Hot Docs 2010: May 3 (Monday)

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

A Man Came and Took Her (Dir: Jedrzej Niestroj and Rafal Przybyl)

In a small village in rural Poland, an eight-year-old girl suddenly vanishes. Where did she go? Is she dead, or just "taken away"? Following the case over an eight-year stretch with close access to numerous "persons of interest", the filmmakers let things unfold without undue glamorization or editorializing. The girl's mother refuses to believe her daughter is dead and seeks solace in any kind of soothsayer or fortune-teller she can find. Set against the backdrop of this parents' worst nightmare we see the investigation unfold. Niestroj and Przybyl contrast the families and the gossiping townspeople against shots of insects going about their work and other views from nature. Engaging but not essential.

Chemo (Dir: Pawel Lozinski)

Another visit to Poland, this time in a Warsaw oncology clinic, set somewhere near the airport. As planes occasionally roar overhead, there seems to be little do do as the patients take their treatment than to talk — to their accompanying family, or just to the stranger getting treatment beside them. And so we see a wide range of responses in the outpatients — the younger ones busily planning for their lives after this interruption is over, the older ones more worriedly just asking for one more year or month to live. Facing an existential void that most of us only think of as some distant metaphor, the subjects — most usually seen in warm close-ups — open up more about their hopes and fears than they might usually. Beautifully lensed, as the patients talked the frame was usually flooded with natural light, looking dreamily lovely in this 35mm print. A good job — at first I didn't think the film was particularly profound, but when I went outside afterwards the sun felt a bit warmer on my skin, and the lilacs smelled a little sweeter.

Paired with Six Weeks, a short tracking a mother's decision whether or not to give her newborn up for adoption. With three separate visual threads, this was a little busy, and the blurry POV shots meant to represent the infant's perspective didn't really work. A scene where the mother reads a letter written to her child — one that they might find one day if they ask for their adoption file on reaching adulthood — was emotionally affecting, but otherwise this didn't quite win me over.

The Day I Will Never Forget (Dir: Kim Longinotto)

I hope to never see this film again.

This investigation of female genital mutilation — to allow the name circumcision seems mealy-mouthed and dissembling — contained some scenes that were spirit-crushing. But Longinotto's camera allows us to be witnesses to this horrible practice, and her unparallelled empathy allows us an almost-unimaginable closeness to her subjects. We are shown the complicated social milieu against which this happens — although the men in the background agree that this is the right and traditional thing to do, it is the women in the communities that are transmitting the values and performing the procedure. And while the message of the film is in the end one of hope and transformation — we spend our time in Kenya with women who are speaking out against FGM and follow a landmark case where girls have obtained a court injunction against their parents inflicting it upon them — regardless of the positive strands, this was tough slogging and mentally exhausting.

To be entirely candid, were this 2002 film not in the Kim Longinotto retrospective, I certainly would not have gone out of my way to see it. And having seen it, has this created an empathic reaction that will make my denunciations more forceful? I don't know. I knew going in that it was about a Bad Thing. Perhaps in a month or a year I'll remember the women and girls who were finding the power to stop this more than the searing scenes depicting what they went through. And maybe that's the message — if I felt traumatized and defeated just watching this, it's almost inconceivable to think what it must be like for those that we see on the screen — and to consider that they are finding the inner strength to rise above it and try and change the world around them.

Regretters (Dir: Marcus Lindeen)

A most pleasant hour spent with Mikael and Orlando, two Swedish men who don't know each other, but share something unusual in common: they have both undergone sex-reassignment surgery, became women, and have now decided to go back to being men. The film's central method is simply to put the two on stage together and get them talking. In talking about themselves and trading war stories, they ask each other most of the questions that occur to us. We also get a sense of their different backgrounds and personalities. Orlando perceived that the grace extended to a woman would make for a better like than the disdain faced by a queer man in the 60's. Now, still with a fabulously flamboyant and unabashed personality, he is content to live in a fairly ambiguous and in-between state. Mikael, meanwhile, is more of an introverted type who wants to go back to being a "proper" man and still has hopes of meeting the right woman.

From their conversations, it seems that neither of these men were strongly gender dysphoric, but were more moved to transition because of social pressures and a sense that this could somehow "solve" their problems. And while both have some fond memories of their years spent as women, it's apparent that the change didn't fix the underlying issues. Sympathetic and charming, this one is recommended.

It was well-paired with the slightly shorter Nobody Passes Perfectly (Dir: Saskia Bisp) from Denmark, which delves even deeper into the ambiguous spaces of the lives of people for whom gender is the furthest thing from a black-and-white duality. Because this was shown at Hot Docs, I accepted in as a documentary, but had I been told before seeing it that it was an episode of a particularly cerebral upmarket soap opera, I would have believed that without question. Which is to say that this was shot very much like a fiction feature, with the conversations between the characters feeling more stagey and considered than everyday conversation. And though I found it a bit slow in some moments, it was generally interesting stuff.

My Perestroika (Dir: Robin Hessman)

It's hard to imagine what it must be like to live through a time of instability, where everything you were taught about how the world works is suddenly yanked away. It is said that in Soviet Union in 1988 that the history exams were cancelled because no one knew what the correct answers were anymore. This film takes us into the lives of a group of classmates who grew up under the communist system and became adults just as everything they were raised with was relegated to the dustbin of history. The five people that we spend our time with have reacted quite differently to this unimaginable series of changes — punk-spirited Ruslan tries to live outside the system as much as possible while Andrei has become a successful entrepreneur. Somewhere in the middle, Lyuba and Borya, now married, are history teachers in a country where history is still in flux.

Interviews plus home movies from childhood days give us a view of growing up in the Soviet system that we don't normally get, and the film does a nice job of getting across how being "a part of history" jibes with daily life as it was lived. And the film looks very sharp. It was good stuff, though perhaps a little glib in places.

Director Robin Hessman was ebullient in a Q&A that could certainly have gone on longer, and her stories added nicely to the experience.