Hot Docs 2010: May 1 (Saturday)

Reviews of screenings from the 2010 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Toronto, Canada.

Eat the Kimono / Shinjuku Boys (Dir: Kim Longinotto)

My first screening in the "Outstanding Achievement" award retrospective, this combined two thematically-linked mid-length films from relatively early in Longinotto's career. Eat the Kimono follows travelling theatrical performer Hanayagi Genshu on tour throughout Japan. Genshu is keenly aware of the patriarchal and class forces shaping society around her — but unlike many is not afraid of taking them on. The title comes from her advice to women — Eat the kimono before it eats you. The film (from 1989) looks delightfully 80's, and there's a wealth of visual details about the time and place to absorb. But the film feels a bit stretched at 60 minutes, and there are a few cultural elements that are left unexplained.

More successful is 1995's Shinjuku Boys, which burrows more deeply and more specifically into the confusing continuum of gender in Japan, following a number of onnabe "hosts" at a Tokyo club. Onnabes are women who dress and choose to live as men, serving a clientele of generally heterosexual women, looking for a kind of idealized boyfriend experience. Almost a show-don't-tell presentation of an Adrienne Rich essay, we meet several of the onnabe and learn about the unclear lines they themselves are navigating, with Longinotto now more confidently eliciting very intimate responses from her subjects. Plus, more vibrant footage of Tokyo at the time — the closing credits visuals with the subjects confidently striding through city and subway, "passing" without effort is a strong ending for a film about one way that women have chosen not to be subject to their society's expectations of submissive servitude.

Disco and Atomic War (Dir: Jaak Kilmi)

An exploration of "soft power" at the frontier of the Cold War. Tallinn, capital of occupied Estonia, is just across the Bay of Finland from Helsinki, and as such, citizens there can catch Finnish television shows, bringing them a taste of life on the other side of the iron curtain. That is, as long as they can stay one step ahead of the authorities with the latest contraband anti-jamming gizmos. The film successfully argues that from such small things come big societal changes — in exile after the breakup of the Soviet Union, even the old politburo-installed leader said it was the key thing that led people to demand something different.

So an intriguing story. The presentation worked less well for me. With a quick-cutting assemblage of stock footage and talking heads, this felt like something one would flip past on television and felt frenetic on the big screen. The soundtrack was overstuffed with sound effects and a limited number of music cues that kept coming back again and again. There were some genuinely funny moments with some wonderfully kitsch images in the stock footage and re-enactment footage, and a subplot of the spread of the plotlines of Dallas through the Estonian countryside was quite nice. But just a bit busier and frothier than I prefer.

Also one annoying technical fault: all the subtitles were justified to the left of the screen, making them inconveniently placed for reading in a theatre with someone in the row in front of you. The director was on hand for a Q&A, but I did not stick around.

Osadné (Dir: Marko Skop)

This film takes us to the very frontier of the European Union, visiting eastern Slovakian town it is named after. Osadné, though set in a beautiful valley, is a dying town — recently the local priest has performed fifty funerals and two baptisms. We meet the optimistic young priest along with the town's long-serving mayor as they they to come up with something to reinvigorate their town. Along with an official of the Rusyn cultural organization, the officials are invited to Brussels to meet with their European representatives and plead their case.

Part gentle satire of small-town life and innocents abroad travelogue, this never descends into the audience laughing at the subjects, who come across as earnest but genuine people. A meditation on the centre/periphery relationships involved in a project as complicated as "Europe", this film also has a big-screen cinematic grace, giving us wide shots of pretty-but-underpopulated Osadné (where a small bar seems to be the only functioning business) to shiny, metallic Brussels. At 65 minutes, the film tells its story without bloat. Recommended.