The weather was mighty fine in Toronto during this year's iteration of Hot Docs (its 15th), and even though the city looks like one big construction site and the subway and commuter train workers went on strike at midnight Friday night, getting around to all the venues for the festival was super easy. I arrived towards the tail end of the fest, and considering it was my first time attending, I got myself acclimated quite quickly. And, as I witnessed my first time attending the Toronto International Film Festival, Torontonians and other locals were out in droves, packing every screening house to the gills. It's nice to see that kind of excitement, especially for nonfiction cinema. They're quite proud of Canada's documentary legacy, and it shows in the stellar programming and appreciative audiences.
Almost immediately, I ran into some friends in the delegate lounge I haven't seen since True/False, and checked out the surroundings of the Doc Shop (modeled on the excellent set-up at the IDFA where you can watch any film in the program through a centralized database system). The ease with which I can navigate a major festival has become paramount in determining how rich of an experience I have there. Between screenings, filmmaker interviews, Doc Shop-viewing, parties and panels, I couldn't find the time and the think-space to write much, so my next couple of posts will be wrapping up highlights from my time there, the emphasis on the films I saw and the filmmakers with whom I spoke. I had two fantastic in-depth talks that I will also be posting this week, the first with Finnish filmmaker, Iris Olsson, and her editor, Annuka Lilja, makers of a deeply moving film called Summerchild, a finalist for best mid-length doc, and recent prize-winner at Full Frame for the President's Award. (The prize at Hot Docs went to Iranian filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei's It's Always Late for Freedom, a stunning verite piece on a correctional center for young people in Tehran.) My other in-depth conversation was with filmmaker, Massoud Bahkshi, maker of Tehran Has No More Pomegranates, an experimental tour de force about his hometown of Tehran. It was one of the most fascinating and exciting conversations I've had in a while. His film is quite brilliant, too. (Bahkshi served as a juror at this year's festival for Best Canadian Feature Documentary.)
As I said, this was my first foray to Hot Docs, and since it's the largest doc fest/market in North America, an important one to attend. I was, indeed, shut out of the Forum completely, and it goes on mysteriously behind locked doors. Even participating filmmakers get the "privilege" of peeking behind the curtain only for a bit, as if to say, this some day might be you, just not right now. It seems to me that commissioning editors are out of touch with what's happening in nonfiction. For the most part, they are not artists, not filmmakers and their aesthetic sensibility is questionable, at best. The gatekeepers should remain cognizant of what's transpiring in international nonfiction cinema and should attempt to stay more relevant in that regard in their decision-making and, in particular, their attitude towards filmmakers. Is it really necessary to create this lion's den atmosphere? Where, for goodness' sakes, is the much needed support for artists? Even the festival's Outstanding Achievement honoree, Richard Leacock stated that he can't get his work played on television--this is one of the godfathers of documentary cinematography, who has been contributing groundbreaking work to the nonfiction canon for decades. And it didn't sound like he was retiring anytime soon.
Okay, on to the other important stuff: the films. Lucky me, the first thing I viewed was Geoffrey Smith's The English Surgeon (the subject of this beautiful piece, the brave Dr. Henry Marsh, pictured above and one of his patients, Marian Dolishny, pictured left with his beloved cat). Winner of the Best International Feature Documentary at Hot Docs, this film's assured storytelling craft serves its magnificent subjects well. Emotionally and visually rich, the film tells the story of Dr. Marsh, an esteemed neurosurgeon based in London, his dark humor tinged with an unrelenting sense of mission and the lusty joy of, as he describes it, "the bloodsport of brain surgery." There is obviously a profound and deep respect between director Smith and his subjects and they offer up their humanity in all its raw and glorious aspects.
Henry Marsh has been going to Kiev for over 15 years to offer what assistance he can to doctors working within an antiquated, crumbling medical establishment, one that ends up killing more people than it aids or saves, particularly when it comes to brain surgery. We learn that due to negligence, by the time most people come for evaluation, there is absolutely nothing that Marsh and his Russian colleague, the beleaguered Dr. Igor Kurilets, for whom Marsh is both a mentor and benefactor, can do, the scans portending the inevitable news that these people are, indeed, living on borrowed time. The scenes where the doctors have to sit and tell the person sitting across from them that they only have a little while to live are devastating--quiet, intense, hopeless. Refusing to give false hope, the doctors must deliver the worst news possible to a long line of people that wait outside their offices to hear their fate.
The scene where we get to witness, from start to finish, the brain surgery on the young and devout Marian is beautiful. Described as "horrible" and "gruesome" by some, I watched this scene with awe. It reminded me of the ear reconstruction scene in Manda Bala and the open heart surgery scene in All That Jazz--certainly not as stylized and operatic as those, but fascinating in its portrayal of a collaboration between doctor and patient. As Marsh says, his patients help make him "brave." Marsh feels it's essential for the success of the operation that Marian stay awake throughout the entire process (including the first drill into the skull), so Marian can communicate with his surgeons as they work to remove the massive tumor in his brain. We are privileged to sit and watch a small miracle happen before our eyes. And, odd to say, there are many laughs in this scene, as well.
Marsh is haunted by one failed case, in particular, and in the climax of the film, accompanied by Kurilets, pays a visit to the mother of a young girl he tried to save several years ago. She greets the two doctors with a houseful of relatives gathered around her for emotional support, and a table laden with food. As they share a meal (no one can really eat anything), the doctor lets her know how devastated he still is that his efforts to save her daughter, Tanya, caused more damage to the already sick little girl, violating, in his mind, medicine's most precious oath--to do no harm. I can't even think about that quietly powerful scene without welling up.
Incredibly, Smith shot this over just two weeks in the winter of '07 and manages to tell a deeply moving story of pathos and redemption, every shot illustrating with delicacy and grace (and loads of humor), a portrait of a true humanitarian. Nick Fraser, the editor of BBC Storyville and with Greg Sanderson, the executive producer of the film, says, "There are very, very few films I love quite as much as this one." I loved it, too.
I watched the first twenty minutes or so of Tamar Yarom's To See If I'm Smiling at the IDFA last fall at Docs for Sale and then had to dash somewhere. (It won the Silver Wolf award there.) What I saw continued to haunt me and I knew that I needed to see the whole thing the first opportunity I had. Missing it again at Full Frame (argh!), I did finally make it to a late night screening at Hot Docs.
Winner of the festival's International Special Jury Prize, the film portrays, in just one powerful hour, the personal accounts of six young Israeli women, all giving intense accounts of their (mandatory) army service in the Occupied Territories, that circle of hell known as the Gaza Strip, where things for all of them went horribly awry.
It's not so much "the female perspective" on the moral challenges these women face encountering the Palestinian population daily (and also dealing with their male fellow conscripts) that makes this film so interesting and vital. It's a soldier's story, one in which these officers look back critically at the way they handled the power placed in their hands at just eighteen years of age. Courageous, articulate, emotionally scarred, the six young women recount in stomach-clenching detail, the horror stories and crimes against humanity they witnessed and, in some cases, instigated. This is a film that makes the notions of where one falls on the political spectrum in this decades-long territorial debacle moot.
Yarom has a Bachelor's in Psychology from Hebrew University, and she delicately, but persistently, guides these women through the minefields of their psyches as they bravely recount their stories of the corrosive effects of power in an occupied zone. Their anguish pierces the heart. This is one of the strongest films on the price of war and occupation on the part of the occupiers I've seen. Jews vow "never to forget" the Holocaust and, with fierce vigilance, keep the memories of the horrors of that occupation alive and well in our collective consciousness decades later. Yarom has contributed a vital piece of cinema to help us remember who's paying for the cost of this one.
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