The fest’s best
Our critic’s picks for what to watch at this year’s festival
“It’ll be all right on the night,” the showbiz maxim goes, and the organizers of the 2024 Hot Docs Festival fervently hope that’s the case with their embattled documentary showcase, which runs April 25 to May 5.
In recent weeks, Hot Docs has endured the abrupt departure of former artistic director Hussain Currimbhoy and the resignations of 10 programmers, amid allegations of a “toxic work environment” at North America’s largest documentary fest.
That followed a warning by Hot Docs president Marie Nelson that this year’s 31st edition of the nonprofit fest could be its last if more financial support isn’t forthcoming from its government partners.
The cash crunch has necessitated trimming the roster by several dozen films, but Hot Docs still has much to show: 168 docs from 64 countries, about a third of which are world premieres. Here are 10 good bets for the fest:
1. Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story
Soul/R&B singer Jackie Shane was the brightest star of her own constellation, which included Toronto. A transgender performer from Nashville who made no apologies for who she was, she turned down “The Ed Sullivan Show” for being transphobic and “American Bandstand” for being segregationist. She was reluctant to tour, preferring to stay in Toronto performing at packed club gigs, recording a hit song (“Any Other Way”), and contributing mightily to the musical emergence known as the “Toronto Sound.” Shane’s powerful pipes and charismatic chutzpah promised global stardom, but in 1971 she dropped out of the public eye. Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee seek answers in a doc reminiscent of the Sundance hit “Searching for Sugar Man.”
2. Black Box Diaries
After Shiori Ito was raped by a prominent TV journalist in Japan in 2015, she was forced to confront her country’s outdated laws and attitudes toward sexual assault. It’s a crime rarely spoken of in Japan, where only four per cent of such cases are reported to police. When Ito, a journalist herself, had trouble getting an investigator to take her case seriously, she took matters into her own hands, surreptitiously recording her conversations with officials and making a video diary of her travails. Her first-person doc is a riveting account of her initial attack, and the subsequent verbal and legal attacks she endured after going public with her case.
3. Born Hungry
A plate of French Dover sole sets you back $65 in chef Sash Simpson’s eponymous Toronto restaurant. Such luxury would have been unimaginable to him in the mid-1970s, when he was a five-yearold orphan picking through garbage bins on the streets of Chennai (Madras), India. His life dramatically changed after he was brought to Canada by philanthropists Sandra and Lloyd Simpson, and joined a large and growing family of siblings. Documentarian Barry Avrich takes the remarkable story a step further, following Sash Simpson as he returns to India to seek his birth family and rediscover the cuisine of a country he’d almost forgotten. The film’s ingredients are part detective story, part culinary tour, all inspiration.
4. Curl Power
“Teenagers are weird … but curling is cool,” a narrator tells us early in Josephine Anderson’s empathetic coming-of-age doc. It seems like a random assertion until you see how it plays out in the lives of teenage B.C. curlers Hannah, Brooklyn, Savannah, Ashley and Amy, collectively known as the 4KGIRL$, who balance the usual teen concerns with a determined quest to become Canadian junior curling champions. Extraordinary access is afforded to Anderson as she follows the girls and their coaching moms through the rigours of training and competing and the vicissitudes of life, the latter including cheers, tears, a serious health issue, and breakups both romantic and academic.
5. Daughters
Iron bars can’t break the bond between fathers and daughters. Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s double Sundance 2024 winner is a cleareyed, compassionate and uplifting account of a unique father/daughter dance program for inmates at a Washington, D.C., jail.
The film follows four young girls, aged five to 15, as they prepare for their first in-person encounters in years with their incarcerated fathers. Co-director Patton, founder of the original “Date With Dad” program that sparked the dance night, appears onscreen to help lead a 10-week “responsible fatherhood” program.
6. Le Mans 55: The Unauthorized Investigation
On June 11, 1955, a collision between three sports cars at the 24 Hours of Le Mans motor race in France sent a Mercedes spinning out of control into the viewing stands, killing 83 spectators and French driver Pierre Levegh, and injuring at least 120 other people. An official investigation shrugged it off as “a racing incident” and found nobody at fault, including the racing boss who refused to stop the event. That was that, as far as sports and government officials were concerned. Documentarian Emmanuel Reyé begs to differ: he lost two of his uncles in the crash and his family remains shattered to this day. He uncovers much information that auto racing czars and politicians would prefer nobody talks about.
7. Never Look Away
New Zealand-born cameraperson Margaret Moth was drawn to the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. As a CNN combat journalist, she “doubled down on danger,” eschewing personal safety in her quest to reveal the horrors of war. Actor Lucy Lawless, of “Xena: Warrior Princess” fame, steps behind the camera to bring us Moth’s story in this intense biopic. Lawless mixes graphic footage (much of it shot by Moth herself ) with interviews of her subject’s friends, lovers and family members. Their candour helps explain what drove Moth, what accounted for her anger, nonconformity and relentless energy. Even after she suffered life-altering facial wounds after being hit by sniper fire in Sarajevo, Moth refused to quit, reporting from the world’s worst hot spots until her death from colon cancer at the age of 59.
8. Porcelain War
Ukrainian artists make exquisite pottery animals even while fighting invading Russians and the metaphor is seen, stated and felt: “Porcelain is fragile, yet everlasting.” This poetic and powerful film by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev took the grand jury prize in the U.S. documentary competition at Sundance 2024. It observes the inevitable contradictions in the lives of its main subjects: co-director Slava, a porcelain artist who is seconded by the military to train recruits in the handling of assault weapons; and his partner Anya, who paints gorgeous porcelain animals and also lethal drones used to target the Russian invaders.
9. Secret Mall Apartment
The story is as remarkable to watch as it must have been for residents of Providence, Rhode Island to discover. Jeremy Workman tells — and shows, via archival and re-enacted footage — how local artist Michael Townsend and seven of his friends fashioned a clandestine apartment out of 750 square feet of “nowhere space” in Providence Place, a giant shopping mall. It was their way of protesting the gentrification of the neighbourhood that had seen many of their art hangouts fall to the wrecking ball. Townsend and his friends have also made public art statements, but the heart of their art lies in their secret abode.
10. Singing Back the Buffalo
Some 60 million majestic American buffalo (or bison) once roamed the plains of Canada and the U.S., providing food, shelter, clothing and tools to Native American tribes and essential support to a vast ecosystem. Overhunting and disease slashed that number to just a few hundred by the turn of the 20th century, a tragedy Saskatchewan raised Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard(“nîp aw is tamâ so win: We Will Stand Up”) compares to the treatment of Indigenous people by colonizing forces. These aren’t mere animals, she argues; they’re “Buffalo people” with matriarchal instincts who deserve respect, protection and freedom. Hubbard follows five Cree and Blackfoot women as they hike to the backcountry of Banff National Park to visit a buffalo herd that was reintroduced to this traditional domain.