Hot picks for Hot Docs

The Hot Docs international film festival begins Thursday in Toronto, featuring nearly 200 documentaries from Canada and around the world. The subject matter is wide-ranging: from pop culture to poverty to South Asian cultures, among others.

We asked several Toronto filmmakers — June Chua, Lalita Krishna and Allan Tong — to give their three picks that filmgoers shouldn’t miss at the jam-packed festival, which runs until May 6.

Click here for the online schedule, and click here to buy tickets online.

June Chua

The Toronto-based filmmaker co-directed Travels With My Brother, which is having its U.S. premiere in New York at the Sprout Film Festival on April 28 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Picks:

1. The Waiting Room
This one is about a day in the life of an emergency room at a public hospital in Oakland, Calif.

“The back story behind the patients is simply riveting – the ultimate people-centered story,” Chua says.

The Emmy-award winning director Pete Nicks, also the film’s cinematographer, pulls together the pictures and the stories in a way that puts the viewer in the middle of the action.

“It’s not narrated,” Chua says. “So the director had to craft the story based on how people interacted and acted in front of the camera.”

2. Big Boys Gone Bananas!
The Swedish director Fredrik Gertten made a film called Bananas about banana workers in Nicaragua who sued Dole Food Co. for using a pesticide that allegedly destroyed their health. But the company mounted an aggressive legal and media campaign against him and the film in 2009. Gertten, a former foreign correspondent, decided to film his battle with Dole and the result is Big Boys Gone Bananas!  

“This had the conflict, twists and turns,” Chua says. “Dole is hot on his heels at every turn. But I found it a celebration of David triumphing Goliath.”

“It’s shocking what you witness in this film as to how the company was almost able to shut down the film but they picked the wrong David,” she says.

The producer of Bananas is Canadian Bart Simpson, who was also the producer of The Corporation. He’s featured in Big Boys Gone Bananas! discussing how hard it was for him to get the real story out to Canadian media. Gertten will be at the Toronto premiere on May 2.

3. Greetings from the Colony
Belgium filmmaker Nathalie Borgers delves into her own personal family history in Greetings from the Colony. A white Belgium official abandons his Rwandan wife and sons, taking a daughter with him back to his native country in the 1930s. It’s not only an examination of colonialism but also an examination of family relations, Chua says.

“It’s a very touching movie plus it’s like a mystery,” she says, adding it’s a “good example of the power of character storytelling.”

“There’s no 3D in this but it’s powerful.”

Allan Tong
The Toronto director has made five films, including Little Mao, a short film about the life of Chairman Mao told through a child’s baseball team, which premiered at TIFF Kids earlier this month. A filmmaker for 10 years, Tong will be at the Hot Docs Forum trying to get finishing money to complete his latest film Leone Stars, which he co-directed. This will be his 10th year at the festival, which he has attended as a film journalist writing for several magazines, including Point of View, Montage and Filmmaker Magazine. He has also gone as a programmer for other festivals, including Planet in Focus and Contact.

Picks:   
1. The World Before Her
The World Before Her, which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival this month and won best documentary feature there, is a great film by Nisha Pahuja that took Tong by surprise when he previewed an advance DVD. It tells the story of two groups of women in modern-day India: one is a violent Hindu fundamentalist training camp for young girls and the other is a group of 20 women vying for the Miss India beauty pageant.

 “The film just cuts back and forth between the characters in both camps,” Tong says. “That’s what makes it a great documentary.”

“As you can imagine you have very right-wing religious fundamentalists who hate anything that has to do with the West and of course the Miss India is as West as you can get.”

These seem to be the two paths that young women take in India because it’s such a male-dominated society, he says.

2. Beware of Mr. Baker
It’s about Ginger Baker, the English drummer in Cream, the hard rock 60s trio with Eric Clapton.
Most hagiographies of rock stars are just “crap” because they “don’t reveal anything dirty,” Tong says.

“This film shatters that. It’s nasty from the beginning and really dead honest.”

The film opens with Baker on a South African ranch walking with the aid of a cane, and talking to the filmmaker Jay Bulger, who says he’s going to interview other people about him for the film. Ginger says, “No, you’re not,” and smashes the filmmaker’s nose with his cane.

“That sets up the relationship between the subject and filmmaker,” says Tong who has watched this film “again and again.”

Beware of Mr. Baker is Bulger’s first film. “He did a great job, cutting it, finding the old archival and blending animation to fill in gaps where there was no video,” Tong says.

3. McCullin
Tong hasn’t pre-screened this film, which is about the war photographer Don McCullin, and says that he’s going purely on the subject. McCullin, who has covered the battlefields in Vietnam, the Congo and the Middle East, will be at the April 27 premiere.

“He’s promoting the film [which] is a good sign,” Tong says.

Lalita Krishna
A filmmaker with 15 films under her belt, Krishna has been going to Hot Docs every year since 2000 when one of her films, What Held It All, played there. One of her latest films, Semisweet: Life in Chocolate, will air on TVO at 9 p.m. on June 6. She says she tries to see as many films as possible even though the Hot Docs festival is one of the busiest times for documentary filmmakers. This year’s program features a lot of documentaries about dysfunctional families, poverty, and people living at the edge of society. Last year, it was about the financial crisis and the year before that it was about the environment, she says.

Picks:
1. China Heavyweight
This is the second film by Montreal filmmaker Yung Chang (who directed the award-winning documentary Up the Yangtze) and follows a boxing coach as he recruits and trains poor rural teens to be boxing champs. The film had its U.S. premiere at Sundance on Chinese New Year’s Eve.
 
“We’ve all been waiting for his second film,” says Krishna, who loved Chang’s first film.

2. Espoir Voyage
Burkinabe filmmaker Michael Zongo retraces his brother’s journey to neighbouring Ivory Coast where many youths travel to find work in the cocoa fields. This documentary resonated with Krishna because she filmed part of her documentary Semisweet in Burkina Faso where she met such kids who made similar dangerous treks.

“It’s a sad story in Mali and Burkina Faso. The kids are so poor. It’s almost a ritual or rite of passage,” Krishna says.

3. Marley
This is a tribute film about reggae artist Bob Marley by director Kevin Macdonald, one that Krishna says everyone has been waiting to see.

“He goes so deep into the stories he does,” and this one promises to be an intimate portrait with some rare interviews and concert footage, she says.

What are you going to see? Send us your picks and reviews in the comments below.