Hot Docs 2006: Thinking Inside the Box

By David Balzer

This year’s Hot Docs International Canadian Documentary Festival in Toronto was, by official accounts at least, a roaring success. Audience levels jumped 25 percent from last year, and the number of accredited industry delegates rose by about a hundred. Attendees queued for blocks, abuzz about the festival’s growing worldwide clout. (Some zealots could even be heard hailing Hot Docs as the largest festival of its kind in the world—um, that would be the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam [IDFA], though Hot Docs now holds the title for North America.) Similar fervour surrounded Werner Herzog’s brief visit to pick up his Outstanding Achievement Award, which occasioned a sold-out “informal chat” and a short retrospective of his documentary work curiously devoid of his latest, The Wild Blue Yonder (shown only a few days previously at the San Francisco International Film Festival Herzog tribute).

The director’s presence may have been a popularity coup, though it hardly furnished a conceptual or aesthetic template: only a handful of films this year came close to approaching grand-scale, Herzogian ecstatic truths. Why? In part, the festival—and, despite its recent ascendancy, the documentary genre’s industry-at-large—remains fundamentally tube-tied, its entries dependent on networks like CBC Newsworld in Canada, Channel 4 in the UK, and PBS in the US for primary distribution. (Hot Docs’ ever-busy “Rendezvous” event, which pairs filmmakers with attentive executives, is an exclusively TV-geared affair.) At screening time, broadcast dates for most films were either pending or, in some cases, past.

The Canadian Spectrum program was particularly plagued by such small-box ambitions. Jean-Daniel Lafond’s American Fugitive: The Truth About Hassan proposed provocative ideas about ex-American, Tehran-based assassin (and erstwhile Kandahar star) David Theodore Belfield, but had all the technical punch of a segment on CBC’s The National. Ditto for Martyr Street, Shelley Saywell’s look at Palestinian and Zionist children in Hebron, West Bank: it won Best Canadian Documentary (Feature Length), an honour bestowed, one assumes, mainly for its content—Saywell showed immense bravery and compassion in making the film. Formally, however, Martyr Street was a dime-a-dozen, indistinguishable from most of its conservative-looking, budget-bound Canadian Spectrum peers.

One exception was Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal’s NFB-produced Bombay Calling (a kind of John and Jane–lite), which, although it’s already scheduled to air on Newsworld’s “The Passionate Eye,” had at least a few cinematic gestures to recommend it (the film will also receive limited, repertory distribution this summer). An examination of outsourced telemarketing centres in India, Bombay Calling touches on several vital ideas: that globalization is changing the nature and dissemination of youth culture; that many non-white people prospering in the wake of this change see their efforts, rightly or wrongly, as empowering—as a kind of new economic counter-attack on the legacy of European colonization.

Bombay Calling introduces viewers to this ethos by presenting its telemarketing subjects as a cast of characters—which in many respects they are, as all of the employees working at the call centre (Epicentre DMM, a company that contacts UK consumers to try to pry them away from British Telecom) have adopted Western pseudonyms like “Charlie,” “Wendy,” and “Sweetie,” and take courses to help minimize their accents. (In a hilarious sequence, a group of trainees repeat phrases such as “The cheerleader needs a rubber band to hold her ponytail” with their English teacher.) The film grants its subjects this masquerade; after all, it’s enabling them to earn almost five times the pay of other people their age. (India has one of the biggest concentrations of English speakers in the world, much bigger, in fact, than the UK.) Appropriately, Addelman and Mallal adopt a decadent and tenuous tone throughout: like the short, stylish, dizzying film that tracks them, these outsourced jobs are, ultimately, mere flashes in the dark.

Also worth mentioning is Atom Egoyan’s Citadel, a film—well, home movie—not likely to get distribution any time soon. (It’s been playing intermittently at Egoyan’s Camera Bar in Toronto.) Indeed, given Egoyan’s self-effacing, tossed-off introduction at the screening, it shouldn’t be as good as it is—a funny thing, considering last year’s expensive-but-tepid Where the Truth Lies.

Citadel, it turns out, deserves a firm place in the Egoyan oeuvre: its closest companion is Calendar (1993), which similarly plays out as off-the-cuff, disingenuous biography. Except that Citadel is much better: Arsinee Khanjian is the apparent star here, as she reacquaints herself, after a 28-year absence, with her home town of Beirut. While Khanjian revisits places of her childhood with amusing, Proustian glee (“My sister broke her tooth in that garden!”), Egoyan pursues her relentlessly with his DV camera, toying intermittently with the autofocus and pretending (as we later find out) to capture the family trip for their son, Arshile. A barrage of images and events is thus girded with Egoyan’s neurotically paternal, over-intellectualized narration: ghosts of the Lebanese Civil War are foremost on Egoyan’s mind, followed by the writings of Calvino, Keats, Shelley, Gibran, and others.

The film’s questions are many: How and why does the past linger? Does our access to digital means of observation and communication limit our capacity for beauty and history? Again, characteristically, Egoyan’s incessant inquiries lead him to coy, postmodern conclusions by the film’s end; during a visit to the Citadel at Byblos, a twist throws the whole enterprise off-kilter in a startling yet irritatingly trite way. But Egoyan’s taunts to Citadel’s audience about art and lies (“That’s what’s absurd—that I could make you believe that something horrible was going to happen”) seemed bracing at this year’s Hot Docs, where remarkably few films copped to a dependence on narrative and editing conventions in the relaying of so-called real-life.

That said, the festival’s abundant International Showcase deserves some praise—though it continues to secure a disappointing number of world premieres (this year saw only two, both middling: Honi Hameagel’s Beach Boys and Linas Phillips’ Walking to Werner). Fresh from the Berlinale, Ben Hopkins’ 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, a gently laconic depiction of the nomadic Pamir Kirghiz tribe of Central Asia, won the Best International Feature Award. It was a fine if rather cautious choice, representative of many distinguished entries in the category, including IDFA 2005 victors Our Daily Bread by Nikolaus Geyrhalter and My Grandmother’s House by Adan Aliaga, the latter a winner of Hot Docs’ Special Jury Prize (Our Daily Bread received an honourable mention).

Jos de Putter, a Hot Docs jury member this year, proffered the quiet, inventive How Many Roads (which also had its IDFA premiere last fall). The film ostensibly concerns itself with American Bob Dylan fans but, as in de Putter’s past work on the Brooklyn Dodgers (Brooklyn Stories, 2003) and a children’s dance troupe in Chechnya (The Damned and the Sacred, 2003), the subject becomes the basis of a layered, and at times hazy, sociopolitical allegory. Naturally perhaps, How Many Roads begins with a slo-mo reprise of the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” sequence from D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967), the film that pitted a heelish Dylan against a swelling, radically divergent fan base. De Putter’s Pennebaker redux effects a fascinating table-turn: while Pennebaker’s focus is on the boy-legend chucking away signs with incredible will but rather listless intent, de Putter’s is on the signs themselves, and on the spectrum of American subjects (from ex-hippies to housewives to Iraq-ready soldiers) who continue to catch them as they fall.

Accordingly, de Putter uses Dylan’s lyrics as his chapter headings (“ROAD MAPS FOR THE SOUL,” “IF TODAY WAS NOT AN ENDLESS HIGHWAY”) and matches them throughout with the banal road signs of contemporary corporate America (“DONATE YOUR BOAT,” “CARWASH AMERICA SUPPORTS OUR TROOPS”). Never editorializing through voiceover, De Putter lets Dylan’s acolytes speak for themselves, and they do so more charmingly than damningly, like characters in Jarmusch film. One woman uses Dylan’s life and lyrics as the impetus to leave her husband; another, sitting on a beach during a family barbeque, claims Love and Theft prophesied 9-11. The film is not entirely successful in its attempts at graceful impartiality: The fervent Love and Theft fan may be free from skeptical narration, but the date of the barbeque (July 4th) and her tacky stars-and-stripes balloons speak volumes. Yet de Putter’s willingness to let middle America in on interpreting the Dylan myth makes How Many Roads, among other things, an apt counterpoint to Scorsese’s No Direction Home.

Eric Daniel Metzgar’s The Chances of the World Changing could almost be classified as a Hot Docs find (it débuted at Durham, North Carolina’s Full Frame festival shortly before its stint in Toronto). Like de Putter’s film, it follows a fixation: in this case, eccentric Manhattanite Richard Ogust’s quest to amass North America’s largest collection of near-extinct turtles. At first blush, such a premise might seem formulaic or cheesy; Chances, however, wants something considerably different than, say, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2003) or even March of the Penguins (2005).

In a sense, Metzgar has made a triumphant film about defeat. Constructing his narrative around Ogust’s search for a space big enough to house the endangered turtles that he continues, compulsively, to import from Asia, Metzgar, along with fate, eventually frustrates this trajectory. As the film unfolds, Ogust, who has put a writing career on hold for these creatures, becomes bankrupt and homeless, sleeping in a tent outside the New Jersey warehouse where he keeps his collection. Ogust then proceeds to lose a battle with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which gives him 90 days to remove his turtles. There is scant resolution here. Ogust travels to turtle aficionados across America to piece off what he’s amassed, and ends up with precious little. His final comments are full of chilling disenchantment: “In your grave, process doesn’t matter—it’s getting it done that matters”; “[the turtles] just slip out of history—it’s heartbreaking.”

Importantly, Ogust’s environmentalism is not maudlin; neither is Metzgar’s, whose film sees Ogust, in the most literary of ways, as a persevering, diffident collector. I was continually reminded of Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library” while watching Chances, particularly of Benjamin’s assertion that a collector gets a special rush from discovering a neglected volume, purchasing it, and then “[giving] it its freedom” via ownership. (Ogust rescued his first turtle at a Chinese restaurant.) Likewise, Benjamin’s depiction of a collector “[handling] the objects in his glass case” and “seeing through them into their distant past” perfectly supports Metzgar’s modest, intent shots of Ogust tending to his creatures, and ironically supports subsequent shots of Ogust’s empty turtle tanks lying amidst husks and snow clumps.

Chances will be aired on PBS as part of their P.O.V. documentary series next year, and stands as an object lesson in the kind of inspired things that are possible within slender means. In all fairness, however, much of Hot Docs’ other shining lights were to be expected, arriving with strong backing and pre-existing momentum from Sundance: James Longley’s glossy Iraq in Fragments; photographer Lauren Greenfield’s superlative anorexia film Thin, which is headed to HBO this fall; and Juan Carlos Rulfo’s In the Pit, which, like Longley’s film, was lauded at Sundance, and financed to a significant degree by said festival’s Documentary Fund.

Also from Sundance, the four-hour PBS leukemia doc A Lion in the House (whose expenses, one assumes, must have been as emotional as they were pecuniary) won Hot Docs’ Audience Award, and no wonder; anyone with the strength to sit through Lion was probably in the mood to shower it (and themselves) with kudos. Lion poses an interesting dilemma: While its length is by far its most distinctive stylistic trait, its diagnosis-to-death/remission pattern is pretty paint-by-numbers, as are its diaristic narrative interludes. Yet compare Lion with the winner of Hot Docs’ Canadian Feature Special Jury Prize, Greg Hamilton’s Discovery Channel–ish Mystic Ball (which came in second to Lion as the audience favourite) and one begins to appreciate Lion’s artfulness. Where Mystic Ball takes viewers firmly by the hand, Lion permits awkward fissures, often to mesmerizing, incriminating effect. Who said all TV was bad for you? Oh yeah, Herzog did.

Articles in this Section

The Modest Pilgrim:
The Austrian Films of Canadian John Cook
By Olaf Möller

Hot Docs 2006:
Thinking Inside the Box
By David Balzer

All Tomorrowland’s Parties:
CalArts in Motion Pictures
By Robert Koehler

and in the magazine..

Everyday People: Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation and A Scanner Darkly
By Kent Jones

Five Charming Cue Cards from Claude Chabrol’s Comedy Cabinet
By Christoph Huber