Sunday, April 22, 2007

Billy the Kid

by James McNally on April 22, 2007

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Billy the Kid

Billy the Kid (Director: Jennifer Venditti, USA, 2007): I’d heard good things about this film when I was at South by Southwest a few weeks ago, but had no idea what it was about. The tit­ular Billy is Billy Price, a 15-year-old living in rural Maine. He’s def­in­itely a bit of an oddball. Left out or picked on at school, he seems to have no idea how to say or do the right thing in social situ­ations. And yet he’s sens­itive and artic­u­late and lives by a strict code of honour. First-time film­maker Jennifer Venditti (whose other job is as a casting agent) met Billy while casting a fic­tion film and was cap­tiv­ated by him. Shot in just eight days, the film cap­tures, incred­ibly, Billy exper­i­en­cing all the exhil­ar­a­tion and terror of first love. There are some moments of such raw emo­tional hon­esty that I found myself cringing one minute and beaming the next. Billy’s greatest dis­ab­ility may also be his most win­ning trait as a film char­acter: he doesn’t have the same bound­aries as the rest of us. He shares his heart, some­times awk­wardly but always sincerely.

Though tech­nic­ally the film is very rough (lighting was a par­tic­ular chal­lenge), the sense of intimacy more than makes up for that. Director Venditti let us know in the Q&A after the screening that since the film’s com­ple­tion, Billy had been in some trouble at school and was forced to undergo a mental exam­in­a­tion. After all this time, he was finally dia­gnosed with Asperger’s syn­drome, a form of high-functioning autism. But Venditti was very careful not to talk about issues of dia­gnosis or treat­ment in the film, because her aim was to show Billy as a real and whole person. Often, we define people by the labels attached to them by society, and the only label that could ever encom­pass Billy would be Billy.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Jennifer Venditti from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 14:51

NOTE: Billy the Kid screened with a charming little short called The Truth About Tooth, from Scottish dir­ector Hazel Baillie, who also appears on the Q&A.

Hot Docs pro­grammer Shannon Abel inter­views Jennifer Venditti

Official site for the film

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs07, adolescence, Documentaries, Hot Docs

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Helvetica

by James McNally on April 22, 2007

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Helvetica

Helvetica (Director: Gary Hustwit, UK, 2007): This was THE hot buzz film of the fest­ival, and a lot of people didn’t get in to see it who wanted to. I’m still a bit baffled that there could be that many font geeks in Toronto, but I sup­pose that since we all use com­puters now, everyone knows what Helvetica is.

Gary Hustwit is the co-founder of Plexifilm, and has been involved as a pro­ducer in the making of a number of doc­u­ment­aries, but for his first pro­ject as a dir­ector, he chose to explore the legacy of Helvetica, a font which is cel­eb­rating its 50th anniversary this year. Despite its age, it seems as pop­ular as ever, appearing in logo­types for com­panies as diverse as Toyota, American Airlines, Target, Crate and Barrel, and American Apparel, to name just a tiny frac­tion. What has allowed Helvetica such longevity, where other more recent trends (like the grunge fonts of the mid-90s) have flamed out already? Opinions differ wildly.

According to some, Helvetica feels like the final ver­sion of sans serif typo­graphy, and attempts to improve upon it just fail. For others, the arrival of the com­puter and the install­a­tion of default fonts just means that people are lazy. If you thought a bunch of well-dressed graphic designers arguing over a typeface would be boring, you’d be ever so wrong.

Spanning sev­eral coun­tries, Hustwit’s film takes us inside the stu­dios of such leading lights of design as Matthew Carter, Erik Spiekermann, Massimo Vignelli, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, Stefan Sagmeister, and David Carson. If these names mean nothing to you, you’ll still mostly enjoy the film, a beautifully-designed thing which is punc­tu­ated by real-world examples of the font in use, shot in rich high-definition and set to a won­derful soundtrack. You may just tune out all of those designer con­cepts and controversy.

And if you do know the names? Well, font geeks, not only are you in for a treat, but this fall, Mr. Hustwit will have a won­der­fully jam-packed DVD to sell you.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Gary Hustwit from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 14:12

Q&A with dir­ector Gary Hustwit from the Hot Docs site

Official site for the film

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs07, design, typography

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The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun

by James McNally on April 22, 2007 · 2 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun

The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun (Director: Pernille Rose Grønkjær, Denmark, 2006): Mr. Vig is an eld­erly bach­elor living in a broken-down castle. For years, he has dreamed of estab­lishing a mon­as­tery there, “to create some­thing enduring,” and so, sensing he doesn’t have long to live, he invites the Russian Orthodox church to use his prop­erty. They send a small group of nuns to check the place out, including the shrewd Sister Amvrosya. They leave and then return in a few months, and Mr. Vig spends time trying to clean and fix the place up. Once the nuns are more estab­lished, he finds him­self but­ting heads with Sister Amvrosya over the renov­a­tions and the future plans for the mon­as­tery. But for the first time in his life, he seems to have entered a domestic rela­tion­ship with a woman, and finds the con­tent­ment that seems to have eluded him in his long life.

This film was unbe­liev­ably touching and beau­tiful, from the 35mm cine­ma­to­graphy (which is becoming rarer all the time in the world of doc­u­mentary film­making) to the soundtrack to the very low-key dir­ec­tion. There are many small grace notes throughout the film, like shots of Sister Amvrosya and Mr. Vig walking in the garden, or her pre­paring food for him. Everything is unspoken, but there is a very real bond between these two.

Throughout the film, Mr. Vig laments that he just isn’t like other people, that he doesn’t know any­thing about love, that when it comes to emo­tions, he’s “deformed” or “a cripple.” And yet, he invites people into his house, invites God into his house, and it somehow becomes a home.

The meta­phor seems obvious but it’s true. The house is the man. Ramshackle, run down, a little dirty, per­haps, but full of inter­esting things and stories, and ulti­mately beau­tiful. This quietly powerful film will stay with me for a long time.

Official site for the film

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs07, christianity, denmark, Documentaries, Hot Docs

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