Hot Docs 2010: May 8 (Saturday)

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

Gaea Girls (Dir: Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams)

Another journey to Japan with Kim Longonotto, and while this subculture is less at the fringes, it's still a very long way to the bright lights of the arena from the Gaea Girls' training camp, located in an old warehouse out in farm country. Following a group of potential recruits to a womens' wrestling league, we witness some hard physical training and no-holds-barred sparring. It's mentally tough, too, under the supervision of wrestling star/trainer Nagayo, who has a tough love approach. Just watching the determination and defeat in the recruits' faces, Longinotto's camera captures a rich emotional rollercoaster. She also proves herself to be a worthy wrestling cinematographer, capturing the physicality of the bouts. A different kind of story than the others featured in this retrospective, but still captured with the same grace and sympathy.

Grace, Milly, Lucy… Child Soldiers (Dir: Raymonde Provencher)

The Lord's Resistance Army, a notorious rebel group fighting in northern Uganda and Sudan fills its ranks by capturing children — both boys and girls. Girls are not only sent into combat but also given as "wives" to older soldiers. When they are finally able to free themselves and return home, ex-child solders are often rejected by their communities. In this film, we follow a number of women, former child soldiers for the LRA, who are now trying to re-create normal lives. Soft-spoken and articulate, they tell us about what they went through as child soldiers and how they are doing now. We follow them as they unite to raise awareness and gain acceptance, whether in their own communities or in front of the UN. A well-paced seventy-one minutes, there is a sense of uplift here in the positivity that these women are generating that mostly overcomes the sense of horror at their past lives.

Casino Jack and the United States of Money (Dir: Alex Gibney)

From the director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side comes this glossy, high-calibre production. Clearly courting a mainstream/non-doc audience, this movie features a glib, quick-cut style and booming, occasionally jarring, soundtrack (the music clearances alone must have cost more than the entire budgets of some of the docs at this festival). But the populist style is in the service of an incredible story, tracking the rise and fall of Jack Abramoff, American super-lobbyist and Republican hero. Abramoff, currently in jail for fraud, engineered bold new ways of selling access to politicians and laissez-faire fundraising methods while making a tidy profit for himself. The film does a generally good job of tracking the many tendrils in play here, with interviews from some of the key players, including disgraced former representative Bob Ney. Political junkies may know many of these details already, but the film does a nice job bringing it all to life, and reminding us that Abramoff isn't a "bad apple" in the system — he was part of the system.

Thieves by Law (Dir: Alexander Gentelev)

Speaking of the thin line between criminality and government, Gentelev takes us on an exploration of the "vory v zakone", the head men in the Russian criminal underground. Finding three who would tell their stories on camera, we get a through-the-looking-glass history of modern Russia, where what is and isn't part of "organized crime" is pretty hazy. Leonid 'Mackintosh' Bilunov, now living in the south of France, presents as a wealthy businessman and philanthropist while cold-blooded killer Vitaly 'Bondar' Dyemochka wants to make movies fictionalizing his experiences. Both look like they stepped out of central casting as Russian mafia. So too with Alimzhan 'Taivanchik' Tokhtahltounov, who tells us he likes to help solve little problems for people — including, possibly, trying to fix an Olympic medal result (which he doesn't really want to talk about). Through conversations with these guys and their associates we get a feel for their characters and milieux, both past and present. The narration is sometimes a little too light and breezy, but the film mostly does its job of exposing us to this world.