READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP
Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is the star of the closing night film at this year’s Doxa Documentary Film Festival, which starts this weekend
Bear 71, an interactive documentary project, will open this year’s Doxa festival, accompanied by live music at St. Andrew’s-wesley United Church.
The National Film Board project — it exists in an online version that allows users to focus on specific parts of the story — is centred on a mother grizzly bear, captured and tagged at age three and under surveillance for the rest of her life in Banff National Park.
Motion-activated cameras caught her movements along trails — and the movements of hikers, eagles, wolves and other animals as well.
Made into a documentary with a script and narration, the film examines those systems of surveillance — the grainy quality of the footage recalls the scenes you get from the cameras at a gas bar — blending the wired world with the wilderness.
The annual festival is screening more than 100 films from Canada and around the world.
Oscar-winning Vancouver director John Zaritsky is back with Do You
Really Want to Know?, the question in the title being whether it’s worth being tested for the gene that carries Huntington’s Disease, a debilitating degenerative condition for which there is no treatment or cure. The American documentary Jason
Becker: Not Dead Yet, tracks the life of 1980s guitar hero Becker, who went from backing David Lee Roth to a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Today, Becker is virtually paralyzed, but still communicates and makes music with the help of a system devised by his father Gary.
Big Boys Gone Bananas is a sequel of sorts to Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten’s 2009 Bananas!, which exposed the awful working conditions on Nicaraguan plantations serving the U.S. Dole corporation. The new movie recounts the corporation’s efforts to threaten, manipulate and otherwise use dirty tricks to keep the original film from being seen.
Ai Weiwei, the dissident Chinese poet who has taken much state-driven abuse for his subversive, fearless work and brash public persona, is profiled in director Alison Klayman’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.
In Story of Burka: Case of a Confused Afghan, Afghan-canadian filmmaker Brishkay Ahmed sees the face-concealing garment as a political tool manipulating Afghan women.