This article was originally published at Art Threat.

The 19th edition of North America’s largest documentary showcase and one of the world’s largest film festivals begins this week, running from April 26 to May 6 in Toronto. With Charlotte Cook replacing Sean Farnel as head programmer, new directions (fewer films, more focus is the official line), new initiatives (Hot Docs’s very own Kickstarter, Doc Ignite), new sponsors (Nescafé, Dundee Wealth and Sun Life Financial, to name a few of the more spurious corporate inductees) and a gorgeously renovated, and reinvigorated, venue (The Bloor / Hot Docs Cinema), Canada’s non-fiction champ continues their tradition of perennial renewal, improvement and growth.

It’s all very promising and exciting and I’m sure this year will signal another hit in the festival’s two decade history. So to get things warmed up, I thought I’d take a look at the programming, which promises a mixed bag of goodies, baddies and proverbial head-scratchers.

The Good: International Titles

As many Canadian producers have, in recent years, lamented: “international” programming at Hot Docs is often a euphemism for “American,” and this year the fest indeed has its share of Yanqui fare (at 52 titles this year’s US offerings add up to a record 28% of programming).

Among the cache from that prolific country are the following promising political notables: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, about the Chinese political artist and activist who has captured liberal and progressive hearts alike; Detropia (pictured at top of post): from the unstoppable dynamic duo of Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing comes another icy observational piece, this time focusing in on a beleaguered Detroit; Call Me Kuchu, a timely documentary about the recently murdered Ugandan queer activist David Kato; The Invisible War, about the US military’s despicable and largely unexamined unwritten policy of protecting rapists in the ranks; The Revisionaries follows fanatic creationists retooling educational curricula in Texas; Where Heaven Meets Hell looks at Indonesian labourers who mine sulfur at an active volcano site, risking their lives in order to stay in poverty; and finally Wildness is a study of place and identity that looks at the LA Latino transgendered community and their refuge, the Silver Platter Bar.

In the non-American international camp look for: Big Boys Gone Bananas, a (it has to be said, technically low-fi) tale of free speech and corporate bullying, with some revealing scenes of how the Los Angeles International Film Festival rises to the support…of the corporate bullies; Crayons of Askalan, about a Palestinian prisoner who “escapes” by illustrating his experience; Meet the Fokkens, a marvelous and upbeat doc about 70-year-old sex worker twins in the Netherlands; Price of Gold is yet another doc about one of the worst industries on the planet, mining, this time the place is Mongolia; Scarlet Road, about sex work with clients who have disabilities; Wadim, about the consequences of regressive immigration policy in Germany; and Krisis — GR2011 — The Prism goes behind the scenes during Greece’s economic turmoil in 2011.

Indian documentarian and activist Anand Patwardhan

Special mention goes to Jai Bhim Comrade, the newest installment from the brilliant activist filmmaker Anand Patwardhan (who will attend the festival), this time his focus is on the oppression and resistance of India’s low caste Dalits.

Lastly, check out the whole “Rise Against” section in the Hot Docs program, which is apparently partitioned off into its own space (ghetto?) to indicate a raft of documentaries that follow in the spirit of the Occupy Movement, and that pack a little more punch? I’m not sure, but the ten films look lively, political, and one or two might even be a progressive intervention against a dull, liberal and suffocating mainstream.

The Bad: Doc Ghettos

Categories in film festivals are, ostensibly, meant to assist audience members navigating formidable avalanches of programming, condensed impossibly into a week or so of mad-dash exhibitions. But they also have a ghettoizing effect, where categories play second and third fiddle to value-added programming found in larger, star-studded sections like “Special Presentations,” and in other festivals, within competition components.

The National Film Board of Canada: Hit hard by the Conservative's 10% budget cut, has two special sections in the Hot Docs program, but had many films (including two mentioned below) rejected this year

As Trihn T. Minh-hah has provocatively noted, once a category for “experimental film” was created and accepted there ceased to be experimental film. Naming, labeling and sorting content into recognizable and digestible holding tanks can and does help audiences find what they’re looking for, but does it actually help or hinder, say, Canadian documentary?

If a program booklet has space for a mere 29 Canadian titles (features and shorts, and not including the two NFB special sections, which are not beholden to submissions) than perhaps the bulk of those titles will fit neatly into a bite-sized section devoted to Canadian fare. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that just might prevent expanded Canadian programming, where contained space is allotted and that space is filled. And if this year’s program is any indication, it might be time to demolish the ghetto and renovate the neighbourhood.

Since Hot Docs is located in Canada, perhaps there should be an “American Spectrum” where all the US docs are corralled, and the “Canadian Spectrum” should be dismantled and its children allowed to roam the program freely and in various degrees of visibility and obscurity. Lest Trihn T. Minh-hah’s observation should come true for Canadian documentary, this is one program-cruiser that thinks Canadian docs do not need their own section in a Canadian documentary film festival.

I’m sure there are legions who disagree, and points to the opposite are welcome, but at 15% of overall programming this year (21% if you include the two NFB components — which reminds me, check out John Kastner’s dark and haunting work in the NFB-sponsored retrospective), some creative expansion of structural barriers might just let a few more solid — and deserving — Canadian titles squeak through the gates.

The Incomprehensible: MIA Political Canadian Docs

Herman's House is among just 29 Canadian docs chosen for regular programming at this year's festival

Word on doc street is it was a bad year for Canadian documentary (political or otherwise), and so Hot Docs must have had its hands tied in terms of robust Canadian representation. They did manage to find a few, and some that pique interest include: The Frog Princes, a tight and moving doc about a group of developmentally challenged actors overcoming all kinds of odds to act in a play at Concordia University; Herman’s House, a rich social justice imaginary that wonders what kind of house imprisoned Black Panther Herman Wallace might live in; Peace Out is a resplendent and smart contribution to the energy debates around Canada’s pristine Peace River (but unfortunately gives an inordinate amount of screen time to corporate yes men and liberals, showing the film’s disconnect with progressive eco-activists); and Smoke Traderslooks at the “contraband” cigarette trade from the perspective of the Mohawk people and is one of only three documentaries at this year’s edition to put aboriginal voices front and center.

Which brings me to the incomprehensible. Let’s say there really weren’t a hell of a lot of quality political Canadian submissions among the 2085 titles sent to this year’s Hot Docs programmers — that doesn’t explain a Canadian MIA list that seems set to grow as I discover more great political films that were rejected. I’d like to highlight three that are among the finest political documentaries that I, as a programmer of political documentary, have come across in the last year, and therefore find it perplexing Canada’s premiere non-fiction film event took a pass on each one.

United States of Africa
After a packed Montreal screening of USoA during this year’s RIDM festival, an enthusiastic audience member commented “It’s so refreshing to see a documentary about Africa that is positive instead of negative…or worse, colonial.” I couldn’t agree more.

Chosen by other festivals but not Hot Docs, this documentary by Yanick Létrouneau follows West African hip-hop performer Didier Awadi as he embarks on an odyssey to combine the politics of anti-colonial African leaders (who, unfortunately, are all male) with contemporary hip-hop both inside and outside Africa.

The result is a fantastically shot and edited film about the importance of political participation, realized in civil society but also articulated through art. Through an ambitious musical project, Awadi travels Africa and North America to rediscover the politics of his home continent, and to hone a message of progressive change through the power of hip-hop. The film itself becomes its own vehicle for art and politics, and pulses along with exquisite imagery and superb music.

United States of Africa is a reviving and enlivening work that refuses to fall into the stereotypical Western-produced “African doc” category: it is full of life, positivity, voice, hope, and an explosion of expression that promises to live well outside of the discerning frames of this exceptional cinematic ballad.

Bone Wind Fire
Rightly chosen by programmers to close Montreal’s FIFA festival and recently the recipient of the Best Documentary Short Award at the Sonoma International Film Festival, the new 30-minute documentary from Jill Sharpe is astoundingly beautiful, conceptually flawless and politically subtle in a way that makes one arrive at the discrimination endured by three incredibly talented female artists in a slow, circuitous and wondrous way. A film of colour, movement, emotion, dreams and discovery, Sharpe’s documentary on three painters — Emily Carr, Frida Khalo and Georgia O’Keefe — is a synecdoche for all the stories yet to be told about women who fight for artistic, cultural and political expression in regimes of patriarchy.

Bone Wind Fire should be, and undoubtedly will be, used as an inspirational teaching tool in every redeeming art school in the world. This film should be seen by anyone interested in art, in human expression, and in the ways established and encrusted lines of a genre can be broken into a thousand beautiful, colourful fragments, then reassembled as abstract and material beauty. It is documentary imagination and provocation at its ultimate finest.

The Carbon Rush
Amy Miller, an emergent Canadian filmmaker with an independent journalist background, has built on the experience and success of her first film, Myths for Profit: Canada’s Role in Industries of War and Peace, with one of the finest, most carefully researched and executed political exposés of the year.

As a programmer one quickly grows tired of every second documentary starting with someone, usually a white guy, saying “So I decided to grab a camera and … blah blah blah.” Miller’s new documentary, about the seriously flawed economic projects underway and under the auspices of carbon trading, turns that tired trope on its head. This film is deeply personal for Miller, having spent months and months in communities affected by these devastating projects, but she wisely removes herself from the picture.

The voice we hear, the people we see, and the struggles we bear witness to, are instead those of the world’s poor, indigenous and marginalized. Whether it is hydroelectric dams in Panama or incinerators burning garbage in India, The Carbon Rush champions the voices of those most impacted by Western economic schemes designed to put band-aids on climate change while destroying communities and lives.

It is an incredibly moving, empathetic and measured film that sticks inside you like a thorn that you want to do something about, that you must do something about. Politically muscular, incredibly timely, and totally under-represented and original, The Carbon Rush is exactly the kind of film that should be projected to a sold-out audience at this year’s Hot Docs.

Political Documentary in Canada: Support Needed

Programming is complicated, and anyone who tells you it doesn’t have its share of politics is fooling themselves and should watch Big Boys Gone Bananas. Good films get turned down and crap gets in for a myriad of complicated equations — I know this is the reality of every festival on the planet, with some specializing more in the latter than the former, especially certain giant glitzy fiction-focused festivals.

But the above three films are impeccable in form, unique in content, timely in issue, and incredibly, audaciously, under-represented in the mediascape. Which begs the question…

PM Stephen Harper and the Conservative government of Canada: Money for fighter jets but no money for docs about fighter jets

With so few Canadian titles in this year’s American-dominated Hot Docs edition, one has to wonder, how did these three titles (and others not mentioned here) end up on the outside looking in?

As documentary in Canada faces new challenges after a particularly vicious Conservative budgetary hack and attack, it is doubtless we need to support all documentary. But works that face the greatest threat of being marginalized and rejected into obscurity (at least in relation to the mainstream), that have more difficulty finding audiences simply because of their “fringe” politics and sometimes (refreshingly) radical and/or progressive — these docs really need support.

These are the works that highlight powerful voices on an all-too-often negatively-represented African continent, feminist artists violated by the mainstream art world, and indigenous and local poor activists resisting unjust and cynical Western economic schemes. These are films that thankfully contain no privileged (male) Western “experts” talking to, around, or in place of, those most impacted and those on the ground enacting change. These are films that are indeed “outstanding” and “outspoken” as well.

Their occlusion in this year’s program is disappointing and difficult to understand, but I hope the filmmakers behind these inspired gems remain undeterred and keep pushing for their gorgeous, timely and crucial works to be shown, seen and discussed.

In the meantime, I’ll see you in the rush lines for all the other promising titles mentioned above.

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That dot is me floating under the moon in a beautiful Quebec lake in 2011

Many cultures imbue numbers with great significance and others engage in the mass psychological delusion of New Years resolutions each January 1st. For my part, I don’t have irrational faith in the potential for numeric interventions in the chaotic unfolding of my destiny but I do quietly partake in the renewal ritual of cleaning up one’s messy metaphorical room at the turning of each new year. Having said that, 2012 is a nice even number that will hopefully mark some much-needed balance and focus in my life and in these first few days of January I have been consumed with thinking about what needs to be achieved and how to achieve it.

If 2011 was the year I intensely thought about getting older and reflected on the difficult project of “growing up,” 2012 should be the year I embrace grownupness – and indeed getting older as this reality comes on with a vengeance at the end of May when I turn that dreadful age of forty. I turned thirty in 2002, the year so many wished George W. Bush would keep eating pretzels (after choking on one), the year of the Enron backlash, the year the US invaded Afghanistan, the year the International Criminal Court was established, the year the African Union formed, the year the US Congress passed the Iraq War Resolution, the year of the first massive march against climate change (in London, UK), the year the Euro was officially adopted by the EU, the year of the tragic Chechen standoff in a theatre in Moscow, the year of the G8 summit in Canada where the world’s richest countries made promises to the poorer nations they did not keep, the year of the Prestige oil tanker disaster off the coast of Spain, the year Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, and the year I marked the end of my twenties.

The meaning of numbers is highly subjective and dependent on our willingness – as individuals and cultures – to load them with negatives, positives and all semantic variances between. For me I couldn’t wait to turn 30 – my twenties had been marked by slipshod proclivities: a lust for wandering, for impatient gratification, for arrogant and self-serving serial dating, for jumping into voids without the gear or tools to climb out. I had done many wonderful things, like traveling and learning a trade and forging lasting relationships, but the overwhelming assessment as I approached 30 was that I had stumbled out of my mixed-bag teens into unadulterated adulthood without a map and compass, a purpose or a vision. I therefore designated my 30th year a crossroads – a transitionary moment that wouldn’t just denote the passing of another year of my life, but would signify the beginning of a new era of constructive and healthy focus where my actions would be decisively responsible, thoughtful, and long term-minded.

I achieved some semblance of these goals over the last nine-and-a-half years, but now, as 2012 has arrived and the year 40 looms large on my horizon, I find myself once again taking stock and loading up numbers with meaning born out of some abstract cultural association with the movement from “younger” to “older.” Where thirty sounded enticingly grounded but still youthful, forty seems like a creaking-down stage where the lines in my face are finally showing themselves and the poor decisions I make bite back harder than in previous years. It’s an overbearing negative feeling I have for forty, one I’m sure my older friends will either laugh off, associate with, and/or reply to, as one friend has, with “you can’t complain up the food chain.”

We live in a culture obsessed with youth and in terms of mainstream and corporate culture, I’d estimate the very best, most sought-after and glorified age would be between the years 20 and 35 or earlier. The forties conjur sagging, wrinkles, balding, fatigue, children, three day hangovers, going to bed early, bad backs, increasingly cranky moods, detachment and confusion with youth culture and/or mainstream culture in general, confounding experiential knowledge not yet articulated into celebrated wisdom (that comes in the fifties and sixties if at all), and general out-of-placeness.

But this, of course, is all bullshit.

I know this, I’m very aware of how consumer, corporate and celebrity culture functions – the way elite media and finance lever-pullers shape our imaginaries and social realities. It’s not a forced coup d’esprit, but certainly an activated hegemony. And yes, I have agency to fight back, to create, to build, to deny the empire of signs its manifest destiny in my mind and body. But there’s that strange face staring back at me in the mirror…undeniably not a thirty-year-old and undeniably looking less and less like one that has recently jumped irresponsibly into an uncertain void.

So I’ve designated the year I turn forty, the year of 2012, as another transitional year, complete with voids, but the outcome of jumping shaped by more certainty. Where turning thirty for me marked the real beginning of some kind of imagined adulthood, turning forty will mark the acceptance of adulthood as a positive, productive, purposefully gratifying and socially enriched stage in my time on this glorious and troubled planet.

2012 transitioned a little awkwardly, with some jerk stealing my warm winter coat, phone, wallet with ID, my keys, and a sentimental token kept in my right-hand jacket pocket on New Years Eve. It put me in a bit of rage/depression funk for the first few days but I’m past that now – some concentrated negativity is now giving way to protracted positive thinking (that’s the agenda at least).

2012 is the year I intend to concentrate on less retreating and more reflecting, less consuming and more creating, less commitment to abstract notions of community and more engagement with tangible aspects of community, less intellectual and time-wandering and more focus, less reliance on escape and more on constructing a strong self with strong relationships, and finally, less insecurity/fretting and more confidence/doing.

This last “goal” applies to the albatross hanging over my shoulders that has been keeping me up at night – the dissertation that I keep avoiding, that I keep convincing myself I can’t do, that I keep battling as an opponent who eludes me, that I keep thinking past instead of before. This PhD dissertation will get written and defended in 2012.

In my thirties I have become a journeyman carpenter, earned a BA, an MA, and almost a PhD. I’ve traveled, started a non-profit and a political art blog (with Svetla and Rob, respectively), got married to the bodacious Bulgarian Svetla (and thus became Svetzra), had writing published and co-edited a 700-page book. I found a home in Montreal – a beautifully cozy, sunny apartment in a great neighbourhood. I feel fortunate for the things I have in my life and the things I have been able to do. The vast majority of the world’s population cannot aspire to 1/100th of these things due predominently to the massive inequity between rich and poor, exacerbated as it is by racism, colonization and globalization.

I have these wonderful aspects of my life under my 39-year-old belt and I cherish them and carry them with pride. But hard work needs vision and focus, and 2012 is the year I intend to work on these qualities, applying them to school, love, family, social justice and community.

I’m readying myself to confront that negatively-charged 40 and load it with a positive force that will put my 30th year to shame.

2012 bring it on!

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Wow, two months since I posted here. Swamped as usual. Suffering from a total writer’s block and unable to really dive into my dissertation-writing. I keep reading and reading and when I sit down to write I feel like I don’t have anything worthwhile to say. But some things were working against me – summer, a big move to a new apartment (with my own office finally!), the ongoing distraction known as Cinema Politica, and most recently, teaching a fourth year undergraduate course at Carleton University on alternative media. With those things behind me (Cinema Politica is finished for the semester and the course is over, save for the huge stack of papers I have to mark by the end of this weekend), I should be ready.

I’m really trying to knock out a rough chapter before I take a short holiday break, beginning December 20th. That gives me ten days. If I can do an average of four pages per day, I can do it. But there’s nothing up there (in my head)!! Argh!! I keep hearing everyone goes through this, but I really feel like there’s no way I’ll ever get this dissertation written. Really. Let’s hope my next post on this blog will be one celebrating a chapter (or two) under my belt.

The picture above is from a special academic forum/workshop I attended this past spring called NYLON (New York-London). It’s a network of super smart people. You have to have a PhD to be a member so most are profs, but they invite the odd graduate student to attend some of their workshops and I was lucky enough to take part and have my paper discussed by this secret cabal of braniacs from the US and UK. I’m over on the left side and to my immediate left is my awesome supervisor Ira Wagman. To my immediate right is the insanely prolific academic Craig Calhoun, who, aside from founding NYLON, is a very pleasant individual. Two intense days of intellectual discussion and boy was I exhausted but also exhilarated. I could use one of those right about now. I’ll have to instead settle for the inspirational effect of snow falling out my window…

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A short 2009 documentary by Aage Rais-Nordentoft about the Iraqi asylum seekers who sought refuge in Brorson’s church, Copenhagen, to avoid being deported to Iraq – but were ultimately forcefully removed despite protestations from supporters. View the Vimeo page here.

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Fabulous animation mixed with hilarious words from kids sorting out the world’s problems makes for one brilliant video. Enjoy.

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The international film festival is a strange creation. Like documentary, it isn’t any one thing. Instead, it resembles a leaky holding tank, the contents of which constantly seep, form new bodies, expand, transform and otherwise confound precise categorization. It is an organism eschewing stasis: regardless of size, import or cultural capital, the festival must constantly be on the move in order to stay alive and offer surprises to its perennial spectators.

If one compares one of the earliest documenta- ries, L’arrivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat by the Lumière brothers—first publicly screened in January 1896—to John Greyson’s complex political doc-opera Fig Trees, screened at Hot Docs in 2010, such itinerant qualities would seem to apply to the non-fiction film genre as well. It makes sense then, that two dynamic and increasingly popular media constellations, one bound up in time and space, the other transcending such restraints, would somehow converge in a global city like Toronto, and demand our attention. Such is the peppy and world renowned international documentary film festival with the infectiously clever name Hot Docs. What follows is an attempt to understand this social phenomenon outside the purview of its films and filmmakers.

Hot Doc Time Machine

International film festivals emerged around 60 years ago as political and national entities fever- ishly assembled in various European cities to counter rival festivals sporting the wrong ideological feathers nestled in equally unfavourable countries. After several “new wave” and “emergent national cinema” declarations, Europe ceded its festival brood—by now its own continental network—to the forces of globalization and in the 1980s other parts of the planet harnessed the film festival spirit, including Sundance, Montreal, Hong Kong, Sydney, and Toronto. These new hotspots in the global culture of cinema showed a rebellious spirit in the face of ubiquitous Hollywood products, and indeed fought effectively (although few continue to) for a more diverse, independent, auteur-driven world cinema. It was a sprout-like phenomenon that would broach the holding tank further by not only boosting commercially unfriendly art house and independent cinema, but by carving out space for other niche iterations like documentary and ethnic themed festivals.

Like most niche fests, Hot Docs emerged humbly at first. It was established by the Documentary Organization of Canada (then the Canadian Independent Film Caucus) in 1993 as an industry insider’s event (read: a diminutive group of documentarians dorking out on way too much caffeine). Initially, docs were shown at prosaic hotel conference rooms, and the technical feat of the day involved balancing television sets on chairs. In 1996 the festival had gained some traction and separately incorporated as its own charitable organization. It began attracting the kind of small crowds in cafés and cinemas in Little Italy that befits a nascent “niche” festival in an otherwise feature fiction–dominated mainstream film fest universe.

Niche festivals form from the clay of larger mixed genre international fests for fairly predictable reasons: lack of representation at existing larger-scale events, abundance of overlooked quality work, and earnest and dedicated communities. These smaller festivals rescue alternative forms and genres from marginalization (“The World of African Cinema” at 8 AM, anyone?) as mainstream fests assert their power to set standards, taste-make, form canons, and draw lines of programming inclusion and exclusion. Among the motley crew of festival-neglected film and video, one finds the documentary, fiction’s twice-removed illegitimate cousin.

Documentary has percolated on the margins of the mainstream festival world for decades, despite holding the title of originator of all things filmic. Until the ’90s festivalgoers would be hard-pressed to find very many non-fiction nuggets whilst traversing the film fest circuit, adorned as it was with so much fiction fare (and fluff). Flash forward almost two decades and Hot Docs has outgrown the awkward stage, maturing in its late teens as the gangly but spirited and respected documentary film festival that is now the largest in North America (and second in the world only to Amsterdam’s mighty IDFA).

Audience attendance figures at Hot Docs continue to break records, with a whopping 136,000 bums settling into seats in 2010 (up from 68,000 only three years earlier). Last year’s edition saw 166 films from 40 countries screened 283 times in seven venues. While 1,818 delegates attended (670 from outside Canada), 20 full-time staffers (and many more on contract) and 370 volunteers kept the machinery whirring as 409 buyers mingled about, ducking from some doc-makers and taking coveted meetings with others. No televisions were balanced on chairs and no espresso machines drowned out any soundtracks.

In all, the 17th edition of Hot Docs was a massive show of force regarding our niche criteria: many films were shown that weren’t to be found at other mixed-genre/mainstream film festivals, and an avid community of fans, makers, buyers, sellers, organizers and taste- makers assembled like a beautiful human-art car wreck for 11 exhilarating days.

But what can we take away from the event as a whole? Hot Docs can be described as many things: carnival, ritual, conference, showcase, ceremony, performance, business meeting, social space, art world, public sphere, bourgeois bacchanalia, corporate platform, emergent artist launching pad. With so many avenues it is instructive to organize thoughts into manageable categories. As such, I focus on two ever-present aspects that help to understand the role, function and context of this important cultural institution. Community and network are defining characteristics of all international film festivals, and they most certainly apply to Toronto’s forum for non-fiction cinema.

A Networked Community

Unlike an automobile pile-up, Hot Docs has a purpose beyond facilitating the ancient act of spectatorship. Hot Docs, like all film festivals, forges community and, like most niche film festivals, celebrates, promotes and supports a marginalized cinematic culture and form. Documentary may be consecrated in some circles for breaking free from its co-dependent relationship with mainstream fiction—rising to lofty heights in popular imagination, media and taste—but outside the ephemeral festival it is still Mission Impossible to easily see documentaries in social settings (that is, in “meat space,” with other humans in the dark).
Festivals like IDFA, DocLisboa, DOK Leipzig, DOXA, RIDM, Cph:dox and Hot Docs are conscious of this chasm between documentary production and reception, and besides delivering abundant doc goods to the public for short stints each year (and through extended festival projects that operate outside limited fest time spans such as Hot Docs’s Doc Soup) these non-fiction fests strengthen their ‘niche’ culture, industry and art by creating and maintaining a community.

It is a carefully controlled and managed community, of course, and hierarchies are established through programming, accredi- tation systems (signified by festival badges worn around the neck), and zones of inclusion and exclusion. Such restrictive strata have led Thomas Elsaesser to compare film festivals to airports, rather than “marketplaces and trade fairs.” Hot Docs constructs such hierarchies by corralling the “right” people together into spaces, often with complimentary food and drink, thus defining inner and outer circles of the international documentary “community” and building an architecture of exclusion and inclusion that is mostly predicated by cultural capital, celebrity/notoriety, proximity to
power, and ability-to-pay.

Elements of exclusion/inclusion permeate the culture and can find their way from the architecture of the event into interpersonal exchanges. While attending Hot Docs some years ago, I had a festival experience akin to speed dating on steroids. I had been standing at a cocktail event in the glorious Royal Ontario Museum, frazzled from so many screenings that day and maybe even mumbling to myself. As I stood there taking the animated crowd in, various individuals frenetically approached me, making the bare-minimum eye contact needed to rule out sociopathy, and quickly scanned my “badge”—the coded pass slung round my neck. I can only surmise, but it seems to me that, upon reading my pass and learning of my “non-profit” and “grassroots” status (as the programmer for Cinema Politica), each person quickly vacated my space, some without even saying a word.

It was like being an unpopular dish at a fancy social: the bowl of potato salad set awkwardly among caramelized Pacific salmon skewers and avocado-mango purées. But, chin up! I learned to adapt and “work the room” like everyone else whose festival setting remains stuck on hyper-network-drive (mostly industry insiders). Perhaps this is a rite of passage for acceptance into the community of doc (and fest) dwellers.

Hot Docs has excelled in forging a networked community of professionals: artists, commissioning editors, distributors, programmers, acquisition executives and others who make up the nuts-and-bolts of the industry. The festival organizes an industry conference where, in 2010, sessions focused on everything from the creativity of the craft to distribution problems/solutions to online and interactive documentary. Kickstart, a workshop aimed at helping emerging filmmakers, divided a day into learning about Funding It, Making It, and Selling It, where the hardened veterans passed on knowledge to the wide- eyed newbies. Delegates spent another day exchanging global partnership know-how as part of International Co-production Day.

But the Toronto Documentary Forum (renamed Hot Docs Forum for the 2011 edition to alleviate confusion) is perhaps the most auspicious aspect of the market side of Hot Docs. A three-day intense meet-and-greet of doc industry types, the TDF (HDF) features a gladiator-style pitch session and a veritable rendezvous avalanche for various agents seeking to connect the crucial dots of financing, production, distribution and broadcasting. Rendezvous is in fact the name of a separate market event that “facilitates one-on-one meetings between independent filmmakers and international documentary financiers.” It is comprised of yet more meetings, succinctly pinched into strict 15-minute time slots pitting makers with buyers. Other “Micro Meetings” and “Network Events” abound.

All these meetings, events and carefully managed spaces help constitute a professional documentary community—and to be sure, Hot Docs is world-renowned for this business-networking aspect of the festival. However, the documentary industry community that convenes in Toronto every April does more than locate funds and connect productions with markets. It is part of a globally linked cultural force that contributes to documentary cinema’s evolution from obscurity in programming ghettos toward elusive primetime television and theatrical slots.

Communities as spread out as the international documentary community require spaces to congregate, share ideas, see each other’s work and rustle up dwindling resources. With tastemakers and policy-makers in such close proximity to artists and audiences, strange things can and do happen. At every Hot Docs edition I’ve attended I’ve met filmmakers who have made golden connections with individuals who can take their project to the next level, as they say. The festival also presents a great opportunity to apply pressure to cultural gatekeepers, as is the case of the European festivals muscling state broadcasters to diversify television content. With Canadian television envelopes closing faster than you can say American Idol, this latter aspect of the festival space is more crucial than ever.

Hot Docs is more than a community of industry insiders—it is a cultural institution that facilitates the linkage between a variety of communities, including activists of all stripes, cinephiles, festival enthusiasts, journalists, critics and artists, to name a few. Yochai Benkler has celebrated this kind of connectivity in what he calls the “new networked information economy.” In his book The Wealth of Networks, he writes that the most exciting aspect of our current historical moment is “the rise of individual practical capabilities, and the role that these new capabilities play in increasing the relative salience of non-proprietary, often nonmarket individual and social behavior.” That we live in increasingly deep networked times is not lost on Hot Docs organizers or anyone with a Facebook account—but how we harness and utilize such social connectivity toward accessible and open systems of exchange is the stuff of an exciting documentary future.

Film festivals like Hot Docs play an important role in how global skeins of art, culture, business and people will converge, collaborate and challenge 20th-century models of static institutions and top-down, centralized power structures. Hot Docs is part of a massive network of, according to the New York Times, over 1,000 film festivals. It is also a hub in the smaller network of documentary art, culture and business. North America’s largest doc showcase is a critical convergence point on a map that is continually redrawn and reinvented by the people traversing its terrain, and as such, it is a space of great import for not only cinema culture, but also the documentary community writ large.

It is the social aspect of Hot Docs that is often overlooked by media, industry insiders and even event organizers, and of course I am not referring to the industry meetings and food and drink extravaganzas—lord knows much attention is directed toward their proliferation. I’m speaking of the less visible but equally important social connections that are forged at the festival each and every year, outside of industry orientation. The myriad moments where cultural citizenship and political participation challenge conceptions of passive spectatorship are part of the brick and mortar that keeps fortress Hot Docs robust and indispensable.

At the TDF in 2010 (Photo credit: Joseph Michael)

Size Matters

As Hot Docs grows it is not without its critics, whose main complaints against the festival stem from its alienating enormity, its perceived focus on market over audience, and its corporate relationships. Valid concerns all of them, but they can be readily applied to any of the large international festivals, and one wonders if it is inevitable that the niche leak from the original European festival holding tank is merely drawing ire because it resembles the mainstream giants from which it sprang forth.

Surely a massive event that attracts precious public and media attention to a marginalized cinematic form like documentary is good for business and culture After all, the thought of 136,000 people turning up to see documentaries at any event was an absurd notion not too many years ago—one that became a triumphant reality at last year’s Hot Docs festival.

Still, producing bigger and bigger editions of Hot Docs requires more money, resources and compromises along the way. Things can fall through the cracks that are disloyal to the spirit of documentary as a dissenting voice in the mainstream media margins. Cadillac SUV ads were shown in 2006 before a doc about Ralph Nader (which led to a wonderful audience revolt of bike bells being rung as the ad played) and Coca-Cola was the environmental film sponsor in 2010 (“You’ve got to be kidding me” was what the elderly women sitting in front of us at one screening said when the Coke sponsorship flashed on the screen). But again, these are likely the inevitable consequences of a small niche fest growing into a large commercial fest. The trick for Hot Docs and other large film festivals is the difficult balancing act between community zest and commercial zeal (often characterized as art versus commerce).

In his rollicking chronicle of 25 years of TIFF, Brave Films Wild Nights, Brian D. Johnson writes, “[A]t any good party, eventually the guests take over. Once the festival is established, the story belongs to the filmmakers.” Hot Docs certainly belongs to the filmmakers, but it also belongs to industry dealmakers, eager audience members, deter- mined activists, and everyone between. In other words, Hot Docs belongs to the documentary community. And as a member of that community, I hope that holding tank con- tinues to leak in outstanding and outspoken ways.

This article originally appeared in POV Magazine, Issue 82, April 2011. An Art Threat report from the 2011 edition is forthcoming.

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At the end of Steve James’s new masterpiece documentary three words are employed to thank the film’s characters—those who gave incredible, intimate access to their lives and work—for their “courage, candour and inspiration.” These are indeed fitting words for some of the bravest, most committed and selfless heroes ever to be shown on the screen. The film is The Interrupters and the heroes are the interrupters themselves – the courageous individuals in Chicago who interrupt cycles of violence in mostly black and latino youth circles. This documentary is nothing short of perfection. The 2 hour 42 minute opus from Kartemquin Films is an inspired political work that charts the difficult terrain of ethics and aesthetics with a poetic visual sensibility and charged respect for the subjects – and never loses site of the story.

Steve James (best known for directing the Academy Award-winning Hoop Dreams) told me that the name “The Interrupters” was chosen because it sounds like it could be a movie about superheroes. As it turns out, the film is indeed about superheroes, only these heroes do not have special powers or wear capes. They do however fight crime, intervening in cyclical socio-political tensions and problems as they percolate, before they escalate to crimes of violence. The interrupters are comprised of ex-offenders and their work with CeaseFire, a non-profit making the most from scarce resources, is dangerous, stressful, and impossibly challenging. This film champions their unsung efforts and ultimately reveals the life-changing (indeed society-changing) effect an individual can have at the most dire and volatile time of someone else’s life.

James told a packed Hot Docs theatre that the filmmakers, inspired by the interrupters, stopped asking the question “how can a person change?”. After spending a year documenting their interventions and mediations a different question emerged: “how can we help someone go back to who they really are?” The Interrupters shows, with gorgeous, confident cinematography, impeccable editing and a superb soundtrack, just how that process works.

From the beginning the audience is catapulted into perilous spaces as violence erupts between various youth. The teens and young adults fight because of personal disagreement, competing neighbourhood rivalries or as retaliation for previous murders and assaults. Arguments often escalate into violence and even murder, as is the case with Derrion Albert, captured on cell phone video in one of the neighbourhoods where the interrupters work.

In one scene in The Interrupters youth pick up stones and knives and face off until an interrupter, the incredibly inspirational, powerful and articulate Ameena Matthews (whose father is notorious gang leader Jeff Fort), inserts herself, whisking away a young male who is bleeding and whose adrenaline dial is set on high. Moments later she is with him at someone’s home, removed from the fight, laughing about how he looked like a cartoon character when he was hit in the face by the rock. “If we can get them to laugh about it, that’s a positive step” she says. The Interrupters is a film that guides us gracefully and uncompromisingly along a path of positive steps. These are the largely unknown steps toward treating violence as a behaviour problem connected to larger socio-political issues that leave under-priviliged and marginalized youths alienated, cynical, and indeed prone to violence.

The Interrupters is a gripping (mostly) observational documentary that produces intensely intimate spaces with vulnerable and volatile subjects but never feels intrusive or sensational. The filmmakers bring us close to the subjects without ever being invasive, and while the bold and steady camera work results in stunning cinematography, the violence and drama is not aesthecized nor normalized. It is a master work of social cinema that captures the urgency of the interrupters’ work as well as the dignity and courage of both those intervening in the violence and those embroiled in it.

This was the best film that I had the pleasure to see at Hot Docs, and it will hopefully find its rightful position in the documentary canon as one of the most committed, inspired and important works in the history of the genre. Steve James, working with Alex Kotlowitz, has made a film that is lightyears away from mere documentation of a social problem. The Interrupters is an audacious socio-political portrait of gifted and dedicated people who are changing society and in the process are changing the way society views the widespread problem of inner city violence.

While monuments commemorating the impassioned and exhausting work of the interrupters should be erected throughout America, The Interrupters documentary is a kind of monument itself – one that should be placed in every library, broadcast on every television and projected in every theatre in the country. In short, it is a documentary that is honest, courageous and inspirational storytelling.

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Check out ShitHarperDid.ca for many more great videos and reasons why we shouldn’t vote for the politician who out-Bushed Bush.

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