Terrorist or victim? That seems to be the animating question behind Alba Sotorra’s The Return: Life After ISIS. Premiering at SXSW, and selected for the Special Presentations section at this year’s virtual Hot Docs (April 29-May 9), the film is an up close and personal look at a group of Western women caught in nightmarish limbo in a detention camp in northern Syria. All left behind First World lives – in the US and Canada, the UK, Germany, and The Netherlands – with online propaganda-shaped dreams of rescuing fellow Muslims and finding shared community. And all ultimately became disillusioned and […]

World-premiering at the hybrid CPH:DOX (April 21-May 12), and co-presented with the all-digital Hot Docs (April 29-May 9), Life of Ivanna is one preconceived-notion-upending film. The story of an Arctic woman struggling to raise five young children as her often abusive husband spends more time drinking than working is a situation sure to strike concern in the hearts of many — alhough the chain-smoking, no-nonsense protagonist at the heart of this particular tale would likely scoff at anyone’s condescending sympathies. Indeed, with steely will the titular, tough-as-nails member of the Nenets of the tundra is able to stare down whiteouts […]

A feel-good film about end-of-life care for those whose minds have already departed might strike some as a radical notion. But no more so than the philosophy behind the Danish retirement home at the heart of Louise Detlefsen’s uplifting It is Not Over Yet, world-premiering at this year’s Hot Docs (April 29-May 9). With this latest project Detlefsen — whose last doc Fat Front delved into another unconventional subject, Scandinavia’s feminist body-positive movement — embeds, almost imperceptibly, in a female-founded, women-run facility. And one that covertly gives the finger to Big Pharma and corporate nursing homes by going back to […]

I last interviewed Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze, China Heavyweight) before the TIFF premiere of 2019’s This Is Not a Movie, which follows the uncompromising humanitarian war correspondent Robert Fisk (who died just this past October) on his eternal mission to give the lie to bothsidesism. And while Chang’s latest doc Wuhan Wuhan – an on-the-ground account of life during lockdown from the perspective of several brave and traumatized frontline workers – might seem a breaking news departure, it’s actually very much in line with the multiple award-winning filmmaker’s character-first approach. Whether tackling issues of capitalist exploitation, controversial righteous journalism, […]

We’ve highlighted the work of nonfiction filmmaker Anthony Banua-Simon before, notably 2018’s compilation documentary short Pure Flix and Chill: The David A.R. White Story. Banua-Simon’s debut feature, Cane Fire, was set to make its world premiere at this year’s Hot Docs, and still will in its online edition. A mixture of personal and archival material, refracted through both personal and national history, informs Cane Fire. From the press kit: The Hawaiian island of Kauai is seen as a paradise of leisure and pristine natural beauty, but these escapist fantasies obscure the colonial displacement, hyper-exploitation of workers, and destructive environmental extraction that have […]

499, the fourth feature film from “25 New Face” alum Rodrigo Reyes, is an epic, enchanting road movie that travels seamlessly through time (a 500-year-old journey reenacted in the present day) and space (across Mexico, from coastal Veracruz to the nation’s capital — or what used to be called Tenochtitlán back when the Aztecs claimed it as their own). Cemented by Eduardo San Juan Breña’s gripping performance as a Spanish conquistador who finds himself washed up into the future and onto modern day Mexico’s shores, the film recreates the path taken by Hernán Cortez in his 1621 quest to conquer the […]

Bouncing around the doc fest circuit this past year, I saw more nonfiction films than could possibly be considered mentally advisable, from sneak-out-of-the-theater duds to unheralded gems I couldn’t wait to rave about. And counterintuitively, it’s those in the latter category, the vast majority international cinematic nonfiction, that always leave me most frustrated. While I can talk (and write) about those films, I can’t bring them to a US theater (or streaming service) near you. What I can do is compile a list of the few films that managed to stick in my brain all the way through to the […]

As a film journo who usually prefers celebrating the fruits of cinematic labor over covering the messy business of making the product I’m often a bit squeamish when it comes to observing pitch sessions (in no small part due to the glaring abundance of older white faces dangling the purse strings). Fortunately, the folks behind the two-decade-old Hot Docs Forum, which utilizes the appropriately Harry Potter-esque, neo-Gothic Hart House student center at the University of Toronto, do an expert job of combining industry necessity with collegial fun. This is perhaps best evidenced by the Forum’s Cuban Hat Award, a prize […]

1999 is one of the most haunting documentaries I’ve ever seen, which perfectly suits its subject matter. Director Samara Grace Chadwick returns to the small Acadian town in New Brunswick, Canada that she left as a teenager after a wave of suicides shook her high school over a handful of years, though the actual events always remain somewhat mysterious and opaque. A portrait of a group of people who, just when they were beginning to live, came intimately face-to-face with the finality of death, 1999 is not an investigation but an immersion into the emotional flux of a community struggling […]

Boston-based filmmaker Garrett Zevgetis’s SXSW-premiering Best and Most Beautiful Things (its title a nod to Helen Keller’s words) is a cinematic portrait of a young woman in Bangor, Maine, a recent high school graduate who is searching for a job to suit her skills. An anime devotee whose rebel fashion sense seems to be influenced by her vast Werecat Sisters doll collection, Michelle Smith also happens to be legally blind and has Asperger’s syndrome. As the doc progresses, though, disabilities fade into the background, upstaged by Michelle’s determination to assert her individuality (including exploring BDSM) and live her life on […]