Hot Docs 2011: May 1 (Sunday)

Reviews of screenings from the 2011 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Toronto, Canada.

Heart-Quake (Dir: Mark Olexa)

This hour-long film tracks Shpresa, whose newborn baby requires heart surgery not available in her native Kosovo. An Italian charity comes to her aid, whisking mother and child away to Milan for the operation. The remaining children are left in the care of Shpresa's abusive husband, and she becomes increasingly distraught as the days pass. But although Shpresa's mothering instincts clearly leave her caught between a rock and a hard place as she considers leaving the newborn in the hands of the increasingly frustrated Italian volunteers to return home, she remains largely opaque. The film drags at times and the nominal main subject was less interesting than Marinella, the Italian volunteer who has to deal with more emotional baggage than she bargained for.

Screened with the mid-length Out of Reach (Dir: Jakub Stozek), which was also fairly slow moving, but dealt with the idea of emotional baggage in a more compelling way. Polish teens Karolina and Natalia have lingering anger with their mother, who abandoned the family while they were young children, but also feel a yearning for something they've missed all their lives. When they finally make contact, they run the risk of finding out that fairy-tale endings don't usually happen in real life.

Bobby Fischer against the World (Dir: Liz Garbus)

Looking back, it seems almost incomprehensible to consider the magnitude of Bobby Fischer's pop-culture import — or the idea of chess mania sweeping America. Even at the time, Fischer was known to be a flawed hero, and in retrospect, the seeds of the paranoid mania that eclipsed all other aspects of his life seem to be lingering there from his youngest days. The film does a good job of peeling back the layers of Fischer's unique family life and the elements of his personality that allowed his genius to manifest in the chess realm. And even though it's hard to dramatize a chess match, it captures the atmosphere of his crowning moment of glory — his defeat of Boris Spassky in 1972 to become the Champion of the World. And then, after that, his decline. So there's a lot of information here, and it's generally well assembled. It does, however, try a little too hard to build excitement, especially near the beginning, which moved too frenetically, set inexplicably to the "Theme From Shaft". Worth seeing as a solid biography piece, and as a bit of a time capsule.

Bury the Hatchet (Dir: Aaron Walker)

Fans of New Orleans music — or anyone who followed David Simon's masterful Treme — would know something of the tradition of New Orleans Indians, but this film gets in close and personal. Featuring several of the "chiefs" who compete to construct the most audaciously colourful costume for Mardi Gras, we learn about the tradition and how it has evolved, and watch these elders consider whether it will survive for the next generation. Filmed before and after Katrina, this film delves into one way of living and populates it with wonderful characters. Highly recommended — my only regret was that I had to dash and missed out on the Q&A following the screening.

The Pirate Tapes (Dir: Matvei Zhivov, Roger Singh, Andrew Moniz, Rock Baijnauth)

That committee of directors is the first sign of trouble for this effort, which attempts to combine ripped-from-the-headlines currency, first person travelogue and undercover investigation in a manner that is less than the sum of their parts. There's some solid talking-heads research here on the roots of the sharp rise in Somali naval piracy over the past few years — though probably nothing you couldn't gather from some of the more rigourous journalistic sources. But the movie really falls apart with the adventures of Torontonian Mohamed Ashareh, who decides to turn a trip to his homeland into an exposé of the pirates. Despite failing to "get the goods" — but delivering some local colour and a whole lot of queasy hidden-camera shaky footage — Ashareh becomes incarcerated, and the film is further derailed with uninteresting scenes of his producers making cell phone calls to try and assist him. All of the seams are plastered over with an out-of-place (and annoyingly loud) indie rock soundtrack. Not recommended.

Screened with the four-minute Only Sky & Water (Dir: Tamara Scherbak), which didn't make much of an impact.