Hot Docs: Wednesday, May 6

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

Rough Aunties (Dir: Kim Longinotto)

"Man are like babies... totally hopeless!" In contemporary South Africa, when the state is unable or unwilling to take care of the most vulnerable, who will? Kim Longinotto (at Hot Docs last year with the superb Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go) follows the women of Bobbi Bear, and organization helping victims of child abuse and rape. Getting to know these strong women, Longinotto is a master at unobtrusively putting us in intensely intimate situations. An excellent doc, but be warned: a total crier.

Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country (Dir: Anders Høgsbro Østergaard)

Telling the story of citizen reporters who risked their lives to show the world the events unfolding inside Burma before and during the 2007 uprising, this doc tells an important story and serves a useful function of weaving together a lot of the footage collected during that time. It also suffers from some technical limitations: the parts of the film not composed of the smuggled footage are often recreations, while the original material is shot on sometimes-grainy, always-concealed handicams, making for less-than-pristine cinematography, which often ends with queasy, shaky shots as the videographer flees the scene. All of which is perfectly understandable, but which also probably makes this film much more viewable on TV than on the big screen.

Antoine (Dir: Laura Bari)

A refreshing change of pace, Antoine takes us into the world of a blind six-year-old boy from Montréal. Resolutely sticking to Antoine's point of view, adults are huge and distant, and the realm of imagination (where Antoine is a private detective busily seeking out clues with his microphone) is no less real than school or home. Strongly evocative of that time when imagination is so powerful, we are pulled right into the world of Antoine and his play-mates in imaginative, colourfully vivid scenes. Not to everyone's liking — a good handful of people fled the theatre when they realized how dedicated to Antoine's imaginary world this film would be — this is anything but a conventional documentary, and all the more powerful for it. The last part of the film might bear some further trimming, but well done overall. (Paired with The Real Place, a five-minute animated short on Canadian author John Murrell.)

Robinsons of Mantsinsaari (Dir: Victor Asliuk)

Sometimes it's not the film's fault that it's not the doc you wanted to see. Set on a remote island with two dogs, a horse and two men who don't like each other, this is not a quirky, personality-driven story against a backdrop of isolation. In fact, the doc never gets around to telling us why these two old men are enemies. Instead, it aims to reveal character through meditative reflections on the island's geography. That last phrase is usually code for "dull", and this film just — just — misses that. Uneven access might explain that we spend more time with one of our characters and get to know him a little more. This is, over all, a bit too spare for my liking, and against a backdrop of other possible films to see, I would probably advise picking another. (My disposition going in might have been soured by the preceeding film, The Beekeepers, a 28-minute musing on the decline of the world's bee colonies. Inelegantly crafted as — I think — a post-apocalyptic dispatch, this film pressed all of the wrong buttons for me. Too arty by half and poorly executed.)