Friday, May 1, 2009

Prom Night in Mississippi

by Jay Kerr on May 1, 2009 · 2 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Prom Night in Mississippi

Prom Night in Mississippi (Director: Paul Saltzman): It’s hard to believe, but on April 19, 2008, Charleston High School in Mississippi held its first integ­rated senior prom. Mississippi integ­rated its public schools in 1970 but in Charleston, they were still holding sep­arate proms for black stu­dents and white students.

Actor Morgan Freeman lives in Charleston. He always thought that it was ridicu­lous that this kind of segreg­a­tion still existed in America. In 1997 he offered to pay for an integ­rated prom of black and white Charleston High School stu­dents. The school turned him down. Director Paul Saltzman approached Morgan Freeman in 2007 and asked him if he was willing to try again. Freeman agreed, the school accepted his offer and Saltzman cap­tured the events leading up to this his­toric occasion.

The inter­esting thing is that all of the stu­dents wanted an integ­rated prom. White and black stu­dents shared the same classrooms so it made sense that they should have a prom with their fellow stu­dents and friends.

The par­ents of some of the white stu­dents were against a “mixed” prom and insisted on con­tinuing the tra­di­tion of having a “white prom.” It turns out that the private “white prom” was kind of “vanilla” and boring. Many of the white stu­dents ended up attending the integ­rated prom and enjoyed them­selves more.

It’s dif­fi­cult to under­stand why racism is still so strong in pockets of the American South to this day. The film exam­ines the tra­di­tion of segreg­a­tion in Charleston and finds that the stu­dents don’t really care about race, but their par­ents do. Many of the white stu­dents know their par­ents are racist but they want to keep them happy, so they just do what they’re told.

I find it amusing that it took a Canadian film­maker from Oakville, Ontario and an Academy Award-winning actor to bring about pos­itive change in the Deep South. The story sounds incred­ible and it is but the dir­ector never finds the ten­sion or drama that could have made Prom Night in Mississippi an incred­ible film.

6/10(6/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, adolescence, race

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Necrobusiness

by James McNally on May 1, 2009

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Necrobusiness

Necrobusiness (Directors: Richard Solarz, Fredrik von Krusenstjerna): Business is booming for the under­takers of Lodz, Poland. Thanks to an ingenious scheme, a couple of them have cornered the market on burials. That is, until the plot begins to unravel and they turn on each other. In this unique film, we follow the journ­alist Monika Sieradzka as she uncovers more and more layers of this luc­rative and ulti­mately chilling con­spiracy. As the film begins, nebbishy hos­pital mor­ti­cian Jacek Tomalski is on trial for attempting to hire a hit man to kill his rival, Witold Skrzydlewski, two-time city coun­cillor and owner of a chain of funeral homes, flower shops and mor­tu­aries. Then a third man, the mys­ter­ious Wlodec Sumera is implic­ated in the con­spiracy. Ostensibly a florist, he looks more like a trained assassin, though his role is never quite clear.

Sieradzka begins to find more dirt the more she digs. She uncovers a huge system, whereby Skrzydlewski pays off para­medics to deliver bodies dir­ectly to him, bypassing the hos­pital morgues. Due to gen­erous gov­ern­ment funeral sub­sidies, the funeral homes are also likely to benefit by having bereaved fam­ilies sign over these pay­ments dir­ectly to them. As the film goes on, it gets even worse, as evid­ence is uncovered that some para­medics were pois­oning patients in their ambu­lances to raise the body count. Additionally, an ambu­lance dis­patcher is implic­ated for delaying ambu­lances in order to increase the chances of deaths occurring.

Although our sym­pathies lie with Tomalski at the begin­ning, espe­cially since he seems to be the victim of police entrap­ment, we come to dis­cover that the two men were once close, and that both had been profiting off the system for years before they had a falling out. By the end, there are no good guys left, and the pro­sec­u­tions are still ongoing. Estimates of the number of sus­pi­cious deaths top 20,000, so the local courts will be busy for many years to come.

There are some flour­ishes in the film­making, including gor­geous black and white anim­ated opening and closing title sequences, a jaunty soundtrack, and a ludicrous number of crane shots. Yes, this film might be the first time I was even aware of a crane shot in a doc­u­mentary. However, not as much atten­tion was paid to some of the basics of struc­turing the film. Viewers are thrown into the story head­long, and are not given any indic­a­tion who the female journ­alist is, or who she works for. There is a female voi­ceover in English, which is from her per­spective, but it’s doubtful it’s actu­ally her speaking. I also felt that the bravura cine­ma­to­graph­ical touches clashed with the more con­ser­vative shots of the courtroom material.

Nonetheless, Necrobusiness may have you thinking about making your funeral arrange­ments early. And as the decept­ively charming Skrzydlewski jokes in one scene, you may want to remember to tip your para­medic well if you ever have the mis­for­tune to be in an ambulance.

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, corruption, poland

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Act Of God

by Jay Kerr on May 1, 2009 · 2 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Act of God

Act Of God (Director: Jennifer Baichwal): Jennifer Baichwal describes Act Of God as a film about “the meta­phys­ical effects of being struck by light­ning.” When a person is struck by light­ning, the film asks if this is a random act, an act of God, and if it con­tains spe­cial meaning.

Baichwal traveled around the globe to hear seven dif­ferent stories that respond to these ques­tions. In Las Vegas a former CIA assassin, Dannion Brinkley dis­cusses his near death exper­i­ence and how it trans­formed him into a kinder, gentler person. He was clin­ic­ally dead for 23 minutes after being struck by light­ning and sur­vived. For him the event had pro­found meaning, a second chance at life and an oppor­tunity to atone for his sins. Now he heads the largest asso­ci­ation of hos­pice volun­teers in the US.

In Cuba we wit­ness the rituals and offer­ings that some people make to Shango, the god of thunder and light­ning. They believe that if you keep Shango happy he won’t send light­ning bolts to their community.

One of the most vivid descrip­tions of this unique exper­i­ence comes from James O’ Reilly. When he was a teen­ager in northern Ontario he and sev­eral friends were struck by light­ning and thrown to the ground. One of the boys didn’t sur­vive. O’ Reilly revisits the exact loc­a­tion of the event and even though it took place 28 years ago, he describes what happened with such terror and con­vic­tion that you feel as though you were actu­ally there.

Act of God

It’s inter­esting to see how some people down­play being struck by light­ning and dis­miss it as pure chance. Others find pro­found meaning in the event and truly believe it is an act of God. Regardless of how the people in the film per­ceive the act of being struck by light­ning, it’s undeni­able that it changes their lives in varying degrees.

I had high expect­a­tions going into this film. I thor­oughly enjoyed Baichwal’s pre­vious films Manufactured Landscapes and The True Meaning of Pictures. Surprisingly, Act of God wasn’t as “elec­tri­fying” as I thought it might be for an opening night film at Hot Docs. I guess you can’t hit a home run every time.

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, canada, lightning, neardeathexperiences

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Antoine

by James McNally on May 1, 2009

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Antoine
Editor’s Note: I’ve decided to begin posting some reviews of films screening at Hot Docs 2009 early, hope­fully helping anyone attending make some decisions about what to see. Antoine is screening on Tuesday May 5 at 7:30pm at the Royal Cinema and Wednesday May 6 at 4:30pm at the Cumberland Cinema.

Antoine (Director: Laura Bari): Six-year-old Antoine Houang will steal your heart. Blind since birth, Antoine nev­er­the­less approaches the world with end­less curi­osity and enthu­siasm. A poet in a tiny body, he spends his days playing a game of “private detective” invest­ig­ating the dis­ap­pear­ance of a cer­tain “Madame Rouski.” Bari shoots the entire film from a kid’s-eye per­spective and never intrudes. But she takes cinema verité to another level, res­ulting in a lush voyage into a pre­co­cious ima­gin­a­tion. Although Antoine cannot see, the film itself is filled with bright col­ours and unfor­get­table images. The adven­turous Antoine runs, skates, rides horses, (pre­tends to) drive a car, and more. Bari, an edu­cator, col­lab­or­ated with Antoine over a two-year period and let him choose the detective game as a struc­turing device. Her film was both a cre­ative endeavour and an attempt to learn more about the pro­cess of per­son­ality form­a­tion in chil­dren. But that’s not expli­citly spelled out in the film, nor need it be.

Entering Antoine’s world means you will listen as he takes calls from the elu­sive Madame Rouski on his cell­phone, as he recalls his memories and his “non-memories”, and as he gathers his friends Mäelle and Juliette to help him invest­igate the case. A true col­lab­or­ator on the film, Antoine chose sounds to record and is often seen wearing his head­phones and car­rying his micro­phone around. In between updates on the “case,” we see Antoine at home and at school, where he’s integ­rated in a reg­ular Montréal classroom.

Antoine

Some might wish this was a more tra­di­tional doc­u­mentary, with more focus on his family or his teachers, but I was swept away by the intel­li­gence and joy of this little boy and didn’t want to leave the world of his vivid ima­gin­a­tion. That being said, the passing of time in the doc­u­mentary (ie. the sea­sons, his sixth birthday, the end and begin­ning of the school year) pulled me out of the “plot” a little, and made me wonder how a child of his age could sus­tain a game for so long. It was only later that I learned that the game was some­thing worked out between him and the film­maker. That also makes me wonder a little bit about some of the incred­ibly poetic things Antoine says. I want to think that it’s all him, but it seems too incredible.

Nevertheless, Antoine is a remark­able boy, and Bari has made an abso­lutely delightful film. Much like Juraj Lehotsky’s Blind Loves (review), she has col­lab­or­ated with someone without sight to bring their ima­gin­a­tion to life, and the result is some­thing both visu­ally beau­tiful and incred­ibly moving.

Official site of the film

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, blindness, canada, childhood, children, Montréal

{ Comments on this entry are closed }