Hot Docs dean still keen 20 year later
Movies come, and they go, for Hot Docs president Chris McDonald.
But even now, with the allyou-can-eat Toronto documentary festival marking its 25th anniversary this week, the professional film lover really can’t think of a better way of Ebert-ing than the strategy employed by his dad.
“If my father likes a film, he says, ‘It makes you think,’ ” said McDonald the other day at Soho House.
“If he doesn’t like it as much, he’ll say, ‘That’s different.’ ” Kind of genius! A flicker of droll passes over his face — the same expression, incidentally, that I detected a year and half ago when I ran into him on North Palm Canyon in Palm Springs, Calif., of all places. Looking somewhat cagey, McDonald admitted at the time that he had, well, escaped from a haunt, particularly well known for celebs, known as We Care, a so-called “fasting and spiritual retreat” in the desert.
His top-secret mission then? To find some darn coffee!
Your secret is safe is with moi, I’d told him, my fingers crossed deftly behind my back.
What’s no secret these days? The extent to which Hot Docs has grown to become the largest documentary showcase on the continent. Not only that, but it is — in terms of “butts in seats,” as 55-year-old McDonald puts it — the secondbiggest trafficked festival, period, in North America (in line after only the Toronto International Film Festival).
The program for 2018 runs the boards: from a free worldpremiere screening in Imax of The Trolley (a spin through public transit in 34 cities) to intriguing deep dives such as Behind the Curve (a look at the rise of Flat-Earth believers) and The Broker (a look into the ins and outs of an Iranian dating agency); a pure pleasure-delivery system such as The Bill Murray Stories (wisdom and wit from the man himself ), requisite viewing such as Active Measures (a close examination into the interference of Russians in the 2016 U.S. election), plus a spatter of films from and about Mexico.
And that’s just for the proverbial starters. The numbers of Hot Docs tell the story:
3,000: The films submitted to the fest from around the world. 146: The films McDonald says he’s personally screened (out of the 200-plus films screening at the fest, until May 6).
20: The years the man before me has been associated with the documentary bacchanal.
And though there was a peaceful renegotiation of powers within the organization a few years ago — Brett Hendrie taking over as executive director, while McDonald entered the newly created position of president — it’s clear to longtime watchers that Hot Docs continues to be his baby.
“Nightmare,” he one-words when asked to describe those earliest days.
“The cinemas were empty . . . and we hadn’t realized there was a marketing element to all of this. Documentaries then was still considered a bit of a slog. But once films began to get financed at our festival, that’s when people started to notice. And once some of the veteran filmmakers — like Errol Morris and Werner Herzog — started to come, that changed things, too. It took a while, too, to get the resources we needed.”
Sporting a pair of Prada loaf- ers, the sides of his head with specks as fine as Maldon salt, McDonald strikes the adroitness of a congenial sea captain. Flicking through a Hot Docs brochure, he nostalgically points to a number of titles that, over the many years, broke through, won Oscars or both. Films such as Waltz with Bashir, Finding Vivian Maier or Inocente.
One thing that has inevitably affected the appetite for documentaries and, to some extent, changed the cultural conversation around them over the past two decades, is the extent to which reality shows and just plain life documentation are part of everyone’s media diet. Just think of the ubiquity of YouTube, the lingua franca of “selfies.”
“We are all documentarians and consumers of the form now,” McDonald begins, pointing out that the form, in all its myriad manifestations, has been ‘democratized.’
“No one is afraid of cameras. No one is afraid of being filmed, it seems. We’re all storytellers. Everything changed; technology changed everything. That you can even edit on a laptop . . . ” he trails off.
Asked if there’s one thing he’s tired of seeing in documenta- ries these days, he comes back: “I’m almost over drones. Every second film now has an establishing drone shot.”
Asked if he has a pick for me at the current fest, he points to the too-crazy-to-be true Three Identical Strangers, about three teenagers in the 1980s who discover by accident that they’re triplets separated at birth. “You just have to see it.”
I bring up the one Hot Docs offering that I happened to screen the night before: Constructing Albert, a year in the life of Spanish chef Albert Adria, brother of Ferran of elBulli fame. Centred in Barcelona, and redolent of the spirits of both Pedro Almodovar and Peter Greenaway, the film is a vehicle for love, valour and tapas. I loved it.
McDonald nods enthusiastically, reminding that the current crop of “foodie docs” probably owe their provenance to the now classic Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
“That’s definitely a genre or sub-genre: the restaurant doc,” he says. “Jiro, when it came out, blew everyone away — it was a juggernaut, theatrically. I’ve been looking for the next really big restaurant film, we all have . . . and there haven’t been that many that have done remarkably well.”
Focused, eaglelike, as part of his role these days, on the yearround, 700-seat Hot Docs Cinema on Bloor St. W., McDonald is keenly attentive to the “commercial view,” as he calls it.
“There’s also another genre of film that does exceptionally well, which I call ‘virtual tourism,’ ” he says. “Any film about Italy or about the Camino Trail or India . . . any place that people aspire to go or have gone to, and want to relive it.”
Similarly, music and fashion documentaries do really well.
Even though it’s his business, it’s clear the extent to which it remains exceptionally personal for the guy. He’s the man who, when growing up between Toronto and Montreal, would organize his sleepovers around the old movie listings on TV (“Why are we watching old black-and-white-movies?” his friends would ask). Fast forward and he’s the fella who still gets a tingle when feeling the jangle of the key for the cinema on Bloor.
“I’ve never opened the door without giggling,” he confesses.
He sighs: “No technology has been able to replace that magical feeling of watching a film in the dark with a bunch of strangers.”