Docs

2022 - 4 - 25

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Image courtesy of "The Globe and Mail"

Hot Docs 2022: Your 10 best fest bets, from an inside look at Disney ... (The Globe and Mail)

Here are The Globe and Mail's 10 best Hot Docs 2022 bets, gleaned from advance viewing, industry buzz, filmmaker reputation, and intriguing subject matter.

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Image courtesy of "Cineuropa"

Documentary The Killing of a Journalist to premiere at Hot Docs (Cineuropa)

25/04/2022 - Matt Sarnecki pays tribute to slain Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, while simultaneously ...

We are grateful for Final Cut for Real’s partnership and are looking forward to premiering our first joint project at Hot Docs. This film is a testament to our credo: killing a journalist will not kill the story.” “I made the film because the story has a twist that unveils a deeper, more shocking account of large-scale corruption – a never-before-seen blueprint of how it works – and is a testament to the power of investigative journalism,” says the director of The Killing of a Journalist, Matt Sarnecki, a US journalist based in Romania, who is the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s (OCCRP’s) video editor. It was the first ordered assassination of a journalist in the country’s history.

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Image courtesy of "Toronto Star"

Opinion | 12 films that are good bets at Hot Docs 2022 (Toronto Star)

Zackary Drucker stars as Agnes in “Framing Agnes,” a doc by Toronto's Chas. Movies. Opinion. 12 ...

One of their tunes is “Masquerade,” a song about “ripping the mask off,” which is what the ASD Band members aim to do as they educate people through music’s shared humanity. And a bonus doc short: Crafted from raw NASA images and audio, Sebastian Ko’s “A Life on Mars” packs decades of research and nearly 10 years of exploration by intrepid Mars rover Curiosity into a six-minute adventure. More recently he’s been helping out in war-torn Ukraine. The doc risks turning into a PSA, but Andrés — who does have a temper — resists cynicism, sacrificing his family life and coming close to burnout as he barrels through danger, red tape and delays to feed hungry mouths. Rawan Tuffaha (vocals), Jackson Begley (guitar/vocals), Ron Adea (keyboards) and Spenser Murray (drums) find friendship and fulfilment as they labour to write and record “Fireflies,” their first EP of original songs. This sentiment is expressed beautifully in Mark Bone’s chronicle of Toronto’s ASD Band, a group of musicians with autistic spectrum disorder (hence the acronym) and ties to the Jake’s House charitable community. Stellar performances all, especially from Zackary Drucker as the title Agnes, a rebellious and resourceful hero of the trans movement who rejects labels: “I think we’re only human if we’re allowed to be anti-heroes,” she says. He returned to Russia a year ago, only to be jailed upon arrival and later accused of terrorism by Putin’s dictatorial regime. Such speculative science came closer to reality in 2018, when Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui announced he’d created the world’s first gene-edited babies, twin girls known only as Lulu and Nana. But what is applauded as progress in science fiction was greeted in real life with considerable alarm expressed by medical ethicists, who fretted about “rogue” research, and by Chinese government officials, who wanted the story controlled and ultimately hushed. It’s a textbook example of how to do investigative docs. They work hard at it, too, with 100 to 130 performances per year and many rehearsals in between, under the watchful eye of Katherine Shortlidge, their leader and fellow dancer. Dinner, wine and a no-holds-barred lesson on racism are served in Patty Ivins’ provocative doc, along with enlightenment or indigestion depending on the recipient. It’s not all fun and philanthropy: health issues, family concerns and at least one ornery husband conspire against joy, forcing some of the dancers to hang up their colourful headpieces.

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Image courtesy of "Original Cin"

Hot Docs 2022: Our Picks for the World's Biggest & Best ... (Original Cin)

Hot Docs 2022: Our Picks for the World's Biggest & Best Documentary Film Festival ... There is genuine excitement in the air as the world slowly returns to post( ...

Heartbreaking and inspiring, Baichwal sticks to her familiar themes of harming the environment but this one really hits home when you listen to Johnson’s story and many others who are awaiting their death sentence due to coming in contact with this deadly chemical. Kuciak specialized in covering corruption between politicians and Mafia-affiliated businessmen in defrauding the European Union. Key to breaking the story was leaked information on a USB key revealing a complex web of paid assassins, corrupt judges, honey traps, and dirty cops at the highest level, with a remarkable number of culprits caught on video. Questions around transgender history, truth and deception, performance and authenticity, get an insightful airing in Framing Agnes, the new film by Canadian director Chase Joynt (co-director of No Ordinary Man). This hybrid film uses contemporary transgender actors to dramatize interviews with transgender people from the past, from a rediscovered archive of interviews from UCLA sociologist Harold Garfield. Specifically, the film is inspired by the case of Agnes Torres who, in 1959, obtained gender-confirmation surgery by falsely convincing doctors she was born intersex, casting her as either a fraud or a hero, as academic Jules Gill-Peterson explains. One of the areas where humans are on the periphery of playing God is in the world of designing humans through gene manipulation, a “not if but when” proposition. “We live in a titanic age,” wrote the late Joseph Campbell of the amazing, frightening advances in technology. And there are truths in the movie that pop up in unexpected places from unexpected people. But the real gold is the archival material, going back to their origins in Calgary’s Loose Moose theatre and Toronto’s Theatresports, and parts in between. The groundbreaking troupe — Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson — is even interviewed at the Queen St. Toronto club that launched them in the ‘80s, with drums and sound equipment as a backdrop. There’s drama (much is made of the schism that occurred when Foley became a sitcom star), and an overarching polyamorous “love story” theme. In the decades since, sports bodies turned to chromosome tests and testosterone levels in their obsession to decide who was a woman, culminating in the South African runner Caster Semenya, whose natural androgen level disqualified her. With 226 documentaries from 63 countries (chosen from a total of 2,563 submissions), 49 percent directed by women, the Festival truly has something for everyone. There is genuine excitement in the air as the world slowly returns to post(ish)-pandemic normal, with people cautiously heading to events at communal venues.

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