Documentaries - Row Three

12 May

Category

What is “Cropsey?”

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Urban legends are nothing new. Almost every town has one to call their own. But sometimes a legend has roots in reality. Maybe that’s the case with Cropsey?

Growing up on Staten Island, children had often heard the legend of ‘Cropsey.’ For the kids in their neighborhood, Cropsey was the escaped mental patient who lived in the old abandoned Willowbrook Mental Institution, who would come out late at night and snatch children off the streets. Sometimes Cropsey had a hook for a hand, other times he wielded a bloody axe. Cropsey was always out there waiting to get them.

Later as teenagers, filmmakers Joshua and Barbara assumed Cropsey was just an urban legend: a cautionary tale used to keep them out of those abandoned buildings. That all changed in the summer of 1987 when a 13-year-old girl with Down syndrome, named Jennifer Schweiger, disappeared from their community. That was the summer all the kids from Staten Island discovered that their urban legend was real.

Now as adults Joshua and Barbara have returned to Staten Island to create Cropsey, a feature documentary that delves into the mystery behind Jennifer and four additional missing children. The film also investigates Andre Rand, the real-life boogeyman linked to their disappearances. Embarking on a mysterious journey into the underbelly of their forgotten borough, these filmmakers uncover a reality that is more terrifying than any urban legend.

Without digging too deeply into the subject, there doesn’t seem to be much information on the net regarding the subject of Cropsey, but there is plenty of stuff on convicted killer, Andre Rand. The trailer tries to play on the audience’s consciousness of fear and ends up looking like a bad episode of “Ghost Hunters.” The details of the case and what really happened on those streets in the late 80′s is more interesting to me than investigating something that is obviously no more than an urban legend. So if it sticks with that and doesn’t try to give us too much “Blair Witchiness”, I think this could be a potentially interesting a worthwhile look at a (serial?) killer and the grip of panic he held on the area.

We’ve stuck the trailer beneath the seats here; plus, the Official site has all sorts of crazy and highly detailed information on the subject if you’re interested further.
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11 May

Posted by
Bob Turnbull

Category

Hot Docs 2010 – Waste Land

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It’s where everything not good goes – including people.

The Jardim Gramacho landfill outside of Rio De Janeiro is the largest in the world in terms of the volume of refuse received to it on a daily basis. It’s rolling hills of garbage give the ground the consistency of Jell-o as hundreds of “pickers” walk through it every day to collect recyclables for money. 200 tons of recycling a day get removed by these people, many of whom live in the slums just outside the dump. Though for some they can make a “decent” wage ($20-25 a day), it looks like a horrible life. The people we meet though – the pickers – are wonderful, delightful and full of life.

Lucy Walker’s film “Waste Land”, though, begins in a completely different realm than this landfill. Things start in New York City, as we follow Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz. His tools of the trade are mostly non-traditional items which he uses to create pictures that he then photographs. Thread, wire, chocolate syrup, caviar, diamonds, pigments and sugar are some of the objects he has used for his work (his photos of the pictures he has created from sugar are stunning) – not looking like much on close inspection, but becoming something beautiful at larger distances. Similar to how his hometown of Sao Paolo is described…

Given this, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine him wanting to work with garbage. This idea (and the film) quickly move beyond just a simple document of his latest series of works though. Once the decision to go to Jardim Gramacho is taken, it doesn’t take long for them to meet some of the pickers. His approach is to take photos of some of his new acquaintances, project them on the floor and them fill them in with a variety of recycling material pulled from the landfill before the final photo is taken.

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10 May

Posted by
Bob Turnbull

Category

Hot Docs 2010 – The Kids Grow Up

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Director Doug Block (51 Birch Street) is an obsessive documentarian. He seems to have endless footage of his daughter throughout her life – following her around, asking her questions – and continues to add to the archives as she prepares to leave for university. She’s becoming less and less thrilled with the idea, but he just can’t seem to stop. His little girl isn’t just moving on to another chapter of her life…She’s leaving. And he’s not quite ready for that.

Can any parent really be ready for that though? I guess you can prepare and come to an understanding of your nest emptying out, but can you really be ready? In order to explore that question (and attempt to work it through for himself), Block uses his old footage of his daughter (starting around age 4) with its snippets of long conversattions about what she wants to be when she grows up and intersperses it within current day chats and other “home movie” moments. His daughter Lucy (now 17) is working her way through the last year of high school, spends more time with her friends, has found a boyfriend and doesn’t quite want to spend as much time in front of the camera as she used to. Block persists though.

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10 May

Posted by
Bob Turnbull

Category

Hot Docs 2010 Awards

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As Hot Docs 2010 has wrapped for another year – their most successful year ever by the way – now is the time to review some of the award winners. The Audience Award winner was announced today (along with the Top 10 top vote-getters) and the jury-voted Industry Awards last Friday. Before getting to the results though, a bit more about the success of the fest:

That’s great news for us documentary fans.

Though my prediction for the Audience Award winner didn’t quite come true, A Small Act still finished in the Top Ten along with a fine crop of others. The big winner was Thunder Soul, the story of the reunion of members from the Kashmere High School Stage Band – a powerhouse funk outfit led by Conrad Johnson that decimated its opposition in band competitions in the 70s. Here’s the full Top Ten:

Hot Docs Audience Awards

Fourth place finisher in balloting, Autumn Gold also won the Filmmakers Award – a new award this year for which Hot Docs invites attending filmmakers with official selections in the 2010 Festival to vote for their favourite film.

And the big winners from the jury voting:

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10 May

Posted by
Marina Antunes

Category

Review: Daddy I Do

1

Director: Cassie Jaye
Producers: Cassie Jaye, Nena Jaye
MPAA Rating: NR
Running time: 90 min.

(4/5)

Sex. There’s a loaded word. Some want it, others have it but everyone wants a say on it. From parents to politicians, everyone has something to say on the subject and a few even have the opportunity to share their thoughts but the discussion that starts with sex isn’t simply about the act of fornication but rather, what comes afterward. It’s the after effects of that romp in the sac that people in high places are worried about. Things like STDs, single parent families, abortion – these are the issues that degrade our social system and show a culture sliding in moral values (or so “they” fear). At the end of the day, it all goes back to sex and education, two things that should go hand in hand but that often don’t.

Daddy I Do Movie Still Cassie Jaye’s documentary Daddy I Do starts as an exploration of abstinence only sex education in the form of purity balls and silver ring/purity movements which discourage sex not through education but through a push of faith. The film continues from here to explore the fallout that comes from the lack of sexual education and though it never makes a case either for or against abstinence only programs, it provides enough data and rope to let the movement hang itself.

Yet with all of the talk of sex education and what works and doesn’t work, Jaye’s film does something else that hasn’t really been done in any other films I’ve seen on the subject: it opens the door for discussion on what this sort of education and mentality does to women.

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08 May

Posted by
Bob Turnbull

Category

Hot Docs Capsule Reviews – The Technology vs Nature Edition

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As Hot Docs 2010 winds down, here’s another sampling of a few of the films I’ve caught over the last week:

Soundtracker (2010 – Nicholas Sherman) – Tracking down sounds is indeed exactly what Gordon Hempton does. He’s finding it harder and harder to do, though, with the proliferation of technology spreading into National Parks and supposedly untouched areas. Nearby highways, construction areas and jet planes contaminate the voices of nature and leave places of complete quiet or simple natural sounds to become fewer and farther between. So Hempton searches for them. His obsessive nature shows its light towards the back half of this slow-paced, but overall lovely contemplative look at how we’re slowly but surely drowning out Mother Nature.

talhotblond (2010 – Barbara Schroeder) – It’s all in the telling. A good story can be turned into a great one if you tell it with all the proper beats, hold back little bits of information and then drop in some surprises. That’s the strategy in this telling of a bizarre internet love triangle of two co-workers becoming rivals for the affections of a girl with the screen name “talhotblond”. One of the two men isn’t exactly what he describes himself to be online and as the truth comes out, tragedy ensues. There’s some interesting questions raised by the film regarding the veracity of the internet, the culpability of those who hide behind false identities and how we look at privacy. Some of those questions could even be raised about the film itself in how it handles the story. Perhaps, but it sure doesn’t stop this from being a gripping, surprising and ultimately very sad story.

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03 May

Posted by
Bob Turnbull

Category

Hot Docs Review – A Small Act

5

I‘m pretty sure I just saw the Audience Award winner of Hot Docs 2010. If I was a betting man, I’d plop a nice chunk of change down on A Small Act coming out on top after all the votes have been cast. Sure the Rush documentary has the built-in fan base and is a ton of fun (and it just won the Tribeca Audience Award), but Jennifer Arnold’s latest (a finalist for the Grand Jury Award at Sundance) is warm, triumphant, hopeful and inspiring without ever being the slightest bit mawkish or sappy. It’s basic premise is that anyone can make the world a better place – if not on a grand scale, at least by making a difference to individual people – one small act at a time.

The main through line of the film is the story of three young Africans from a small village in Kenya. They are all smart and have loads of potential, but their families lack the funds necessary to put them into high school. Without some form of assistance, they will likely get sucked into the cycle of poverty so many have before. This is where the Hilde Back Educational Fund comes into play. It has been set up by a former resident of the same village to help those students who show promise, but lack the financial station to pay for their early education. Chris Mburu heads the fund and simply wants to pass along the same type of act of kindness that was provided to him when he was of the same age and couldn’t afford schooling. It came from a middle age Holocaust survivor who had fled to Sweden and was looking to give something back and help someone just like she had been helped after leaving her home country. Her donations (to the tune of about $15 a month) gave Chris the chance to acquire an education. And that he did. After attending Nairobi University, he went to Harvard, became a lawyer and now works at the United Nations as a human rights attorney specializing in areas like genocide. He never forgot that small gesture from a woman he had never met, so he named a new educational fund after her.

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03 May

Posted by
Andrew James

Category

Review: Exit Through the Gift Shop

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Director: Banksy
Producers: Holly Cushing, Jaimie D’Cruz, James Gay-Rees
Starring: Thierry Guetta, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Space Invader
Narration: Rhys Ifans
MPAA Rating: R
Running time: 87 min.

(3.5/5)

For this author, documentaries can often be a difficult pill to swallow. Not for lack of quality or substance, but often the subject matter is just not sufficient to hold my interest for a full 90 minutes (or more). Exit Through the Gift Shop managed to keep my attention for its entire run time… barely. It ended when it needed to and was (and should be) compelling enough to anyone with an interest in the arts. Whether it be paining, sculpting, abstract art or even (and maybe especially) film making.

The general idea was originally for a self-proclaimed film maker to film as much subversive, often political, often covert and usually illegal street art “perpetrated” by a wide array of artists spanning the globe. Under the guise and promise that a feature film documentary would emerge from the footage, thereby not only preserving the usually short lived street art but also bringing to the forefront the message and intent of this artistic movement. As filming continued for years, it became evident that the film would never get made and instead, the film maker himself became involved in making a (big) name for himself as a street artist while one of the main artists focused on within the film is actually the one who put this whole experience together for you and I to enjoy.

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02 May

Posted by
Kurt Halfyard

Category

Hot Docs: The Parking Lot Movie Review

7

What happens when you throw a bunch of over-educated graduate students, slacker musicians and other creative and testosterone-loaded souls into a job where absolutely nothing is required of them except sitting there and taking money from customers? Well, Kevin Smith more-or-less answered this question with his indie-hit Clerks in 1994, but here is a documentary seemingly populated entirely with Randals.

The Corner Parking Lot is a sodium-lamp lit stretch of broken asphalt and dumpsters for the restaurants along the downtown area of Charlottesville Virginia. Being a sleepy town and a college town (the University of Virginia) there a mix of class that grind against one another in the evening and weekend nightlife. A number of the philosophy and anthropology graduate students work under their very employee-friendly boss and owner of the lot. They are (more or less) given free reign to release their creative energy in passive-aggressive prankery against the ‘parkers.’ The gate board is adorned daily by existentialist aspects of the job and pop culture trivia applied ritually with stencils and spray paint. Guitars, flip coning (soon to be an Olympic sport) and graffiti scrawls on what it means to park become performance art. In short, hanging out is what these guys do best. They serve you but they do not have to like you, and if you are in the rich lawyer, drunken frat boy or air-head sorority set then they are very much judging you by what you drive, how you park. They see the delightful irony of someone driving a $70,000 Cadillac Escalade desperately trying the squeeze it into the crevices of the smaller parking spaces, and then trying to not pay the $4.00 lot-fee. They could explain why you have to pay, they could explain the fundamentals of capitalism if they chose, but mainly they will mock you. Perhaps they will engage your parking break, just to see if you notice before you make it back to your home (you know you don’t use the damn thing!) Have no fear, they equally rail against the other end of the automotive economic scale, those smug and oh so superior Prius owners. Apparently, you should drive a Honda Civic to not be in the CPL doghouse – it is good on gas, easy to park and otherwise non-offensive aesthetically.

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02 May

Posted by
Bob Turnbull

Category

Hot Docs Capsule Reviews – The “I Love You Man” Edition

1

As Hot Docs 2010 kicks into full gear, here’s a sampling of a few of the films I managed to see in the lead up to the fest:

Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage (2010 – Sam Dunn, Scot McFadyen) – The two images above are apropos for a discussion of the latest musical documentary by the team that brought us Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey and Iron Maiden: Flight 666. Rush is a band that has always had a sense of humour about themselves and it shines through in this almost 2 hour journey through their 35 year recording career. Whether it’s appearing in the film “I Love You Man” (top photo), making a rare TV appearance on “The Colbert Report” or looking back at their old publicity shots and admitting they didn’t know much about fashion, the trio enjoy not taking themselves too seriously. I had a great big smile on my face the entire length of this film – from the early live footage with drummer John Rutsey to the closing credits dinner between the three bandmates. Granted, my bias is showing – I love this band. It’s actually a good thing that there is currently an embargo on full reviews (until the theatrical premiere on June 10th) because I’m not sure I can quite express my genuine feelings about the film yet…So if you are a fan of the band, you will adore this film – there is a veritable plethora of old film and photos that I would expect even the most hardcore fan has not seen (including a scene from an old Allan King documentary entitled Come On Children with a very young Alex Lifeson telling his parents he doesn’t want to finish school). For those who aren’t big fans, there is still a great deal to like since the band’s story arc is always engaging, the incorporation of the many photos and graphics is extremely well done and the various testimonials of other musicians are very entertaining. And the music is, if I may be allowed a small fanboy moment, awesome.

The “Socalled” Movie (2010 – Garry Beitel) – Funk, Rap and Klezmer. An obvious combination of musical styles right? No? Well, Josh Dolgin thought they were and so he began to experiment and create songs using these styles as touch points. In his younger days, he called himself “Heavy J” in order to fit in with the scene. It never really took hold, though, and people started to call him “The So-called Heavy J”. After awhile, that last part dropped off and he became “Socalled”. Through 18 or so short sections (some a few minutes, some closer to 10-15), we watch Josh create, perform and talk about his art. My favourite portion has to be his meeting and NY concert with Fred Wesley – former trombonist and leader of James Brown’s band – where they bust out some serious funk. I get the feeling Dolgin is a spiritual kin to Glen Hansard (from the film “Once”) who proclaimed “Make art! Make art!” at the Oscars a few years ago. That’s just what Dolgin does on a daily basis.

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30 Apr

Posted by
Bob Turnbull

Category

Hot Docs Review: Eat The Kimono

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Hanayagi Genshu certainly is an interesting woman. She’s a dancer, singer, storyteller, political activist, feminist and even a former inmate. She travels throughout Japan to perform her convention bending dances and make speeches to stir up those she feels have been wronged or held back. “The world will get a little bit better if the oppressed speak out. You musn’t be silent”. Throughout the hour long Eat The Kimono (another film in the Hot Docs 2010 retrospective series of Kim Longinotto’s career), the controversial Genshu’s voice is at the centre of every scene. Other people chime in occasionally, but the filmmakers focus exclusively on Genshu and what she has to say. The result allows her message to be heard unfiltered, but also allows the viewer to make up their own minds about Genshu herself.

She’s not immediately likeable. Our introduction to her is through old news footage of her arrest (for stabbing a dance teacher). As she is being led off by police officers, she shows a strong disregard for what she has done by telling the camera that she will be alright and flashing a peace sign – an odd choice after committing a violent crime. She tends to dominate conversations and, even when dealing with her causes, usually brings the topic around to herself. She never hesitates to mention her struggles growing up as the child of travelling performers, how poor they were and how she was bullied and called names. This led to her current fights against prejudice, discrimination and the pyramid system (ie. class structures) and she uses these stories of her childhood in many of her songs and dances. It’s also the reason why she served those 8 months in prison for knifing the dance teacher. Looking back on the incident, she relates that the instructor was talentless but held the position because of her level on the pyramid. She stabbed her because “We have suffered, I want you to know our pain”. She also claims that the police made a much bigger deal over the situation than was warranted: “I just cut her neck a little bit”.

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29 Apr

Posted by
Bob Turnbull

Category

Hot Docs Review: Shinjuku Boys

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It’s 7AM and as the streets of Tokyo start to come alive, a group of Onnabes leave the New Marilyn Club to head back home. After a long night of entertaining customers at the club and singing Karaoke, they’re pretty tired, but their suits are still sharp as ever (if a little baggy) and their hair looks freshly coiffed. Apart from the fact it’s early morning, they don’t look much different than any other style conscious young man looking to make an impression – except for the fact that they are all women. After all, the term Onnabe refers to a woman who lives as a man and dates other women. Shinjuku Boys, a documentary from 1995 by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams, not only introduces us to three of them, but provides three very intimate portraits.

This year’s Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival has, as one of its many programs, an Outstanding Achievement retrospective on filmmaker Longinotto. She’s won numerous awards for a variety of documentaries (such as Rough Aunties, Divorce Iranian Style and Sisters In Law) and many of them focus on women in extraordinary circumstances and provide some understanding as to how they survive. Given that and a quick reading of the topic of Shinjuku Boys, one might be led to think these women are reacting to a very patriarchal society and looking for their own roles within it. That’s not the case. These women (or “boys” as they tend to be referred to – even by each other) have far more personal reasons for choosing to adopt these more masculine roles.

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