The Reckoning heading to Hot Docs festival
TORONTO — Just six months after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke and triggered a flood of sexual misconduct allegations as well as the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, a Canadian documentary examining the saga is set to make its debut.
“The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret,” directed by Montreal-born doc maker Barry Avrich and produced by Melissa Hood of Toronto, will screen April 28 and May 5 as part of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.
“The purpose of the film was to immortalize a debate and a time in history, an era, in the face of social media that is, I think in a lot of ways, undermining a lot of the accusations,” said Avrich, whose other projects include the 2011 documentary “Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project.” “Because the cycle happens so quickly that you don’t have enough time to debate, the public is getting bored, so how do you keep the debate going? That was the purpose for the film: to immortalize this debate and the conversation, affect change.”
Billed as “a definitive film about the abuse of power in a complicit culture,” the doc has interviews with several actresses, including Katherine Kendall and Melissa Sagemiller, who’ve made sexual misconduct allegations against Weinstein, filmmaker James Toback and others.
It also has interviews with journalists, agents, psychologists, former Miramax employees and lawyers as it looks at the debates surrounding such allegations, the impact of these cases, and the systemic and cultural issues leading to harassment. Also among the interviewees is Dylan Farrow, filmmaker Woody Allen’s adopted daughter who alleges he molested her in an attic in 1992 when she was 7. Allen has long denied the allegations and was investigated but not charged.
Hood said Farrow’s story “highlights some of the contradictions and the complexities” of the Time’s Up movement when it comes to supporting certain alleged victims and not others, or separating the art from the artist.
Also featured in the doc is Toronto lawyer Marie Henein, who represented former CBC radio star Jian Ghomeshi in a highprofile sexual assault case. Ghomeshi was found not guilty. Henein is now representing a Toronto actress suing Weinstein for sexual assault. The allegations have not been tested in court.