europe’s largest circuses, the Circus Arena! Patrick Bendino is the heir apparent to his the family circus, he’s trained, he’s skilled, and he’s learning to manage and be ringmaster, he’s…
Hot Docs 2015: Chuck Norris Vs Communism – Ilinca Calugareanu
Screening today at the Hart House theatre at 9:30pm is this masterful, and highly enjoyable documentary that plays like a Cold War thriller. The year is 1985. The place, Romania, a country under strict control by its socialist/communist government, there’s one television channel for the nation, and it broadcasts nothing but state propaganda. The…
The Mind Reels 