Hot Docs 2012: Reviews #4

Reviews of screenings from the 2012 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Toronto, Canada.

Who Cares (Dir: Rosie Dransfeld, 80 minutes, Canada)

Rosie Dransfeld's Broke, which played HotDocs in 2009, stuck in my memory, so I was interested when I saw that she was returning to the unglamourous streets of Edmonton. Broke was a fairly closed-in film, focusing on a pawnbroker and the customers coming in and out of his shop. Here, we get the sense that Dransfeld could have done almost the same thing for the owner of the drab, low-rent Reno Bar, who looks to have a complicated-but-neighbourly relationship with his clientele, many of whom are on society's margins. Rather tellingly, Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'" is playing in the background during once scene set in the bar.

But it's the subset of patrons who are working prostitutes that Dransfeld focuses on here — and the difficulties they face that gives us the film's title. One of the film's strands follows an RCMP officer whose outreach activities mostly involve collecting DNA samples from sex workers should the worst happen. "It's not gonna make you safer," he admits as he does his rounds.

How can there be a subset of women in our community where we say, "the protection of the State does not apply to you"? We'll make some effort to identify your remains, but otherwise, you're on you're own. To ask that is to answer — we simply edit them out from our conception of community: "nobody ever sees the person. They just see the prostitute," says one of the film's subjects. And another strand follows a couple now-retired sex workers who are trying to create a better life for themselves.

Broke had exhibited a fairly limited technical palette, and in comparison this film is visually richer, taking us on prowls through an empty, late-night version of Edmonton, filled with wide roads and grim low-rise neighbourhoods. The film's less-strong second half drifts a bit, inserting some segments that feel like entries from one subject's video blog in an attempt to impose an uplifting arc, but I thought the film was strongest when it stuck in and near the bar. Still, Dransfeld's best skill remains her patience and sympathy for her subjects, allowing us to hear honest and direct talk from some women who have faced some rough lives. Regardless of whatever exploitation and indignities they've faced, we're given a chance to empathize with them, and I think it's that closeness that I'll remember most from this film.

The Waiting Room (Dir: Pete Nicks, 81 minutes, USA)

In the emergency room at the Highland Hospital in Oakland they arrive on foot and on the bus — they show up here because there's nowhere else they can go. In the American healthcare system, the public hospital is the institution of the last resort, as evidenced by the lengthy queue in the waiting room, as patients are forced to wait hours to be seen.

Allocating limited resources, it seems like doctors and medical staff spend more time shuffling patients in and out of available beds and figuring out how to work the bureaucracy than they do actually treating them — and when a trauma case arrives in the ambulance, staff converge to try and save a life, leaving everyone else waiting even longer. This isn't an extraordinary day at Highland — it's every day.

And so, over the course of the film, we spend a day in the waiting room, listening to the patients' stories and following a few through their experience at the hospital. Parents feel powerless anxiety while guarding over their children, doctors worry about what will happen if they discharge patients with no home to go to, and at the end of it all is the indignity of the billing department. Along the way, there are small moments of grace and comforting and little hints of community, as folks who might not otherwise interact rub shoulders and share the burden of waiting.

The film is observational and absolutely non-didactic, but to watch this while knowing even the slightest context of the American political debate over healthcare is to see it as an indictment of a society that treats its members with such callous disregard. A very good piece of work that needs to be seen widely in its own country — and also here, as a rejoinder to those who want to dismantle one of Canada's most important social institutions.

The Revisionaries (Dir: Scott Thurman, 83 minutes, USA)

It's hard to have a reasoned and logical debate when your opponent's goals are to undermine the foundational use of reason and logic. Welcome to Texas, where fundamentalist so-called Christians and extreme right-wingers are playing the long game, trying to radically shift the terms of discourse by hard-wiring their strange, irrational values into the state's educational curricula. That would mean that all new textbooks would have to conform to the new curricula — and because Texas is such a large bulk customer, other states with less clout would get swept up into buying those same texts inculcating those same values.

Starting with the battle to de-legitimize the Theory of Evolution, the right-wing fringe of the State Board of Education is so over-the-top loonytunes that it's tempting to treat all of this merely as comic fodder — and, indeed, there are plenty of truly funny moments in this film. But as they move from science to social studies, watching the committee pass amendment after whitewashing amendment, creating a strange conservative vision of America squelching all traces of race and class struggle ("delete 'hip-hop' and insert 'country-and-western music'" is one petty-yet-telling amendment) transcends perplexity into outright rage.

And yet, this film's construction and even-handedness would probably mean that someone supporting the ultraconservative faction would find as much here to buttress their position. What might be considered giving the boardmembers copious rhetorical rope with which to hang themselves by one side would be seen as a good showing by the other. Certainly, as director Thurman explained in an enjoyable Q+A session, that's how former chair Don McLeroy felt when he saw the documentary. Whether or not the genial McLeroy is the best advocate of his own position, he animates every frame he on the screen with a sunny obliviousness to facts, reason and logic.

The upshot here is a film that is both enormously entertaining and truly infuriating. It will take someone wiser than me to understand how there can be any sort of meaningful dialogue with people who have such a different value system — and in the meantime, I can only hope that American values like "pragmatic reason" and "separation of church and state" somehow prevail in the great state of Texas.