The following short reviews of films screening at Hot Docs are by James Adams, James Bradshaw, Guy Dixon Rick Groen, Liam Lacey, Gayle MacDonald and Dave McGinn. Films are rated on a four-star system.
Babies
- Thomas Balmès (France)
- ****
The premise is ingeniously simple: Follow four newborns from four very different corners of the Earth – Namibia, San Francisco, Tokyo, Mongolia – through the first year of their existence. Better yet, powered by vérité footage shorn of any narration, the execution is sublime. Although the cultural differences are many and obvious, it’s the commonalities that linger here – the babies’ keen curiosity, their hunger for nourishment in its many forms, their canonical babbling showing the first signs of linguistic shape, their cries of frustration, their smiles of contentment. Touching and funny and thoughtful too, this is William Blake’s Infant Joy brought to rich cinematic life. R.G.
April 30, 1:45 p.m., Isabel Bader
David Wants to Fly
- David Sieveking (Germany/Austria/Switzerland)
- ****
We first meet young David Sieveking in 2006 as he’s finishing film school in Germany. A huge fan of David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet), Sieveking wants to make “dark films” in the Lynchian mode but wonders if there’s been “enough darkness” in his life to do so. When he learns that his hero is going to be speaking at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa -- Lynch is a long-time Transcendental Meditation devotee -- Sieveking decides to make the trek, camera in tow, to meet him there. Eventually, Sieveking embraces TM, too. But after the Maharishi dies in 2008, disillusionment sets in and Sieveking becomes a sort of cinematic knight errant obsessed with exposing the dark secrets at the heart of the movement. David Wants to Fly is bound to be one of the hits of Hot Docs 2010. Frequently beautiful to watch, always absorbing, sometimes hilarious, it deftly weaves Sievking’s various quests -- for love, spiritual enlightenment, meaning, the truth -- into a compelling whole. J.A.
May 4, 9 p.m., Bloor; May 5, 3:45 p.m., Cumberland 3
Enemies of the People
- Thet Sambath, Rob Lemkin (Cambodia/U.K.)
- ****
Cambodian journalist Thet Sambath was consumed with the need to discover why members of his family, as well as hundreds of thousands of others, were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. With artful presentation, Sambath and Rob Lemkin weave together footage gathered over several years as Sambath befriended Pol Pot deputy Nuon Chea, the Khmer’s “Brother Number Two,” as well as several of the lowly farmers who performed the killings, working past their initial denials to earn their trust and elicit stunningly frank tales – and a surprisingly balanced portrait – of mass slaughter in the name of the nation. J.B.
May 3, 6:30 p.m., Bloor; May 5, 11:30 a.m., Isabel Bader
Ito – A Diary of an Urban Priest
- Pirjo Honkasalo (Finland)
- ****
A gorgeous poetic documentary, shot in Tokyo entirely at night, Ito is Finnish filmmaker Pirjo Honkasalo’s follow-up to her acclaimed 2004 film, 3 Rooms of Melancholy, about children and the Chechen crisis. Her subject here is a young monk, Yoshinobu Fujioka – a motorcycle-riding bar keep and former boxer. Over the course of the film, we see Fujioka counselling a woman murderer in jail, a man grieving the death of his father, a musician friend and finally, Fujioka’s own mother, who abandoned him as a child to become a Buddhist proclaimer. L.L.
May 2, 9 p.m. Cumberland 3; May 5, 4 p.m., Cumberland 2
Marwencol
