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On the podcast, Alex Heeney interviews South African director and co-writer Oliver Schmitz about the 4K restoration of his landmark 1988 film Mapantsula. Mapantsula was the first movie about the realities of apartheid that was actually made by South Africans in South Africa.
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Film distributor Kino Lorber’s 2024 Spring Into Summer Sale (in the US; Summer Beat the Heat Savings is Canada) is on now until Monday, July 21. Here are five great films to buy at great deals. The US sale can be accessed here. The Canada sale can be accessed here.
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Kino Lorber’s semi-annual sale (Spring into Summer Sale in the US; Summer Beat the Heat in Canada) is a great way to pick up wonderful films at fire sale prices. As someone with limited floor space, my criteria for purchasing physical media can be pretty stringent. The first obvious reason is because it’s a film you love and want to watch over and over again. I’ll recommend films that fall into this category, but since I’m picking films that will give you a “film festival on your couch” experience, there’s a fair chance you won’t have seen them.
When it comes to blind buys, my top reason is because there’s no VOD option, the library and/or local video store (if you still have one!) won’t loan it to you, and you’d like to see the film. But I also think it’s worth owning the Blu-ray if it has noteworthy special features you can’t get elsewhere or the picture and image quality loss from streaming would be significant. I’m also a strong proponent of purchasing films (at reasonable prices!) when it’s the kind of film that is hard to make yourself rent (even for free off Kanopy) because you have to be in the mood for it and it might be a commitment. I picked up Last Year at Marienbad at last year’s sale, and I’m sure that’s the only reason I finally watched it after decades.
Most of the films I’ve picked here are recent releases or recent restorations. They’re under-the-radar films (even if they may have played major festivals) that, for the most part, I’ve previously extolled the virtues of. I’ll let you know why I like the film, and why I think this purchase is worthwhile.
$9.99 CAD; $7.99 CAD
A three-hour period piece about life in Germany in 1930 might sound like a staid and boring affair, especially when you hear that it’s made by a titan of German cinema. That was my initial worry, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The hint I should have taken was that it was premiering the Berlinale Competition, which celebrates inventive auteurist cinema.
The film is based on Erich Kästner’s 1931 book, Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist, which was sexually and politically provocative enough to be heavily edited before its initial publication, then banned and burned by the Nazis. Having read the book, I would never have imagined that it could be adapted to look like Graf’s film, but it’s nevertheless a fairly faithful adaptation.
This sharp, witty, political film mixes romance, formal invention, and a cast of unforgettable characters to tell the story of life after the crash just as the rise of Nazism was beginning. The hours slipped away, and what I found was a fast-paced, often very funny and politically sharp film with some incredible performances at its centre. It’s densely packed, sometimes bonkers, romantic, and a fun ride through a depressing time.
Listen to our podcast on Fabian- Going to the Dogs
To begin with, if you’re in Canada, it’s the only way to watch the film. It’s not on VOD or streaming; it is on VOD and Kanopy in the US. But beyond that, this is one of those films you’re liable to put on your “to watch list” and then never get to because the subject matter and length seem daunting — even though it flies by the way a Frederick Wiseman film would. If you own it, you don’t have to pick the perfect time to rent it and watch it. You can put it on (or change your mind!) as you see fit. The Blu Ray is just $7.99 USD and $9.99 CAD, so it’s essentially the cost of renting it twice, and the film is very much worth seeing at least twice.
$11.99 CAD, $7.99 USD
This inventive first feature from legendary Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema was a seminal work of New Queer cinema and the Toronto New Wave. It’s also a wonderful character portrait about a woman becoming an artist, but afraid to claim it — back when films about this were rare. There’s been an explosion in recent years of films about female artists, but this one was one of the first, holds up, and still feels new. Canadian stage legend Sheila McCarthy stars and gives a very funny and layered performance.
Kino Lorber released the film recently in a 4K restoration, which brings this beautiful film back to life. Before this, it was incredibly hard to find and the only copies were old DVDs that were out of print. Kino Lorber went on to restore and release Rozema’s When Night is Falling and White Room in 4K this year; the films are worth seeing and the restorations great. I wasn’t able to get copies of them in time to speak more fully about them. Kino Lorber also released Mouthpiece in 4K, our #3 film of the 2010s. (Only Mermaids is available at fire sale prices. The others are still regularly priced.)
One of the top reasons for getting the Blu Ray instead of just renting the restoration is for the special features! Sometimes, Kino really delivers on these, and this is one of those! Patricia Rozema provides a thoughtful audio commentary that is worth the price alone, as well as offering us some of her early short films and a Q&A on the film. And Patricia Rozema is always worth listening to! I’ve interviewed her twice about Mouthpiece: once for The Canadian Cinema Yearbook and once for a livestreamed Q&A. We recently published a career profile of her by Lena Wlison.
Read our career profile of Patricia Rozema
$9.99 USD; $13.99 CAD
I’ll let Brandon Nowalk’s words do the talking in this excerpt from the ebook Subjective Realities: The Art of Creative Nonfiction. He discusses how the film mixes fiction and documentary elements in a formally inventive, vibrant, and funny way.
“This film is too complicated for me,” director Miguel Gomes told Cinemascope at Cannes. “I think I’ll understand it better weeks from now.” He took the words out of my mouth. If not even the director can wrap his head around the undulating oobleck of Arabian Nights, what hope do I have? Not that it’s a daunting sit. It’s a funny, fantastical collection of stories. What’s hard is wrapping it in a bow.
Arabian Nights is the blind men’s elephant: miniseries and short story cycle, documentary and fantasy, proletarian and prohibitive. It’s an enormous six-hour movie split into three volumes, made up mostly of separate smaller stories, such as the trial of an antsy rooster and a meeting of merchants more focused on their dicks than the debt crisis they’re trying to resolve. The material for these stories comes largely from real life. Gomes employed a team of journalists to sift through Portuguese news for such strange but true stories from all over the country between the summers of 2013 and 2014.
Get your copy of Subjective Realities to read the full piece.
I’ll start by saying I don’t actually own a copy so I can’t speak to the transfer or special features, but it’s one I’m eyeing myself in the sale. The film is in three three-hour volumes, which makes it a massive undertaking. So if you’re doing this for the first time, knowing you can start and stop, resume later, or devour them all in one day is one sure way to ensure you actually watch it.
I’ve only seen the films once, and I saw the first one under less-than-ideal conditions in Cannes (tired, dehydrated, boiling), and yet I can’t get the films out of my mind a decade later. They have some incredible, hilarious moments, some moments where you may be tempted to reach for your phone (don’t do it! they pay off!), and so much originality I can guarantee you’ve not seen anything else like it. It’s a film project worth doing. Also, these are getting increasingly hard to find streaming; in Canada it’s Kanopy or bust.
$7.99 USD; $11.09 CAD
Antoneta Alamet Kusijanovic’s Murina is one of the best feature debuts I’ve seen in recent years. It’s a smart, beautifully shot film about a young woman coming into her own amidst abuse in Croatia. It won the Caméra d’Or (the award for best first feature among all first features at Cannes) after premiering in the Director’s Fortnight section.
Here’s an excerpt from my intro to my interview with Kusijanovic:
“Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic’s debut film, Murina, is a gorgeous, thoughtful exploration of teenage girlhood, abuse, and finding your own way out of oppression. The film opens underwater, where seventeen-year-old Julija (the very talented newcomer Gracija Filipovic), and her abusive father, Ante (Leon Lucev), are hunting eels. It’s a bold sequence that takes its time, letting us revel in the rhythms of the sea before we even see any humans. By introducing us to this foreign underwater world from the start, Kusijanovic establishes the film as one that is also working on a metaphorical level, even as it has some social realist approaches and preoccupations.”
As the film is widely available on VOD and streaming (on Kanopy), it’s not a necessity. However, watching it on Blu-ray will ensure you get the most out of Hélène Louvart’s gorgeous cinematography. And at this price, if you watch the film twice, it pays for itself, which is absolutely worth doing.
Read my interview with director Jusijanovic on Murina
$17.97 USD; $23.98 CAD
If you saw 45 Years and thought, what an incredible thing that Charlotte Rampling gets to star in a film about a woman over 50 having a mid-life crisis, Under the Sand is the precursor. Rampling’s first collaboration with François Ozon (they have made several films since) is ahead of its time as the story of a woman not-quite-grieving the loss of her husband. She refuses to accept his death and has imaginary conversations with him at all times. Come for the Rampling performance, stay for the largely thoughtful story, and thank the gods (Andrew Haigh) for giving us 45 Years, which takes a much more modern, feminist approach to the central woman’s story. Some of Rampling’s character’s preoccupations in Under the Sand really do date it to 2000.
OK, so I’ve cheated. This one isn’t on sale. But it’s a film worth seeing that’s not on VOD in Canada or the US, so it’s worth bundling with your dirt cheap purchases. The Blu-ray has no special features, no bells or whistles, but I’m glad I got to see the film. And if you don’t have a library or local video store to provide you with it, it’s worth checking out and then rewatching for Rampling.
There are several wonderful films on sale that I haven’t recommended because I haven’t seen the Blu-ray and/or they’re only available in the US.
Like Murina, Scrapper is a vibrant coming-of-age film with beautiful cinematography by Molly Manning Walker (who directed How to Have Sex). It’s worth seeing, and for $9.89 CAD (cheaper than the DVD!)/$7.99 USD, that’s basically just the cost of the rental and a bit.
Among the films with major sales only available in the US are the climate change documentary Anthropocene and the Iranian road movie Hit the Road. I also highly recommend Gehrard Richter Painting, in which you literally watch Germain painter Gehrard Richter watch paint dry (and blur it again before it fully dries!). I admittedly took a little nap in it, but it’s a fascinating look into the artistic process that I’ve been recommending for a decade.
Finally, though not on sale (they’re only $15 USD though), I recommend picking up copies of the DVDs of Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago (one of our 50 best films of the 2010s) and Exhibition. We loved the films so much we knew we had to write a book on Joanna Hogg — on The Souvenir — even before we saw the film! You can’t buy them in the Canada sale, but Kino Lorber will ship them to you in Canada.
Alex Heeney reviews the Soulpepper Theatre’s remount of their 2019 production of A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Artistic Director Weyni Mengeshi. The production updates the performances to reflect modern mores to mixed results as the interpretation clashes with Tennessee Williams’ text in the second half.
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Health Warning: The indoor air quality at this production is extremely poor, with particulate matter (PM 2.5) levels exceeding the levels during last year’s dangerous wildfire smoke in Toronto. Please use caution. More details at the end of the article. These PM levels were 13x the WHO recommended 24-hour exposure levels, which should not be exceeded more than 3-4 days per year.
In the remount of her 2019 production of A Streetcar Named Desire, Weyni Mengeshi updates the supporting performances to reflect modern mores to mixed results as the interpretation clashes with Tennessee Williams’ text in the second half. In the production’s opening, fallen Southern Belle Blanche Dubois (Amy Rutherford) wheels on her hardshell suitcase. We’re not in the 1950s, although Blanche’s wardrobe wouldn’t exactly be out of place there either.
When Blanche arrives at the doorstep of her sister Stella (Shakura Dickson) and her husband Stanley (Mac Fyfe), we soon realize that Blanche behaves not just melodramatically, but as if she’s in another world and, perhaps, another play. That’s by design, for better and worse. Blanche is all smoke and mirrors. Is she a widow or a maid? She keeps changing her story. How did she ‘lose’ the plantation that she and Stella grew up in and end up so destitute as to constantly be relying on the kindness of strangers? What does Blanche even want to achieve by showing up here?
Shakura Dickson’s scene-and-show-stealing no-nonsense Stella, by contrast, lives in the real world. She’s preoccupied with the practicalities of an expectant mother, ready to relax when she can, party when she can, and do what she can for her helpless dear sister. She doesn’t treat Blanche’s arrival as an imposition so much as a bonding opportunity and a chance to lend support. If she’s been marked by a childhood with Blanche, it’s only intensified her compassion rather than traumatized her into choosing controlling relationships. In other words, Mengeshi is reluctant to make the connections in the text between Blanche’s and Stanley’s overbearing behaviour toward Stella.
Indeed for one of Tennessee Williams’s most intense melodramas, Mengeshi leans away from the melodramatic as often as possible. While Rutherford gives a fairly standard interpretation of Blanche, the woman who can’t or won’t look at reality, the rest of the performers act in a more realist register. Stanley and Stella are a passionate if not troublesome, initially, duo, who offset Blanche’s overly dressy costumes and airs of gentlewomanly behaviour with down-to-earth working-class respectability. Stanley’s temper may be volatile, but he doesn’t read as wholly dangerous except perhaps to Blanche. Even Blanche’s gentleman caller reads less as a pathetic mark or an overbearing brute so much as a sensitive man who’s taken with Blanche and wants to get to know her, warts and all.
The production’s most frustrating choices are also among its most intriguing. Whether to accommodate a live band or because she had one, Mengeshi chooses to extend the sequences between scenes with long moments of dialogue-free performance. Since the band is good and, along with the women’s drawls, the sole indication we’re in New Orleans, it’s a useful stage setter. (Characters in this production rarely look like they’re enduring sweltering heat, especially noteworthy for a show premiering in the middle of Toronto’s first major summer heat wave.) Sometimes, the transitional business can be revelatory, like watching Stella drunk dance as she waits for her sister to give birth. It means she’s out of it when Stanley comes home and, as she tells it, attacks her. More often than not though, it makes the production feel shaggy, like the transitions are under-rehearsed and slow.
When a drunk Stanley takes a swing at Stella, it happens far upstage, and so messily that we’re not sure whether he ever actually connected with her. There is no thwack of connection between his arm and her body and she wears no bruised makeup in the following scenes. It’s unclear if this is meant to make us believe Stella’s side of the story, that he just gets bad when he’s drunk but is no real danger. The characters all treat Blanche’s horrified reaction as an overreaction, but even attempting to hit your wife with a miss still seems pretty bad to me – bad enough to that it’s hard to believe the self-possessed Stella would come back to him so quickly.
The sequence, though, is not entirely convincing, with Stanley crying, almost out of nowhere, after the five-minute loss of his wife to the upstairs neighbour. We watch them make up and get it on, as if nothing bad happened. If you’ve seen any other production of Streetcar or read the text, it’s a bit hard to believe. Stanley’s volatility and abuse is all over it. In Mengeshi’s production, it’s as if that volatility and abuse are only visible to Blanche, and we don’t get enough information either way to quite know who to believe, despite seeing everything play out. The refusal to pick an interpretation while making each of these moments explosive yet vague hinders rather than helps the production.
More frustrating is how the production treats Stanley’s attempted rape of Blanche. He rolls her on the bed upstage – the first time the bed has been wheeled about in the production, so it’s meant to get our attention – and while standing over her as if to thrust, red lights and loud music play overhead. It’s a far cry from Julie Taymor’s sleeves of ribbon as an obvious if artistic stand-in for blood. We don’t know if this is a stand-in for rape or for Blanche’s imagination of rape or the threat of it. Putting us into Blanche’s perspectives for these moments might work if the entire play stayed in her subjectivity. But Mengeshi has deliberately separated us from Blanche’s subjective reality throughout the rest of the production: she’s the only one not acting like it’s 2024.
Aye, there’s the rub. Although there are no cell phones or other indications of modern times, the costumes are just modern enough to read as 2024 and timeless enough to almost be as convincing as from another era. Everyone but Blanche is so busy acting thoroughly modern that it comes as a jarring surprise when Stella suddenly cedes all decisions about Blanche to Stanley, even though she’s not sure he’s right. Wouldn’t this lively, empathetic Stella opt to talk to her sister, to get her modern mental health care rather than have her committed like it’s the dark ages? Unfortunately, that’s not how Williams’ text of repressed emotions ends. And Mengeshi never convincingly shows how the characters could make the transition from such understanding people to such cold ones.
Still, the show offers many pleasures. The set design by Lorenzo Savoini offers multiple spaces outside of Stella and Stanley’s apartment on multiples levels, which Mengeshi makes use of throughout the play as a release valve from the central tension. The music from the live band and transitions also offer an opportunity for a breather from one intense scene to the next. In a play over three hours, it can be easy to get sleepy or zone out, but Mengeshi has paced this production to keep you engaged and alert.
Finally, even if the show didn’t have so much food for thought, albeit to mixed results, it would be worth seeing for Shakura Dickson’s performance as Stella. While most of the core cast has returned from the 2019 production, Dickson is a new addition, and a fantastic one. She’s so good that the Streetcar neophyte friend I took with me to see the production was convinced, by intermission, that Stella was the star of the play. Such is the power of star quality.
The theatre was smoky before the play began. The particulate matter levels were as dangerously high as outdoor levels during last year’s wildfires (PM 2.5 was around 200μ/㎥). WHO recommends that PM2.5 levels should not exceed 15 μ/㎥ in a 24-hour period, and this should not be exceeded more than 3-4 days per year.
This makes the Baillie Theatre a dangerous space to enter without an N95 respirator, and especially for pregnant people, people with breathing issues, asthma, allergies, or other sensitivities to poor air quality. California Air Resources Board details some of the health effects of PM 2.5 here.
I saw the show on opening night, when Environment Canada was warning that outdoor air quality was very poor. The PM 2.5 levels I measured outside the Soulpepper Building were ~20μ/㎥, meaning the theatre was 100x more hazardous.
That said, the COVID hazards are lower than other Toronto venues, with CO2 levels staying below 1200ppm throughout (for comparison: a full TIFF Cinema 2 would be 2500+ ppm, the Bluma Appel Theatre reached 1600 ppm after a 90-minute show in the winter).
Editor’s note (updated June 29): The poor AQ inside Soulpepper seems to be coming from the Michael Young Theatre next door. I went to see Age is a Feeling there on Saturday, the 29th, and had to leave because the PM levels were so high, they were off the charts for my meter (999+ μ/㎥), which is entirely hazardous. This suggests that the poor AQ at Streetcar (Baillie Theatre) was a diluted version of the poor AQ in the theatre next door. AQ this bad is extremely rare and speaks to a problem with the building, making Soulpepper a hazardous environment until they address this issue.
Streaming Theatre: Listen to our podcast on the NTLive production of The Deep Blue Sea, also about a complex woman in a domestic environment. Read our essay on Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, which adapts the play for the screen and puts us inside the protagonist’s unreliable headspace. Mengeshi’s production attempts to do this on stage, but it’s inconsistent so works less effectively.
Alex Heeney reviews the 4K restorations of the post-war black-and-white films Shoeshine (Vittorio de Sica) and The Lavendar Hill Mob (Charles Crichton).
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Vittoria de Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Charles Crichton Lavender Hill Mob (1951), both post-war films from Italy and England, respectively, have been recently restored in 4K. It’s a strange experience watching black-and-white films of that era look so crisp and unblemished, without the blurriness of 35mm or even the trace of dust, spots, and other damage.
On the one hand, they look beautiful, and any restoration challenges aren’t evident in the frame when you watch it. On the other hand, the restoration process turns these mid-twentieth-century artifacts into something entirely new — a new medium for a message from another era. Such is progress. It creates a strange cognitive dissonance that I remarked on and then quickly moved on from as the films progressed, and I became more involved in the stories.
I don’t have nostalgia for the muddy prints of days of yore. When I lived in Northern California during the transition between film and digital in cinemas, I couldn’t wait for film to be abandoned. I was used to the perfect, crisp digital projection that Toronto had long since embraced.
I recently saw a 35 mm restoration of Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus. It looked beautiful in glorious technicolour, and the image perhaps was even more alive on film. But the visual beauty came at a price: the sound. The voices were often so dampened to the point of inaudibility that I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Without captions, I relied on my memory of the dialogue from when I’d recently watched another restoration on Criterion Channel, where sound quality wasn’t an issue. But this struck me as a hugely inaccessible screening I didn’t wish to repeat. Fortunately, 4K restorations avoid these issues.
Vittorio de Sica’s Shoeshine is widely considered the first masterpiece of the Italian neorealist director. Sometimes, the canon can lead you astray, but this film is still resonant, humanist, and infuriating today. It’s the story of a friendship torn apart by the cruel and indifferent adult world that cares little for children and less for the challenges of post-war poverty.
The film follows two inseparable young teenage boys in post-war Rome: Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordini) and his best friend, Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi), an orphan of the war. By day, they work shining shoes. By night, they dream of combining funds to buy a horse. When Giuseppe’s older brother gets them into some illegal dealings for a quick buck, they suddenly find themselves incarcerated in a harsh system that pits boys against each other and discourages empathy.
As soon as the boys enter the juvenile prison, they are separated, which they and we experience as a violent rupture. Arriving in the cavernous space which will become their home, where the other boys are hidden behind cell doors, de Sica shoots the pair in a wide shot. They are walking side by side, so close as to seem like a single unit, within the vast expanse of the prison. We realize they’ve never been forcibly parted until now. They spent the war years getting by because they had each other. Suddenly, they’re all alone.
The boys’ fates are predetermined by their privilege. Giuseppe has a family who pays for a lawyer. He quickly falls into a group of boys he shares a cell with who support him and ultimately plan an escape. Pasquale, by contrast, is relegated to an upper level of the prison where the only friend he makes is a sickly boy who needs his protection. Giuseppe may be physically smaller in stature, but he finds people who help him. The more empathetic Pasquale instead uses his minuscule privilege to help someone else. It leads to not-so-buried resentments, especially as the prison guards manipulate him into squealing on Giuseppe’s brother, thinking he’s doing so to spare the helpless Giuseppe a beating. Pasquale does this as an act of compassion, but it only furthers the rupture between the boys.
There’s a gothic element to Shoeshine, which traps us within the same four walls the boys cannot escape for most of the film. The boys, especially Giuseppe and his friends, dream of leaving. The food is terrible, their freedom is curtailed, and fending for yourself becomes your top priority, even if it means hurting others. For Pasquale, who was already effectively on his own, despite some support from Giuseppe, prison life has its merits: a reliable place to sleep and food to eat when the closest he’d had to a bed before was an elevator the landlord would chase him off.
Inside the prison, the boys are all described as miscreants and criminals. Whatever their crimes, it mostly comes down to needing shelter and food and being naive enough to be manipulated by more sinister adult forces. The prison isn’t a place of shelter or rehabilitation but where these same adults, who see the boys and not the system as the problem, foster the self-interested behaviour they claim to condemn. There’s no way out for these boys.
Charles Crichton’s Ealing comedy The Lavendar Hill Mob is a highly amusing caper starring Alec Guinness as a bank worker who oversees bullion deliveries, who spots an opportunity to steal a pile of gold from his employer. Amidst the Ealing comedies, it follows the superior Robert Hamer film Kind Hearts and Coronets, also starring Guinness, this time as a man intent on killing off everyone in his family who comes before him in the line of inheritance. Guinness also plays all of his family members, both men and women. Like Kind Hearts, The Lavendar Hill Mob is lightly class-conscious about the desperation for money in post-war Britain, relies heavily on the immensely talented Guinness’s performance, and is queer-coded.
Guinness stars as Harry Holland, a comfortable bank worker who wants to retire early by stealing gold. He teams up with a man who lives at his boarding house who melts metal into sculptures, Aflred (Stanley Holloway). The film’s best part is the planning stages of their heist and the budding queer-coded friendship between the soon inseparable, scheming men. They spend so much time together and live together that they resemble a couple more than recent acquiantances united by a common absurd goal. Once the heist gets going, the film can drag a bit and doesn’t make sense. But it’s all worth it for a scene where Harry must pretend he’s been kidnapped and tied up (very poorly) and help the cops find him in this not-so-great disarray.
During the 1980s AIDS pandemic, a militant gay activist group took their name from the film, and it’s interesting to watch the film today with this in mind and how we can read it through a queer lens.
Alex Heeney takes a look at some of the animated documentaries that screened at HotDocs 2024, including Pelikan Blue, The Day Iceland Stood Still, Grand Theft Hamlet, and Silent Trees.
All about animated documentaries: Our ebook Subjective Realities: The Art of Creative Nonfiction features a series of interviews with filmmakers about their animated documentaries by Alex Heeney. Get your copy of .
Read all of our HotDocs coverage here.
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When HotDocs held its press conference to announce the festival this year, there was more press around the festival and the hordes of programming staff that had just quit in protest than the programming. HotDocs had previously gone to the national newspapers to lay out their financial troubles, the need to make money at this year’s festival, and the need to cut the programming. This year’s programming was significantly streamlined compared to past editions, often favouring crowd-pleasing Disney movies over more thought-provoking international cinema.
As a lover of creative nonfiction cinema — I wrote the book on it — the biggest blow was the festival’s decision to cancel their Markers program. Named after Chris Marker, whose film Sans Soleil had a gorgeous retrospective screening at this year’s festival, the Markers Program, which programmer Jesse Cummings described as “the bleeding edges [of documentary]: there are a lot of different ways in which these films shoot off from traditional documentary form, so I like to try and have a balance of these different modes that filmmakers are exploring.”
The Markers program was a recent innovation at the festival and by no means the only films at the festival to put “form front and center.” One of the most formally precise and best films to screen at the festival in recent years screened in the Canadian Spectrum before Markers existed: First Stripes, about the Canadian military and one of Seventh Row’s picks for the 50 best films of the 2010s (We delve deep into the film in our ebook The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook). But the festival’s choice to cut the program is in line with its increasing, though by no means new, tilt toward seeing documentaries as delivery devices first and cinema second.
Since I started attending HotDocs almost twenty years ago, the program descriptions of the festival’s films have always focused on subject matter. The festival divides the films into programs based on the topic. These range from music docs (“Pop/Life”) to “The Changing Face of Europe” to technology (“Emergence – Docs on Technology”). The festival’s marketing has always focused on what you can learn through films about everything from extreme sports (last year’s The Deepest Breath and this year’s 7 Beats Per Minute), contemporary politics, to the always popular Toronto issues docs like last year’s Someone Lives Here.
But as Roger Ebert famously said, “It’s not what a movie is about; it’s how it is about it.” If a filmmaker has a strong vision and a knack for storytelling, a documentary can open your eyes to worlds you had no idea you were interested in. First Stripes was case in point. I’d never thought much about the Canadian military before. Still, I was drawn in by the film’s formal verité approach to observing an institution and exposing its toxic culture through thoughtful juxtapositions in the edit. (It’s edited by the great Mathieu Bouchard Malo, who was interviewed in English in our ebook, The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook.)
Likewise, I’m casually interested in organ donation, but not enough to watch a whole film about it unless it’s in the hands of Penny Lane, who made last year’s HotDocs masterpiece, Confessions of a Good Samaritan. The film was ostensibly about her journey to becoming a kidney donor. It was also about an existential crisis, finding a way to do good, and how organ donation works and why it’s necessary. (I talked to Penny about the film’s formal innovations on the Seventh Row podcast here.)
The best experience I had at the 2024 HotDocs Film Festival was seeing Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) on the big screen at TIFF Cinema 1. It’s a landmark film in the history of creative nonfiction cinema — I wrote the book on its contemporary descendants — which is part travelogue, part memory piece, part essay film. The chance to see classics of cinema on the best screen in Toronto — and the only TIFF cinema with proper ventilation — has all but disappeared. TIFF Cinematheque has pushed its films into Cinema 4, favouring collecting membership fees over catering to audiences. But for Sans Soleil, the projection was beautiful, the CO2 stayed under 800ppm (it was a weekday afternoon at <50% capacity), and I didn’t have to queue for a decent seat. And the film is wonderful!
In search of more formally adventurous works of creative nonfiction, I focused much of my viewing this year on the animated documentaries screening at the festival. Animation as a storytelling tool in documentary is by no means a recent development. The first animated documentary dates back to Winsor McCay’s 1918 film The Sinking of the Lusitania. In the intervening years, documentarians have used animation to tell autobiographical stories, like Jan Oxenberg’s Thank You and Goodnight (1991), war stories like Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir (2008) and Leanne Pooley’s 25 April (2015), and beyond. However, there weren’t usually multiple animated documentary films each year due to the expense and perhaps even some bias against animation in documentaries.
After the success of the high-profile animated documentary Flee (2021), this year’s festival had several films that felt like they were made in its shadow. Flee was the story of director Jonah Poher Rasmussen’s friend Amin, a gay Afghan refugee living in Denmark who was still emotionally scarred by his migration experience. In Flee, the animation served two key purposes. In the present day, the rotoscoped images of the conversations between director Rasmussen and his subject, Amin, allowed Amin to maintain his anonymity. The more stylized sequences from the past bring to life Amin’s memories of his flight from Kabul to Denmark. These made Amin’s past trauma as vivid to us as it was to him, bringing us right back there with him.
Two HotDocs films about escaping from totalitarian states seem to be directly influenced by Flee: Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Zwiefka’s Silent Trees and Hungarian filmmaker László Csáki’s Pelikan Blue. Pelikan Blue is Hungary’s first animated documentary, and producer Ádám Felszeghy told POV Magazine that Flee directly inspired them. He also suggested that Flee had been a financial disaster despite its critical acclaim, and they are concerned about the prospects for Pelikan Blue. I’ll also review two other animated documentaries at HotDocs on completely different topics: Grand Theft Hamlet and The Day Iceland Stood Still.
Silent Trees follows a Kurdish family of refugees in Poland who crossed in via the Polish-Belarusian border (also the subject of Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border), survived, and are now in holding at the refugee camp, waiting for their fate to be decided. Zweifka shoots scenes from the present as live action, and animates the memories of the family’s border crossing, much like Rasmussen did in Flee. It’s a moving story, but its adherence to a similar structure as Flee makes it feel like a story we’ve heard. I’m glad to see more and more of these refugee stories. It’s a major international crisis, but I worry that the more similar they become in structure and form, the harder it will be for them to penetrate.
Pelikan Blue is about the forgers who, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, helped Hungarians take visits to the West by forging otherwise outrageously expensive train tickets. The film gets its title from a particular type of ink that was easy to chemically erase, making the entire forgery scheme possible. In the present day, the group of animated forgers gather to discuss figuring out how to forge tickets, the adventures this took them on, and how it affected other people. Actors perform their documentary testimony.
Like Flee, the animation in Pelikan Blue anonymizes the forgers and their customers while also bringing us into the memories rather than merely listening to the documentary-recorded voices. Through animated flashbacks, the stories of the time are brought to life, with some scenes invented to illustrate the broader narrative. Csáki intersperses news footage from the day with the animated footage, much like Rasmussen did in Flee, to remind us that this story is true. Some of the imagined scenes in the past are also interspersed with newly filmed footage with similar details to lend the animated imaginings a sense of reality.
Both Silent Trees and Pelikan Blue effectively use animation to tell the film’s stories. But they feel like re-treads of films like Flee wherein the animation serves the exact same purpose as that film. The visual style of animation differs — Silent Trees is less stylized, and Pelikan Blue has the whimsy and look of network TV cartoons. Though ostensibly hybrid documentaries, the lack of new approaches to form makes these films feel both less exciting and less illuminating than their predecessors, even as they work as standalone pieces (especially if you haven’t seen Flee).
Less effective was the SXSW documentary that previously screened at Visions du Réel, Grand Theft Hamlet. The film’s conceit — the entire film takes place in Grand Theft Auto gameplay – feels like a re-tread of 2022’s We Met in Virtual Reality, which takes place entirely inside the video game VRChat. Both films are about virtual connections during the early COVID-19 pandemic, when going out to see people in person was to be avoided. Grand Theft Hamlet’s additional idea was to follow two out-of-work actors as they try to mount a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet inside the game. Although a neat idea, the film raises interesting questions that it never fully explores, counting on the not-so-very-novel-by-now novelty of its premise to sell itself.
Pamela Hogan’s The Day Iceland Stood Still uses animation, but only sparingly, and is one of the most effective and creative uses of animation I saw at the festival. The film tells the story of October 24, 1975, when more than 90% ofl women in Iceland went on strike — from employment and their homes. Hogan mixes archival footage of the leading activists, with contemporary live-action interviews with the women who took part, with animated sequences to bring the younger version of these women’s stories to life. The sketched look of the animation, both whimsical and too stylized to look quite real, helps to put distance between the memories the women evoke today, dramatized in the animation, with the women we meet now, fifty years later.
The film is a galvanizing look at how collective action can create massive social change. The rag-tag group of women who thought up the strike built enough momentum to shut down the country in progress effectively. The results continue to echo today, where Iceland is far and ahead of many other Western countries when it comes to approaching gender equality. It’s a reminder that ordinary people — those women in the animation shown in the kitchen or typing at work in ordinary milieus — can effect extraordinary change.
Although this year’s crop of animated docs may have done less to push the boundaries of film form than those in past festival editions, it’s nice to see animation becoming an essential tool in documentarians’ toolboxes. These strong films use animation to fill in storytelling blanks that would have been otherwise hard to fill. The stories themselves are strong and engaging, even if innovation, for the most part, takes a back seat.
More animated documentaries: Read our interviews with animated documentary filmmakers Leanne Pooley (25 April), Penny Lane (NUTS!), Tomasz Wolski (1970), Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Flee), and more!
Get our ebook on creative nonfiction, Subjective Realities, which features a case study on animated documentary.
More HotDocs: Read all our HotDocs coverage from this year and beyond.
Alex Heeney reviews Caitlin Cronenberg’s directorial debut, Humane, a huis clos horror film set in a near future of highly encouraged assisted death finds a rich family of awful pepole trying to decide who among them to kill.
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The rise in Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) around the world as a solution to whatever governments don’t want to pay for — disability, aging populations, population growth — is ripe for a horror movie treatment. Caitlin Cronenberg’s debut feature, Humane, is the first film I’m aware of to attempt this, but to mixed results. (Yes, she’s one of those Cronenbergs, sister to Brandon.) By presenting us with heroes we can’t care about and a de facto villain who is the only character with a pulse in the film, Cronenberg keeps a film about a politically charged topic apolitical and hard to invest in.
A huis clos dinner party gone wrong, Humane is set in a not-so-distant future of food insecurity, harmful sunlight, and climate change disaster. Here, “the government” is encouraging people to “enlist” in assisted death. In exchange for curbing population growth and reducing government spending, “enlisted” people’s families receive a quarter of a million dollars.
When the film opens, Charles York (Peter Gallagher, in fine form), the Peter Mansbridge of Cronenberg’s vague fictional setting — the film is shot in Toronto, but no country or city is ever mentioned — is gathering his loved ones for a last supper. He’s decided to enlist with his second wife (Uni Park), but none of his four petty adult children, including government advisor Jared (Jay Baruchel, who seems to be in a different movie from everyone else) and despicable CEO Rachel (Emily Hampshire), know this until the dinner happens. Just as the children start to squabble about Charles’s shocking revelation, their dinner is interrupted by the bright-eyed government-contracted euthanasia doctor, Bob (a hilarious Enrico Colantoni), who has come to collect his pounds of flesh.
The children encourage Charles to delay or withdraw from his enlistment. As Jared loves to say — someone who regularly appears on TV to promote enlistment — enlistment isn’t for “people like us.” He means rich people like them. The kind who gather in a gigantic Forest Hill family home to consume gourmet contraband food and count the millions they stand to inherit from the father they don’t care much about. But when Bob takes Charles aside to sign some paperwork, Charles discovers that life might not be worth living as someone going AWOL — especially for a man for whom reputation and money are everything. One little catch: his wife has fled, and once Charles passes, Bob informs the family that he won’t leave until he has another York Family corpse in tow. It’s up to them to decide who to send as tribute.
It’s an intriguing premise that should provide an opportunity to deconstruct class privilege, family relationships, and how easily we feed people to the wolves when it seems like us vs. them, even if it’s our own family. Working from a script by Michael Sparaga, Cronenberg’s world-building is quite strong as we discover the government machine behind “enlistment.”
The family becomes quite literally trapped in their house. With internet and phone signals cut off, they can’t access their network of wealth and power to get themselves out of this. When they get to the business of trying to kill each other, a regular occurrence, Bob informs us, they don’t have the necessary medical care when they finally figure out they might be stronger together. Cronenberg and Sparaga achieve all this through a few newscasts at the beginning, brief scenes of the children entering the house, and then dialogue that never feels expositional. She treats everything as unremarkable, letting us spot the strangeness in drips and drabs. We are learning about the hidden intricacies of the program, just as the family is.
Unfortunately, Cronenberg makes some crucial miscalculations in casting and tone, which render this promising idea hard to care about. To begin with, the entire York family are rich assholes. It’s a nice upending of the tropes of the “government is cruel” film, which so often asks us to hate casually cruel government policies because they affect good people, like the Deserving Poor in I, Daniel Blake. Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa’s brilliant euthanasia film, Plan 75, still falls into the trap of making us angry about the euthanasia program because the person affected by it is a good, lonely person who deserves support.
Nothing is deserving about the York Family. Cronenberg and Sparaga spend too little time fleshing out the characters before the horror premise kicks in for them even to be three-dimensionally evil. Unfortunately, that means it’s very, very hard to give a fuck who this group of cartoon villains decide deserves most to die. Plus, we already know from the start that their adopted brother Noah (Sebastian Chacon), a person of colour and a recovering drug addict, will be the first and easy target.
None of this is helped by the fact that the actors in the York Family behave like they’re in different movies. Jay Baruchel, a Canadian actor who has somehow failed upwards into high-profile Canadian projects after never quite breaking out stateside, is constantly over-acting. He finds endless tics to embellish his character to take over the scene. More often than not, he’s pulling faces that don’t fit with the rest of the cast’s more naturalistic approach.
Unfortunately, Baruchel’s character is the most developed on paper, leaving the other siblings with little to play, so we focus on Baruchel’s from-another-planet performance. Worse, as an ensemble film, almost every scene features multiple actors, one of the absolute hardest things for a director to pull off well, and the scenes fall flat. Yet we never get a sense of the family’s alliances and squabbles, which might complicate this decision. It’s just the bio children vs the adopted one, the richer children versus the poorer ones.
Although I regularly found myself bored with and ambivalent about the York Family, the film comes to life when Enrico Colantoni’s Bob comes on screen. It helps that the character and the actor are the only ones having fun here. But considering the horrifying program that he’s an agent of, Cronenberg risks having us side with the person doing something awful to awful people rather than critiquing the system that encourages people like Bob to take pleasure in watching a family disintegrate — or drawing straws to do it for them.
Then, again, I’m not sure Cronenberg’s film has any ambition to provide social commentary about euthanasia programs. The film’s vague setting means there’s no meaningful connection to the very real and problematic euthanasia happening in Canada right now under the MAiD program. The main reference point in the film is a widespread carceral system as in the US, which euthanasia and ‘enlistment’ have since replaced. Bob bemoans that attending to prisoners’ medical needs was more profitable to him personally than merely collecting bodies, which you can only do once per person.
I don’t think it’s coincidental, either, that the program uses militaristic terminology associated with serving your country for enrolling in the suicide program. The US has much more military culture than Canada. Highlighting American connections and keeping the setting vague suggest that it’s angling for American audiences despite being a Canadian-authored and produced film. The primary nod to the Canadian context is the fact that Bob’s mobile euthanasia service vehicle is filled with boxes labelled “MAiD kits,” which looks like COVID Rapid Test boxes. That’s unfortunate because it removes any teeth the film might have.
Although the film acknowledges that euthanasia programs like the one in the film mostly affect poorer people, the film is about the 1%. Initially, this seems like an opportunity to consider the “this could happen to you, no matter how privileged you are, and there’s no way out” consequences of killing your population as a panacea for all of the state’s problems. But not finding a way out amidst that much wealth and privilege is unrealistic. It would also be structurally unsatisfying for a film that positions Bob and the government as the villains and a hack as the solution.
That’s not to say there’s no body count or that the Yorks don’t suffer, just that neither they nor we care much about who the casualties are. It makes the result predictable and allows Cronenberg to avoid any real political stand. Considering her film is about a crucial issue that is only ramping up in the worrisome ways it’s being applied but still not yet widely discussed in fiction, it’s a missed opportunity and a disappointment.
More on Medical Assistance in Dying: Read our review of Chie Hayakwa’s Plan 75. Read our interview with Chie Hayakawa on making a film about euthanasia.
More Horror/Genre Films by Women: Read our review of Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding and our interview with Glass on Saint Maud. Read our review of South African horror film Good Madam.
More Horror: Get our ebook on feminist horror films, Beyond Empowertainment. The book looks at a spate of horror from the 2010s, featuring interviews with filmmakers and essays on the films.