The Kids Grow Up (Director: Doug Block): Personal filmmaking at its rawest, The Kids Grow Up is something of a follow-up to Doug Block’s previous film, 51 Birch Street. In the earlier film, Block explored his parents’ marriage and how his mother and father’s choices had affected him and his sisters as adults. It was also a film about getting to know your parents as people and not just as the roles they played in your upbringing. In his latest film, he explores how his daughter Lucy’s impending departure for college is affecting him and his wife Marjorie. Both films are about letting people break free of their familial roles, but in this one, it’s less about uncovering a mystery and more about dealing head-on with the passage of time.
Since he is a documentary filmmaker, he’s been filming his daughter since she was a baby and so he has an abundance of material to show her growing up. I particularly liked a sequence where from behind the camera, he asks his daughter, then 10 years old, “How was your childhood?”. The quick-witted Lucy doesn’t miss a beat. “Daddy, I’m 10 years old. I’m still a child!” The director isn’t quite as self-aware, at least until it dawns on him that Lucy’s leaving home must signal the end of his own arrested adolescence. In his zeal to be the polar opposite of his own distant father, he’s become his daughter’s “buddy” and is feeling her very necessary separation from him as abandonment. To make matters worse, Marjorie, who had seemed more at ease with the transition, suddenly suffers a major depressive episode and can barely leave her bed for several months. Doug’s helplessness during this period made me think that his real anxiety over Lucy’s departure was about how his relationship with Marjorie would change. They would no longer have Lucy as a shared focus, but would instead be back to focusing on each other.
The Kids Grow Up is a wonderfully-edited film that documents an important time in the life of Lucy Block, but more importantly, it documents a time of maturation for her father. Lucy comes across throughout the film (even as a young child) as remarkably self-assured and independent. We know that she will be fine at college, and wherever she goes after that. But along with her father, we mourn her childhood a little bit, knowing that she has to leave it behind. She doesn’t need the film to help her grow up, but we come to realize that it’s an important milestone for Doug. In mourning her childhood’s passing, he’s also mourning his own, but it helps him enter into a new phase of adulthood. By the end, he’s even becoming more comfortable calling himself grandfather to his stepson’s little boy. When I first heard the title of this film, I thought it was just an expression that parents used when they spoke to each other. But I came to realize that in the case of Doug Block and his daughter Lucy, he was talking about two kids, his daughter and himself. And it’s almost as much fun watching the father grow up as the little girl.
Official site of the film
(8/10)
Tagged as:
#hotdocs10,
family,
fathers-and-daughters,
parenting
Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio (Director: Samuel Wainwright Douglas): Believing strongly that architecture is not just for rich people living in cities like New York or Chicago, Auburn professor Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee founded the Rural Studio in 1993 in Hale County, Alabama, many of whose inhabitants live in abject poverty. The studio was established as a way for students to gain some practical experience while also helping the rural communities around it. Since its founding, students and instructors have lived and worked together to build everything from houses, animal shelters, churches and even a boys’ and girls’ club.
Although Mockbee himself died in 2001, director Douglas uses a wealth of interview footage from 1999 in which Mockbee passionately argues that architects must be a part of the community they’re designing for. He’s also adamant that students of architecture actually get to build some of their academic projects, unlike at many schools where student work is strictly theoretical. Not everyone has agreed with Mockbee’s ideas; Yale professor and architect Peter Eisenman doesn’t believe, for instance, that he needs to know the people who will be living or working in the buildings he designs to know what they need. But Mockbee and his colleagues at the Rural Studio argue just the opposite. The film follows a few of his students and their projects over the past ten years.
Using mostly recycled and donated materials, the architect/builders of the Rural Studio are hoping to make a positive impact on some of the most neglected communities in America. Although for some, this will mark a phase on their professional journey, Mockbee’s passionate desire was for this experience to change his students’ lives forever. Although we don’t get a sense of where most of the participants have ended up, it’s clear that Mockbee’s ideas have influenced other architects and organizations. In Utah, Design/Build Bluff constructs similar projects on Navajo reservations, while Architecture for Humanity is doing this kind of socially-conscious architecture all over the world.
Citizen Architect is a fitting tribute to a man more of us should know about. I was happy to see some of the work that he and his students have accomplished in Alabama, but I’m even happier to see that his influence has begun to spread far beyond the rural South. As the film notes, there are far more people living in shantytowns and rural areas than there are living in the traditional centres where architects have historically plied their trade. Hopefully, more of them will understand how much they are needed outside the glittering cities of glass and steel.
Official site of the film
(7/10)
Tagged as:
#hotdocs10,
architecture,
philanthropy
The National Film Board of Canada recently made its entire catalogue of films available for free online viewing, which is great if you have regular access to a computer with a fast Internet connection. For others, at least in Toronto and Montréal, your alternative is to strap yourself into one of the funky personal digital viewing stations at the Toronto Mediatheque or the Montréal CineRobotheque where you can watch films to your heart’s content for just $2/day. In yet another example of the NFB’s leadership, it is doing away with the fee altogether as of May 1st, which means free NFB films for (just about) everyone.
If you’re not being swept up next week by Hot Docs, or even if you are, drop by the Mediatheque at 150 John St. and check out some of the NFB’s 5,500 films for free!
Tagged as:
nationalfilmboard,
nfb
I realize that I’ve been uncharacteristically silent on the subject of Hot Docs this year, which is unusual since it is my favourite film festival by some margin. But rest assured, I’ve been hard at work behind the scenes making sure that Toronto Screen Shots will offer more coverage this year than ever before. Along with my trusty correspondents Jay Kerr and Drew Kerr (should we call them the Doc Brothers?), I’m hoping to offer reviews of at least 20 titles from North America’s largest documentary film festival.
From more than 2,000 submissions, Hot Docs’ team of programmers has selected 166 films to be screened between April 29 and May 9 at venues across the city. Tickets and passes are on sale now, and as always, are the best bargain going for film lovers in this city. If you visit the box office in person (at Hazelton Lanes, on the lower level), you can even pick up DVDs from the Hot Docs Collection at a special price of just $15.95.
I won’t be posting full reviews until the festival starts, but here are a few reviews that will be going up for films I can definitely recommend:
- Gasland — a horrifying exposé of the environmentally-damaging practice of drilling natural gas wells, set to some very jaunty banjo music.
- The Kids Grow Up — a filmmaker works through his feelings of abandonment as his teenaged daughter prepares to leave home for college.
- Marwencol — a man recovers from a vicious beating which left him in a coma by building a miniature World War 2 village in his backyard.
Tagged as:
#hotdocs10
Tuesday April 20th at 7:30pm, Cinecycle (129 Spadina, in the coach house down the lane behind the main house)
From the Facebook page of an event being organized by my friend Polly:
Award-winning filmmaker Jafar Panahi is recognized by film theorists and critics worldwide as one of the most influential filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave movement.
On March 1st of this year, Panahi was arrested at his home together with his wife, daughter and 15 dinner guests. Although the others have since been released Panahi is still being detained and has not been officially charged with any crime.
The international Facebook group Free Jafar Panahi is planning screenings of some of Panahi’s best known films during the week of April 15th to 21st to show our support. So far there are screenings being booked in Spain, Finland, India, Argentina, Germany, Latvia, Armenia. I am very pleased to add Canada to this list.
As part of this coordinated show of support Toronto will host a screening of Panahi’s 2006 film “Offside”. Six Iranian girls defy the law forbidding women from attending sporting events by disguising themselves as boys in order to enter Tehran’s Azadi Stadium to watch the 2006 World Cup Asian zone qualifier between Iran and Bahrain. However, their presence is discovered and they are arrested one by one.
Winner of the Silver Bear Award (2006 Berlin International Film Festival) and 2006 Amnesty International Film Award (Ljubljana International Film Festival), the Globe and Mail says “Offside”, “uses soccer to speak volumes about the gulf between Iran’s religious rulers and its citizens — especially the women.”
Tickets $10.00 Doors open at 7pm. All proceeds from this screening will be donated to Amnesty International.
Many thanks to the kind cooperation of Mongrel Media for making this screening possible.
I’m proud to support this cause and will be attending the screening. The film is wonderful, and if you like, you can read my review from TIFF 2006. Please RSVP on the Facebook page.
Tagged as:
football,
iran,
soccer
