Seventh Row

A place to think deeply about movies

HotDocs

/

HotDocs 2021 highlights, from Indigenous stories to animated histories

Seventh Row’s editors pick the must see films of HotDocs 2021, from Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning Of Empathy to Archipelago.

Read all our HotDocs 2021 coverage.

A collage of stills from HotDocs 2021 films.
HotDocs 2021 highlights, from Indigenous stories to animated histories. Images courtesy of HotDocs.

Never miss a great film again. Get exclusive content and hidden-gem recommendations you won’t find on the website.

Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.

HotDocs, the huge annual documentary festival in Canada, is virtual for the second year running in 2021. As usual, its large programme means the festival is a mixed bag: for every film that explores its subject in a creative, illuminating way, there are ten boringly made issue docs, albeit about interesting topics. Past festival favourites that balance content and form have included The Road Forward, First Stripes, Anote’s Ark, and Wintopia.

We’ve discovered some gems hidden within the programme this year, in particular the documentaries by Indigenous filmmakers, which there are usually a healthy contingent of at HotDocs, from Canada and beyond. If you’re in Canada, you can watch the films recommended below until Sunday night, when the festival ends.

Archipelago (Félix Dufour-Laperrière)

An illustrated still of the St. Lawrence River in Archipelago, one of the best films of HotDocs 2021.
A still from Archipelago, one of the best films at HotDocs 2021. Still courtesy of HotDocs.

From our review: “Québécois animator Félix Dufour-Laperrière makes his first foray into documentary filmmaking with Archipelago, which mixes archival footage with animation to tell the story of the land along the St. Lawrence river. Working from a documentary about the St. Lawrence from the 1940s, which itself is an inaccurate depiction of the region at the time, Dufour-Laperrière annotates, paints over, and plays with the footage, and in turn, our sense of the history of the land. 

Our guide through the territory is a woman who represents the river, an animated outline whose body is made up of live action footage of the river. She’s in conversation with a man, talking about the land, its twists and turns and islands, and how it’s changed over time. Throughout the film, there’s a sense of the impermanence of the people who live on the land: a group of dancers from the archival footage are animated into ghost-like figures; a collection of animated people rise up from the river and into the heavens.” Read the full review.

Get tickets to Archipelago here.

Daughter of a Lost Bird (Brooke Swaney)

A still of a mother and daughter sit on a bench together, facing each other.
A still from Daughter of a Lost Bird, one of the best films at HotDocs 202 1. Still courtesy of HotDocs.

From our review: “Daughter of a Lost Bird opens on Kendra, a young woman in her thirties, sitting on her floor as she nervously makes an important phone call. She leaves a message: “Hi April, this is Kendra Potter, your birth daughter.” Shortly after, April calls back, and mother and daughter hear each other’s voices for the first time.

Swaney tracks Kendra’s journey over several years as Kendra reconnects with her long-lost family and her indigeneity. Swaney is careful to contextualise Kendra’s identity crisis within the traumatic history of adoption in Indigenous communities in the US. As a result of the Indian Child Welfare Act, both Kendra and her mother were adopted out of their birth families, separating them from their Indigenous communities by two generations.” Read the full review.

Get tickets to Daughter of a Lost Bird here.

Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning Of Empathy (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers)

A woman cradles a newborn baby in Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning Of Empathy, one of the best films of HotDocs 2021.
A still from Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning Of Empathy, one of the best films at HotDocs 2021. Still courtesy of HotDocs.

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’s Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning Of Empathy is the rare “issue doc” that’s told from a deeply personal perspective. Tailfeathers, who recently impressed as both an actress and writer-director with The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, creates a portrait of the community where she grew up, the Kainai First Nation. Through exposition about statistics, meetings at institutions, and intimate personal portraits, Tailfeathers documents the drug epidemic eating away at the community.

Tailfeathers brilliantly balances individual stories with historical context, which connects the struggles of drug addicts on the reserve to centuries of colonial trauma, passed down from generation to generation. Through following her own mother, Dr. Esther Tailfeathers, who works directly with drug addicts, Tailfeathers illuminates the practices of harm reduction, and how funding for harm reduction programmes could go a long way to healing the community. Tailfeathers’s exceptionally moving, enraging film covers all the bases, both big and small picture, in informing the viewer about the crisis. It’s one of the most vital films of the year. 

After you’ve watched the film on the HotDocs platform, make sure to give it a rating in order to cast your vote for the Rogers Audience Award. That will give Kímmapiiyipitssini a chance to win prize money, which Tailfeathers has announced will go directly back to community efforts in Kainai. OS

Our interview with Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers will be on the site soon.

Get tickets to Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning Of Empathy at HotDocs (until May 9) here.

Get tickets at DOXA until May 16 here.

One of Ours (Yasmine Mathurin)

A closeup of a young Black man in the film One of Ours, one of the best films of HotDocs 2021.
A still from One of Ours, one of the best films at HotDocs 2021. Still courtesy of HotDocs.

From our review: “The family at the centre of Yasmine Mathurin’s One of Ours is a maelstrom of complex dynamics governed by settler colonialism. Mathurin specifically follows Josiah Wilson, a Black twentysomething born in Haiti where he was adopted by a pair of Canadians — a white mother and an Indigenous father — who were living there at the time, and soon brought him home to Calgary in Canada. Having grown up as a member of the community of his father’s Heiltsuk Nation, Josiah is culturally and legally Indigenous. But as an adoptee, and a Black man, he looks like he’s out of place in this community. This also means he’s part of the African diaspora that was first torn from their homeland and brought to Haiti, hundreds of years ago, only to be once again torn away from his homeland by the Canadian family that adopted him. 

Josiah is an avid basketball player, and throughout his teen years, was a member of the Heiltsuk Nation team that attended the All Native basketball tournament annually. The tournament is a celebratory gathering of West Coast Indigenous Peoples across Nations. After years of attending, one year, he’s suddenly barred from the event because he lacks the ⅛ ‘blood quantum’ required — itself a colonial concept aimed at eventually eliminating Indigenous communities over generations.” Read the full review.

Get tickets to One of Ours here.

Remembrance of József Romvári (Sophy Romvari)

A black and white still of Jozsef Romvari.
A still from Remembrance of József Romvári, one of the best films at HotDocs 2021. Still courtesy of HotDocs.

Sophy Romvari’s latest short film, Remembrance of József Romvári, is a more modest project than her previous short, Still Processing, which we interviewed her about at TIFF last year. However, Remembrance is further evidence of her knack for making personal nonfiction films. The short was commissioned by Kino Lorber as a blu-ray special feature for their collection of films by Hungarian auteur István Szabó. József Romvári, who passed away in 2011, was a prolific production designer who worked on Szabó’s films. He was also Sophy Romvari’s grandfather. Romvari elegantly introduces the viewer to her grandfather and his work, showcasing how sketches transformed into elaborate sets. She also weaves in her personal memories of the man, making Remembrance both an ode to his artistry and a loving memorial. OS

Get tickets to Remembrance of József Romvári here.

Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America (Emily Kunstler, Sarah Kunstler)

A still from Who We Are, one of the best films of HotDocs 2021.
A still from Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America, one of the best films at HotDocs 2021. Still courtesy of HotDocs.

From our review: “ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jeffery Robinson’s presentation about the history of racism in the US forms the backbone for Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America. But the film is more than just doing for racism and white supremacy what An Inconvenient Truth attempted to do for climate change. Written by Robinson and directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, the film is very much Robinson’s story. Because Robinson is an incredibly compelling speaker with a personal stake in the topic, he finds a way to make the story feel specific and personal without either making the audience feel bad about themselves or falling too much into personal interpretation.

In the vein of Ava DuVernay’s 13th, about how slavery has merely transformed into mass incarceration of Black people in the US, Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America takes us back 400 years in history to understand America’s white supremacist roots. In his presentation, Robinson meticulously quotes from primary documents, so that we, as an audience, can interpret first-hand how ingrained white supremacy has always been in American culture and institutions. In so doing, Robinson avoids preaching at every stage, even if a film with this particular title might be targeted more at the converted than the avid Richard Spencer followers.” Read the full review.

Get tickets to Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America here.

You could be missing out on opportunities to watch great films like these HotDocs 2021 films at virtual cinemas, VOD, and festivals.

Subscribe to the Seventh Row newsletter to stay in the know.

Subscribers to our newsletter get an email every Friday which details great new streaming options in Canada, the US, and the UK.

Click here to subscribe to the Seventh Row newsletter.

In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1

We drop you into the minds of some of today’s most influential documentarians, each with very different approaches, to question whether there’s any “right way” to make documentaries.

In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1

/

HotDocs Review: Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America

In the documentary Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jeffery Robinson guides us through the history of racism in America through primary documents and site visits both personal and political.

Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America is available across Canada until May 9. Get tickets to Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America here.

Read all of our HotDocs coverage here.

Jeffrey Robinson (right) in the documentary Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler and written by Robinson.
Jeffery Robinson (right) in the documentary Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler and written by Robinson.

Never miss a great film again. Get exclusive content and hidden-gem recommendations you won’t find on the website.

Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.

ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jeffery Robinson’s presentation about the history of racism in the US forms the backbone for the documentary Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America. But the film is more than just doing for racism and white supremacy what An Inconvenient Truth attempted to do for climate change. Written by Robinson and directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, the film is very much Robinson’s story. Because Robinson is an incredibly compelling speaker with a personal stake in the topic, he finds a way to make the story feel specific and personal without either making the audience feel bad about themselves or falling too much into personal interpretation.

In the vein of Ava DuVernay’s 13th, about how slavery has merely transformed into mass incarceration of Black people in the US, Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America takes us back 400 years in history to understand America’s white supremacist roots. In his presentation, Robinson meticulously quotes from primary documents, so that we, as an audience, can interpret first-hand how ingrained white supremacy has always been in American culture and institutions. In so doing, Robinson avoids preaching at every stage, even if a film with this particular title might be targeted more at the converted than the avid Richard Spencer followers. 

Nevertheless, the film does effectively target people who may not consider themselves personally racist but also may not understand the racist system and society in which they live and participate. Robinson doesn’t just tell you that racism is structural, but he shows the receipts. He shows us the words used to write it into law. At every stage of the presentation, co-directors Emily and Sarah Kunstler pause the proceedings to follow Robinson on the ground, observing how structural inequalities affect individuals. In an early scene, they show us the degree of Robinson’s compassion and patience when he engages with a confederate supporter and protester who continues to deny the violence of slavery.

ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jeffery Robinson gives his presentation in the documentary Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler and written by Robinson.
ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jeffery Robinson gives his presentation in the documentary Who We Are: Chronicle of Racism in America, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler and written by Robinson.

Robinson’s tour around America outside of the presentation is both personal and political — a discovery for Robinson as much as for us. When he visits a museum about the history of slavery, the museum guide shows both us and him the shackles used on children of enslaved people at the market; in his presentation, Robinson explains how laws had to be made to account for these children and prevent them from gaining power when they were often the result of white rapists. Taking a walking tour of New York City, his guide illuminates how New York wasn’t just the centre of northern economics, but also was interested in the slave trade long after the city itself had abolished slavery. Robinson then shows us the evidence of New York’s reluctance to join the union in the Civil War.

On a more personal level, Robinson meets up with friends from his past who were witness to the same structural racism that he and his family faced. We learn that he was only able to get the strong, newly integrated education that he did because his family bought a house in a white neighbourhood — with the help of white friends. We also learn that this is a fact that Robinson only learned fairly recently, though he reveals memories of the racist treatment he received from neighbours at the time. In one of the film’s most moving scenes, Robinson meets up with a white elementary school friend and their coach, and the two former students learn for the first time how their coach protected and shielded them from cruel sentiments expressed by their opponents at a tournament. All three of them end up in tears both out of gratitude for the coach’s work to shield them and heartbreak that this was necessary at all.

You could be missing out on opportunities to watch great films like the documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America at virtual cinemas, VOD, and festivals.

Subscribe to the Seventh Row newsletter to stay in the know.

Subscribers to our newsletter get an email every Friday which details great new streaming options in Canada, the US, and the UK.

Click here to subscribe to the Seventh Row newsletter.

Get the ebook all about documentary filmmaking!

Discover great interviews with documentary filmmakers

Over and over, we drop you into the minds of some of today’s most influential documentarians.

Get your copy today!

/

HotDocs Review: One of Ours explores identity under colonialism

Yasmine Mathurin’s One of Ours is the story of Josiah Wilson, a Black twentysomething born in Haiti where he was adopted by a pair of Canadians — a white mother and an Indigenous father — as he navigates his identity.

One of Ours is available to stream across Canada until May 9. Get tickets to One of Ours here.

Read all of our HotDocs coverage here.

Josiah Wilson is the subject of Yasmine Mathurin’s documentary One of Ours, which premiered at HotDocs 2021. Josiah is a Black man with dreadlocks (slightly bleached blond), wearing a black hat. He is pictured from the shoulders up, standing in front of a mural of Heiltsuk art.
Josiah Wilson is the subject of Yasmine Mathurin’s documentary One of Ours, which premiered at HotDocs 2021. Josiah is pictured in front of a mural of Heiltsuk art.

Never miss a great film again. Get exclusive content and hidden-gem recommendations you won’t find on the website.

Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.

The family at the centre of Yasmine Mathurin’s One of Ours is a maelstrom of complex dynamics governed by settler colonialism. Mathurin specifically follows Josiah Wilson, a Black twentysomething born in Haiti where he was adopted by a pair of Canadians — a white mother and an Indigenous father — who were living there at the time, and soon brought him home to Calgary in Canada. Having grown up as a member of the community of his father’s Heiltsuk Nation, Josiah is culturally and legally Indigenous. But as an adoptee, and a Black man, he looks like he’s out of place in this community. This also means he’s part of the African diaspora that was first torn from their homeland and brought to Haiti, hundreds of years ago, only to be once again torn away from his homeland by the Canadian family that adopted him. 

Josiah is an avid basketball player, and throughout his teen years, was a member of the Heiltsuk Nation team that attended the All Native basketball tournament annually. The tournament is a celebratory gathering of West Coast Indigenous Peoples across Nations. After years of attending, one year, he’s suddenly barred from the event because he lacks the ⅛ ‘blood quantum’ required — itself a colonial concept aimed at eventually eliminating Indigenous communities over generations. 

For Josiah, this is about more than just being able to play basketball; it feels like he’s been exiled from his community. Josiah is forced to ask, and Mathurin’s documentary explores, what does it mean to be Indigenous? And how do we form our identities? This also leads Josiah to a greater awareness of how his adoption has divided him from his biological roots, including his language. He speaks French, so he can communicate with locals when he visits Haiti, but he has no family connections there and no way of learning Haitian Creole (which his adoptive father does speak). In an effort to be properly accepted into the one community he has always known, Josiah feels more loss for the community he lost. His sister, also adopted in Haiti, feels a similar sense of dislocation when she moves back to her adoptive father’s home territory of Bella, Bella. Culturally, she feels at home, but she’s also the only Black woman for miles, which makes her stick out and want services like a hairdresser who can work with Black hair.

Josiah Wilson, seen from behind, looks out at the ocean in Yasmine Mathurin's documentary, One of Ours, which premiered at HotDocs 2021.
Josiah Wilson looks out at the ocean in Yasmine Mathurin’s documentary, One of Ours, which premiered at HotDocs 2021.

As the film progresses, we learn more about how Josiah’s family is a crucible for discussions about colonialism and identity. After he and his sister were adopted from Haiti, his parents had two white-passing biological children who do have Indigenous blood quantum. The different levels of racial privilege experienced by the siblings are a source of tension within the family, even as Mathurin constantly makes us aware of the love and affection shared by all. Still, none of them grew up on the Heiltsuk Nation territory, and all of the children were traumatized when their parents divorced and their Indigenous father left them. That story is itself complex, because the divorce was a product of their father coming out, something he never felt safe doing on a reserve with strong Evangelical Christian Missionary influences for centuries.

Mathurin’s filmmaking approach is largely to act as a fly-on-the-wall camera documenting Josiah’s experiences. She never appears in the film, though the boom sometimes does, in what seems like a deliberate reminder of her presence than clumsy technique. But because of the complex dynamics within the family and its inherent tensions, Mathurin intersperses the action with interviews with both Josiah and his daily members. The film ultimately takes place over years as Josiah copes with the fallout of being barred from the basketball event, and Mathurin charts the shifts in how the family interacts and describes their relationships. It’s a moving and unsettling film that is a case study in just how widespread the effects of colonialism are and how it continues to be an ongoing traumatic process and experience.

You could be missing out on opportunities to watch great films Yasmine Mathurin’s One of Ours at virtual cinemas, VOD, and festivals.

Subscribe to the Seventh Row newsletter to stay in the know.

Subscribers to our newsletter get an email every Friday which details great new streaming options in Canada, the US, and the UK.

Click here to subscribe to the Seventh Row newsletter.

Get the ebook all about documentary filmmaking!

Discover great interviews with documentary filmmakers

Over and over, we drop you into the minds of some of today’s most influential documentarians.

Get your copy today!

/

HotDocs Review: Archipelago is an animated tour of the St. Lawrence

Archipelago is a documentary that mixes archival footage with animation to tell the story of the land along the St. Lawrence river.

Archipelago is available to stream across Canada until May 9. Get tickets to Archipelago here.

Read all of our HotDocs coverage here.

A still from Félix Dufour-Laperrière's documentary, Archipelago, an animated travelogue along the St. Lawrence River.
A still from Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s documentary, Archipelago, an animated travelogue along the St. Lawrence River.

Never miss a great film again. Get exclusive content and hidden-gem recommendations you won’t find on the website.

Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.

Québécois animator Félix Dufour-Laperrière makes his first foray into documentary filmmaking with Archipelago, which mixes archival footage with animation to tell the story of the land along the St. Lawrence River. Working from a documentary about the St. Lawrence from the 1940s, which itself is an inaccurate depiction of the region at the time, Dufour-Laperrière annotates, paints over, and plays with the footage, and in turn, our sense of the history of the land. 

Our guide through the territory is a woman who represents the river, an animated outline whose body is made up of live action footage of the river. She’s in conversation with a man, talking about the land, its twists and turns and islands, and how it’s changed over time. Throughout the film, there’s a sense of the impermanence of the people who live on the land: a group of dancers from the archival footage are animated into ghost-like figures; a collection of animated people rise up from the river and into the heavens. 

Still from Félix Dufour-Laperrière's documentary, Archipelago, an animated travelogue along the St. Lawrence River. This image features black-and-white animation.
Still from Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s documentary, Archipelago, an animated travelogue along the St. Lawrence River.

Although the film is told mostly from a French settler perspective, the film does acknowledge the Indigenous Peoples who were there first. Innu poet Joséphine Bacon interrupts the narrative with her poem about the land, in Innu-aimun, as a reminder that our entrenched narratives about history tend to ignore the presence of Indigenous Peoples. Throughout, Dufour-Laperrière asks us to question how we tell the story of our land, how much that story is told by the dominant culture, and how that story changes over time as the culture itself changes.

Working with twelve different animators in an improvisatory style — no storyboards or detailed plans were used — allows Dufour-Laperrière to create an always inventive and surprising visual style. Each stop we make along the St. Lawrence unlocks secrets of the land and its people, sometimes with small, personal stories, and sometimes, with stories of a broader community.

Get tickets to Archipelago here.

You could be missing out on opportunities to watch great films like Archipelago at virtual cinemas, VOD, and festivals.

Subscribe to the Seventh Row newsletter to stay in the know.

Subscribers to our newsletter get an email every Friday which details great new streaming options in Canada, the US, and the UK.

Click here to subscribe to the Seventh Row newsletter.

Read more about Archipelago in our ebook on creative nonfiction…

Explore the spectrum between fiction and nonfiction

Subjective realities: The art of creative nonfiction is a tour through contemporary creative nonfiction, aka hybrid or experimental documentaries. Discover films that push the boundaries of the documentary form.

Download a FREE excerpt from the book

/

Daughter of a Lost Bird Review: An Indigenous woman reconnects with her birth mother

In Daughter of a Lost Bird, Brooke Swaney sensitively documents an Indigenous woman reconnecting with her birth mother and coming to terms with how colonial violence has shaped her life.

Daughter of a Lost Bird is screening virtually across Canada at HotDocs until Sunday night. Get tickets.

A mother and daughter stands side by side, arms around each others' shoulders, in Daughter of a Lost Bird.
Daughter of a Lost Bird Review: An Indigenous woman reconnects with her birth mother. Image courtesy of HotDocs.

Never miss a great film again. Get exclusive content and hidden-gem recommendations you won’t find on the website.

Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.

Daughter of a Lost Bird opens on Kendra, a young woman in her thirties, sitting on her floor as she nervously makes an important phone call. She leaves a message: “Hi April, this is Kendra Potter, your birth daughter.” Shortly after, April calls back, and mother and daughter hear each other’s voices for the first time.

Documentarian Brooke Swaney tracks Kendra’s journey over several years as Kendra reconnects with her long-lost family and her indigeneity. Swaney is careful to contextualise Kendra’s identity crisis within the traumatic history of adoption in Indigenous communities in the US. As a result of the Indian Child Welfare Act, both Kendra and her mother were adopted out of their birth families, separating them from their Indigenous communities by two generations.

A still of Kendra against the backdrop of nature, looking to the right of frame, in Daughter of a Lost Bird.
Kendra in Daughter of a Lost Bird.

Kendra goes through a huge and emotional journey in the film, from the excitement of meeting her birth mother, to the mixed feelings of meeting the Lummi community to whom she belongs, to her growing anger about how colonial violence has shaped her life. Kendra grew up with white adoptive parents whom she loves, she’s white passing, and she has a happy life in the city with her husband and young daughter. She’s torn about whether she wants to embrace her community, in case it means giving up the identity she’s so comfortable in. At the same time, we watch her come to terms with the fact that she’s a textbook example of assimilation, which causes her a lot of hurt and rage. 

Swaney delicately and empathetically navigates these questions. Filmmaker and subject are friends — they met when Kendra, an actress, starred in one of Swaney’s short films as (coincidentally) a young Indigenous adoptee reconnecting with her heritage. Swaney gives Kendra a lot of space to tell her own story in her own words. She’s also careful to flag when her own personal biases as a filmmaker might be getting in the way of the story she’s telling. She speaks in voiceover about how she’s worried she’s pushing Kendra into reconnecting with the Lummi people because, as an Indigenous woman who grew up on a reservation, amongst her community, Swaney is excited by the idea of Kendra reentering her community. She even raises these concerns with Kendra, who insists on persevering with the film. 

A still of a mother and daughter sit on a bench together, facing each other.
Kendra (right) meets her birth mother (left) for the first time in Daughter of a Lost Bird.

There’s a real sense of collaboration between Kendra and Swaney, and accountability on Swaney’s part to tell this story truthfully, which is refreshing to see in nonfiction filmmaking. She is an audible and visible presence in the film; she sometimes interrupts with voiceover, and at one point explains some of her own family background, showing family photos and video footage. Swaney knows how to step back and not impose herself on Kendra’s story, while including just enough of herself in the film that we understand the power dynamics at play.

Get tickets to Daughter of a Lost Bird here (available to watch until Sunday night).

You could be missing out on opportunities to watch great films like Daughter of a Lost Bird at virtual cinemas, VOD, and festivals.

Subscribe to the Seventh Row newsletter to stay in the know.

Subscribers to our newsletter get an email every Friday which details great new streaming options in Canada, the US, and the UK.

Click here to subscribe to the Seventh Row newsletter.

In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1

We drop you into the minds of some of today’s most influential documentarians, each with very different approaches, to question whether there’s any “right way” to make documentaries.

In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1

/

HotDocs 2020 is a reminder of the world beyond lockdown

As HotDocs 2020 goes online, B. P. Flanagan takes a whirlwind tour around the world with Mayor, Stateless, All That I Am, Love & Stuff, and Ottolenghi.

HotDocs 2020 is a reminder of the world beyond lockdown.

HotDocs is a festival with a reputation for swift action. In 2018, just months after the Harvey Weinstein story broke and #Metoo launched into the stratosphere, the Toronto nonfiction festival responded with a strand of ‘Silence Breakers’. This year, the festival has adapted to change, again, by migrating its 10-day run (May 28–June 6) fully online during the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 crisis, though many films will screen until June 24.

The festival has made over 140 films available to stream, either individually ticketed or as a part of streaming bundles — but only to Ontario residents. Investing in the streaming bundles is the perfect way to recreate the festival experience at home, as I discovered on Monday during a six-film binge. Mira Burt-Wintonick’s Wintopia, a eulogy for her father, the documentarian Peter Wintonick, is a stand out. My interview with the director is running on Seventh Row later this week. 

Love & Stuff (dir. Judith Helfand)

Still from Love & Stuff directed by Judith Helfand. The film is screening at HotDocs 2020 until June 24.
Still from Love & Stuff directed by Judith Helfand. Love & Stuff is screening online at HotDocs 2020 until June 24.

In keeping with the madness of the physical festival, I stumble into the living room at 8 a.m., my own Palais or Lightbox, for Judith Helfand’s Love & Stuff. A memoir covering the last months of her mother’s life and her subsequent adoption and adjustment to motherhood, Helfand explores the camera as a self-professed ‘umbilical cord’ between daughter and mother. The material link of video footage proves her major creative inspiration, as well as the thing that holds her back personally. As she attempts to come to terms with the changes in her life, Helfand slowly tries to clear her apartment of her mother’s things, stacked in boxes for years on end. 

Helfand, no stranger to being her own subject in A Healthy Baby Girl (1997), is as unusually compelling a character as her mother, and she skillfully avoids self-mythology; the visual metaphor is strong enough on its own. Between her hoarding and ongoing weight loss saga, the desire to shed conflicts with the inherent indexical nature of film and filmmaking.

Working with so much old footage alongside new shots of the spaces she’s occupied for years on end in Love & Stuff, she can access older iterations of wardrobe and clothes as though they are memories. ‘Documenting what happened to us was the only way to make me feel better,’ she explains. Like the best of Ross McElwee, who’s Sherman’s March (1985) and Time Indefinite (1993) effortlessly tie together strands from his own life, Love & Stuff is so clear-eyed in its ruminations that it feels set in past tense, as if it’s cascading through months and years like a diary. 

Stateless (dir. Michèle Stephenson)

Still from the NFB-funded documentary Stateless, directed by Michèle Stephenson. The film is screening online at HotDocs 2020 until June 24 and will also screen at DOXA online in BC.
Still from the NFB-funded documentary Stateless, directed by Michèle Stephenson. Stateless is screening online at HotDocs 2020 until June 24 and will also screen at DOXA online in BC.

In Stateless, director Michèle Stephenson contrasts two women in the public sphere: one deals with people, the other with reactionary ideals. In the aftermath of the supreme court ruling stripping citizenship from Dominicans of Haitian descent, nationality has been turned into a legal and bureaucratic labyrinth. Rosa Iris, a young attorney, attempts to help. As she educates local children and her neighbours about the functions of government, Stephenson cuts to verité scenes of street life.

Stephenson doesn’t shy away from showing Iris’s spacious house in contrast with the poverty of the people she helps. Iris even travels to Santo Domingo with Juan Teofilo Murat, a cousin who has fallen victim to the new laws, to attempt to receive confirmation of his identity. They get stopped by the military several times en route, which is captured in tense static shots as their car is repeatedly searched.  

The face of the Dominican Nationalist Movement, Gladys Felix-Pimentel, is a Marine Le Pen-style populist descendant of ex-president Pedro A. Pimentel. Visiting the Dajabon border crossing, where she hopes to raise support to build a wall, Felix-Pimentel brags that her government takes suggestions from Israel on immigrant problems.

Stateless brings us inside Felix-Pimental’s world, at a sort of Karen’s Anonymous meeting, where Felix-Pimentel drinks wine and spouts hate with other women of the movement. She and the government gaslight and deny what those impacted by the regime tell them. “You can’t have been born to a 13-year-old mother,” an official tells Murat on receipt of his paperwork, denying its validity; “You’re too young to have been a sugar cutter,” says Felix-Pimentel to a displaced worker, in an attempt to cancel out his lived experience. Reality, it seems, can be shifted to their will.

In somewhat a riposte to the attempted feel-good feminism of Netflix’s Knocking Down The House (HotDocs 2019), here in Stateless, grassroots campaigning is localised, personal, and a tool used by those on both sides. Stephenson’s nonjudgmental approach, cross-cutting between the two women, exposes the hypocrisy of nationalism, and the toll on those who fight it. 

Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles

Still from Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, which was selected for HotDocs 2020 but is not screening online.

A different kind of authoritarianism takes place in Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, which insists that the viewer believe in the Yottam Ottolenghi phenomenon. (The man makes middle-eastern inflected cuisine that’s easy to make and looks good on Instagram. One must respect the hustle of selling a million books and selling out live shows worldwide.) In the film, the Israeli-British restaurateur enlists the help of a global team of novelty dessertmakers to put together a themed food exhibit for New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show, ‘Visitors to Versailles’ (2018).

While the food porn on display will appeal to lovers of cakes and jams, this has the corporate sheen of a commercial and the structure of an episode of Bake Off. Even the merciful 75-minute runtime suggests this would have gone straight to TV. This is probably why it isn’t included as a streaming title on the Hot Docs slate. In an illustration of how the festival has been negatively affected by circumstance: one might have expected The Cakes of Versailles to premiere with a Q&A from the celebrity chef to add some glamour to the festival event. A guaranteed sold-out show. If watched online, it’s a sorbet between more sober viewing, but hardly worth paying out for in its own right. That’s probably why the filmmakers opted not to participate in the online festival this year.

All That I Am (dir. Tone Grøttjord-Glenne)

Still from All That I Am, directed by Tone Grøttjord-Glenne. The film is screening as part of the online edition of HotDocs 2020 until June 24.
Still from All That I Am, directed by Tone Grøttjord-Glenne. The film is screening as part of the online edition of HotDocs 2020 until June 24.

Far more challenging is Norway’s All That I Am, from director Tone Grøttjord-Glenne. She follows 19-year-old Emilie, who returns to her family home after years in foster care, having been abused by her step-father from the age of six. Across two years, she testifies against him, moves into an apartment by herself, and attempts to rebuild her life.

Taking place in small conversations and without grand moments or gestures, Grøttjord-Glenne  captures moments captured on the fly without regard for conventional filmmaking coverage. Emilie is shy on camera but perfectly normal; the tension in the film develops from the drip feed of details, notably as she attempts to talk to her young siblings about what she’s been through. It’s amongst the most impressive works I’ve seen at Hot Docs, an issue film that refuses to make an issue of its subject. 

Mayor (dir. David Osit)

Still from Mayor directed by David Osit. The film is screening online as part of HotDocs 2020 until June 6.
Still from Mayor directed by David Osit. Mayor is screening online as part of HotDocs 2020 until June 6.

Seeking escapist entertainment, I travel next to Ramallah, Palestine’s de facto capital, the setting of Mayor. American director David Osit locates audiences with a map and scrolling-text explanation of the predominantly Christian Ramallah’s place in the world, which slowly fades into an establishing shot of a city cafe. You’d be forgiven for thinking Mayor is in thrall to Golden Era Hollywood. As Osit orients the viewer around the city, with static shots around the Mandela statue, street life, and Popeye’s chicken shop, it’s as much of an ode to a city as Manhattan (1979, dir. Woody Allen). 

The Mayor of the title is Mousa Hadid, portly, reserved, but nonetheless magnetic; he cuts a heightened figure of comedy and keen strategy. Between low-key Wisemanesque scenes of government meetings, and a mad Dubstep-themed Christmas celebration in the city centre, Hadid worries that he’s cut off from the people. When Donald Trump announces the relocation of the American embassy to Jerusalem, Hadid misses it because he doesn’t have a TV or radio in his office. A visiting priest watches with bemusement at Hadid’s bumbling as he shouts at his secretary to buy a radio. Although this plays out as farce, the humour rings hollow, bouncing against the desperation of the situation. Hours later, he still doesn’t have a radio. 

Osit’s vision of a naif’s local decisions shifting the bigger picture seems Capra-esque, but Mayor‘s idealism comes up against airpods and the trials of small municipal government, and escalating conflict on the West Bank. “It looks like a Barcelona match up there,” says Hadid’s driver as protesters march the streets and throw rocks at Israili military.

Hadid is constantly caught up in these moments of violence at a slight remove, conflicted between being the ostensible leader and having no material power within the ecosystem of Isreali occupation. Even as he learns the utility of social media and livestreaming as a way to communicate with his people, further afield, he worries that he can’t do much more than fix a broken fountain or choose when to switch off the Christmas lights. 

This builds to an incredible final half hour set piece, as the Israili army descends into the  streets one night, intimidating and firing bullets and gas indiscriminately, with no fear, even as cameras capture the events. Osit depicts every step of how Hadid deals with the emergency, stuck in his City Hall office. As the central authority figure, his personal inclinations become secondary to what his choices politically signify for Palestine. Suddenly, he might just change everything.

As protests in North America against police violence continue, sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis, and the USA descends into military occupation, Mayor is essential viewing about the lines between small and grand acts of resistance. 

As the SARS-CoV-2 lockdown continues, burning through the personal watchlist has become an arbitrary, academic act. Without the communal response to new work, it can feel like just blindly filling in the blanks. Taking myself away from the timeline by dedicating a day to the Hot Docs pass, and choosing to blind-watch these offerings is a way of engaging with the outside world in a way that I haven’t been able to from rural Wexford, Ireland.

In these global stories of struggle, love, authoritarianism, reconciliation, and so much more, you wonder how the current situation flips everything. Or doesn’t, as the case may be. As the world moves at a hitherto unseen pace, these films might seem in danger of lagging behind, but their truths are right up to date.

Mayor is available online until June 6; Stateless, All That I Am, Love & Stuff, and Wintopia are screening on the HotDocs website until June 24, geoblocked to Ontario.

Stateless and Wintopia are also screening at DOXA in Vancouver later this month. The screenings will be online and geoblocked to BC. 

Get the ebook!

Discover great documentaries through interviews with their filmmakers

Over and over, our ebook drops you into the minds of some of today’s most influential documentarians.

Get your copy now!