Hot Docs 2012: Reviews #5

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

Canned Dreams (Dir: Katja Gauriloff, 81 minutes, Finland)

This is a film about what goes into the food we eat. And while there are a lot of shots detailing the workings of the industrial food industry, it's not a Discovery Channel-style "how'd they make it?" outing. Rather, it invites us to think at a more poetic level: when, at every stage of its production, our food passes through so many hands, what do the workers put in of their hopes and dreams? When animals are killed for our consumption, does their fear and pain linger in the bodies we consume?

The film ends with a shot of cans of ravioli in a modern supermarket aisle. How did they get there? Through a series of vignettes, the film shows us the origin of nearly every component — from the scavengers at the bauxite mine that produced the aluminum can to the slaughterhouse workers who killed the cows. And at each stop, while we watch the miners, farmers, butchers and millers at work, we hear them talk, discussing their lives, their hopes, their dreams.

The result is a film that is both instructive on the monumental technology and pan-European journeys involved in our food system (a long journey by truck seems to end every phase) and also driftingly poetic. And although the film invites us to believe that there might be some sort of psychic transference, with so much bitterness and pain ending up in our meals, it also forces us to wonder as the justness and sustainability of a food system that requires so much fossil fuel to move things around and so many workers struggling to get along.

Rather beautifully shot, though the poetic style and pacing may not be to everyone's liking. There are also some sequences that do not shy away from showing us what happens in an abattoir, so those of a particularly delicate constitution should consider themselves warned.

Les ordres (Dir: Michel Brault, 109 minutes, Canada)

The first of a trio of screenings in the festival's Outstanding Achievement Award Retrospective of Michel Brault's works. One of Canada's greatest film-makers, Brault's work encompasses both narrative and documentary work — as well as films that use elements of both. His 1967 Entre la mer et l'eau douce (simply one of the greatest-ever films produced in Canada) employed the NFB's direct cinema approach that it had pioneered for documentaries to a gritty non-doc feature (a similar method that would also inform, say, Goin' Down the Road) and this film would employ a similar methodology. In fact, Les ordres is a docudrama, with the script drawn from extensive interviews.

The film's rigour includes some strange elements, such as when the actors introduce themselves and explain what part they will be playing when we first encounter them. But once the action is underway, it's riveting stuff. Throughout the film, the sentiment that was foremost in my mind was, "how has every Canadian not seen this movie?"

Les ordres is simultaneously a very specific piece of historical accounting (telling the story of those who were unjustly imprisoned without charge after the War Measures Act was invoked during 1970's October Crisis) and a broader Kafkaesque fable of what happens when police are allowed to act with impunity. In both regards, perhaps the film was so striking in the manner that its vivid and terrible affirmation — yes, it can happen here — rings forth to this day when the power of the state decides that self-protection trumps individual rights. We need look no further than the scandal of the G20 summit in Toronto or the ongoing student mobilization in Québec to see how this registers still. And seeing the simple technologies of the carceral state and the brute control of bodies reminds us how little this disciplinary approach has changed.

All of this is captured by Brault's superb eye for light and composition — he has also served as cinematographer on several seminal Québecois films, and here, daily life is rendered in gritty monochrome reminiscent of an Italian neorealist film before switching to bland, washed-out colour during the period of the characters' imprisonment. The plain details of their treatment were foregrounded over the larger social picture, but this still felt like a powerful political statement — even if it didn't fire up my nationalistic sensibilities, I was filled with anger bursting from my chest at the bland competence of the police who were, of course, merely "following orders".

A striking film, then, that needs to be preserved as a part of our history and part of our present moment. But perhaps I was swept up in it too much. As the lights went up at the end and I was trying to tamp down my desire to deliver a molotov cocktail à les flics, the guy in the row in front of me shrugged to his friend and commented, "well, it was a good Canadian film, but in the broader context of world cinema..." and the blood pumping in my ears drowned out whatever else he was saying.

The Outstanding Achievement Award Retrospective series continues with Pour la suite du monde on Thursday, May 3 @ 7:00 PM and a collection of shorts on Friday, May 4 @ 1:00 PM