Hot Docs: Friday, May 8

Reviews of screenings from the 2009 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Toronto, Canada.

Episode 3 - ‘Enjoy Poverty’ (Dir: Renzo Martens)

A political statement as art project, this doc attempts to deconstruct the power relations at play between impoverished citizens of the Congo, those "exploiting" them, and those "helping" them. Renzo Martens, playing a character named "Renzo Martens", tours the countryside with a generator and a large neon sign reading "Enjoy Poverty" (since, after all, it's the most abundant resource at hand). It's all a little artsy and conceptual, but there's a method to the madness, an attempt to step outside of the usual tropes of looking at this part of the world. Why does MSF show up when children are malnourished after an insurrection, but not when children are malnourished as a result of ongoing economic exploitation? Martens' gamesmanship cannot really get him outside of the loop, but it does create some space for an investigation to take place. Once all the navel-gazing is put aside, however, this is still an imperfect documentary — the first third or more felt more like the sort of "suffering Africa travelogue" that the movie was trying to criticise, and there were a few sequences that could have been trimmed or chopped out and not missed. And ultimately, although the movie was positioning itself as being bluntly controversial, it never like it had that much bite. In person at the Q & A afterwards, Martens was thoughtful and articulate, which improved the experience.

Old Partner (Dir: Chung-ryoul Lee)

Apparently the #1 all-time box office champ in Korea for documentaries, Old Partner is a story that may be almost universally appealing. Following an elderly farm couple and their equally elderly ox, time slows down as we watch farmer Choi work his land in the old fashioned, back-breaking way. There's a great wealth of observational material defining the triangular relationship, and many funny and sad moments as we watch everyone teeter on the brink of ill-health. Expertly crafted, this might sound slight or corny, but it is simply one of the best docs in the festival this year.

pereSTROIKA - reCONSTRUCTION of a flat (Dir: Christiane Büchner)

An utterly unique story: after the fall of communism, tenants were given ownership of their own rooms within shared flats, creating a giant marketplace of tiny properties. This film takes us inside one such flat and follows a real estate agent's efforts to convince everyone to sell at once, so that the flat can be resold at higher value as a whole unit. Complications ensue. The best element here is simply a window to see how people in contemporary Russia live — how much space they have, what kind of furniture they have. The plot (and the plotting) gets a little hazy and confusing at times, but this is a reasonably pleasant trip.