Hot Docs

Toronto’s own world-class documentary film festival, Hot Docs, has released its full 2008 schedule. This year’s festival takes place from April 17-27 and features more than 170 films from 36 countries. Reasonably-priced tickets and downright cheap passes are already on sale. In my opinion, this is the best film festival in the city. No celebrities or red carpets, just smart films about real things. I’m excited by a number of films and will be talking about them in the weeks to come, but if you’re able to be in Toronto for Hot Docs, don’t miss it!

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(Left to right: Neal, Adam, Lexi, Henry, Wyatt)

Autism: The Musical (2007, Director: Tricia Regan): Winner of a slew of audience awards at recent festivals, Tricia Regan’s film sheds light on the mysterious world of the autistic child. Autism is now diagnosed in one child in every 150, and comparatively little research has been conducted into understanding it. Serendipitously, there is an interesting article in this month’s issue of Wired magazine, which postulates that instead of treating it as a disease to be cured, we should be trying to understand autism as just a different type of thinking. This documentary might actually help that process. We meet five different children, and their parents, who help us understand the challenges, but also the potential, of being autistic. At the centre of the film is Elaine Hall, mother of Neal and the creator of The Miracle Project, an organization dedicated to arts education for autistic kids. Elaine gathers a group of children each year with the goal of putting on a musical performance. She adopted her son Neal from Russia, and after he was diagnosed as autistic, her marriage broke up. Neal is perhaps the most affected by his condition, prone to tantrums and unable to speak. But Elaine is energetic and positive and at the first meeting, Regan’s camera pans around the room to encompass the curious kids, but more tellingly, the suspicious (and exhausted) faces of the parents.

The film follows a fairly standard chronological timeline, with titles informing us how close we are to opening night. Along the way, we take detours into each featured child’s story, along with the story of their parents. I found each one incredibly moving, and was pleasantly surprised at the complete transparency and gut-wrenching honesty of the parents. Lexi’s parents split up during the course of filming, and her mother’s brutally frank admissions broke my heart. And Adam’s parents, though still together, are having problems that his father admits are partly a result of his wife’s “monomania” in caring for Adam. I think that these people have had their idea of a perfect life turned so completely upside down by their children that they have no masks anymore. It was refreshing and heartbreaking at the same time. As in Lexi’s mom’s wish that Lexi die before she does. With the difficulty of finding schools and caregivers who understand autism, it seemed a reasonable position.

From the children there are several amazing moments of clarity, but the most piercing came from Wyatt, who wondered why all the kids at the Miracle Project were in “their own little worlds” before admitting that he too spent too much time in his own world, mostly because with no one around to talk to, he became lonely in the real one.

The director admitted in her Q&A that she was brought in to direct by the mother of Henry, one of the featured kids (and the only one to have Asperger’s Syndrome, a milder form of autism), who had envisioned making a film to reach out beyond the “autism community” in order to help people understand and to do something. Autism doesn’t attract the resources that childhood diseases like diabetes do, and dealing with it isn’t so straightforward. Like the deaf community, there is a growing “culture of autism” (represented by people like Amanda Baggs cited in the Wired article) who don’t think autism is a disease that needs a cure at all. On the other side are parents of children like the ones in this film, who just want some help. As the number of kids with autism grows, and they grow older and require more specialized care, the educational system will need to adapt. And so will the culture at large.

The finale is as big and emotional as we might expect. But since we’ve gotten to know the performers over the previous hour, we know the show is not going to be flawless. Instead, the creative anarchy that seems to be part and parcel of autism made the performance, and the entire film itself, that much more inspiring.

Here is the Q&A with director Tricia Regan from after the screening (it gets louder after the first few seconds and then louder still at around the 0:40 mark, so don’t turn up your volume right away):

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Duration: 12:12

Official site of the film

Official site of The Miracle Project

(9/10)

Tagged as: autism, children

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Up The Yangtze (2007, Director: Yung Chang): Set against the ongoing development of the Three Gorges Dam, Up The Yangtze is an intimate film about the momentous forces changing modern China. Director Yung Chang, born near Toronto and now a Montreal native, travelled to China in 2002 with his grandfather, who wanted to show him the great river he’d been telling stories about for years. They took one of the “Farewell” cruises which are designed to show tourists the landscape before it is flooded by the dam project. After this surreal experience, Chang knew he had to make a film. Though there are some hints of the film about tourism that he originally envisioned, he wisely focuses on the people being directly affected by this enormous public works project. China itself sometimes seems to be one giant construction site, and the growth of cities has led to an ever-growing hunger for the electricity to power them. Though damming the Yangtze was a dream originated by Mao, it wasn’t until the late 1990s when the project began to come to fruition. The result has been a massive forced relocation of more than two million people, as the rising water levels flood many villages.

Chang found the subjects of the film during the regular recruiting sessions held by the cruise line. Chen Bo Yu is quickly christened “Jerry” for his interactions with Western tourists. He’s 19 and an only child of rather well-off parents. Typical of the sons of China’s one-child policy, he’s a “little emperor”, arrogant and self-centered, used to getting his way. He takes the job in order to make as much money as possible, and at one point boasts that he’s making more than his parents. But he doesn’t survive the three-month probation, possibly as a result of an allegation that he shook down some tourists for “personal tips”.

Yu Shui, on the other hand, needs this job desperately, to support her family. Although only just out of middle school, her subsistence farmer parents can’t afford the fees to send her to high school, and suggest she get a job. They’re also keenly aware that their ramshackle hut by the river, with its vegetable garden, will soon be swallowed up and they’ll have to find paying work. Quickly dubbed “Cindy” by her employers, she struggles to overcome her shyness and the obvious class differences between her and the other employees. Her English skills aren’t as well-developed as her employers would like, so she starts her working life washing dishes in the kitchen. For someone whose ambition is to attend university and become a scientist, this humiliation, along with her homesickness, is difficult to take. But she makes a few friends along with her salary, and soon we wonder if she’ll return home at all.

Her parents had agonized about sending her off to work, and are clearly uncomfortable having to exploit her in this way. But her father also wants her to see the world, even if that just means the rest of the river, and at their first reunion, her parents’ pride is evident. But so is Yu Shui’s embarrassment. Part of it is the typical teenager’s feelings about her parents, but it’s also clear that she’s different from the other young people working on the ship. When her boss invites them aboard for a tour, it’s almost excruciating to watch. But you also get the feeling that she’s going to be ok in this new future, while her parents will continue to struggle.

It’s clear that China’s renewal is unstoppable, but that it is also proceeding without much pity for the rural population. In one scene, a shop owner tearfully pours out a tale of beatings and forced relocation as a statue of Mao sits benignly behind him. I wonder what Mao would think about a country still officially committed to Communism rolling over the very people it professes to revere. There is a time-lapse scene near the end of the film where we watch the rising water claim Yu Shui’s family’s beloved riverbank shack, and it wordlessly drives home the utter indifference of “progress” to the most vulnerable people caught up in it. Much like Jennifer Baichwal’s film Manufactured Landscapes (and the Edward Burtynsky photographs it is based upon), Up The Yangtze is a historical document of a time and place that will not exist for long.

Official site
Donation site where you can help Yu Shui/Cindy’s family

UPDATE: The film opens theatrically in Toronto on Friday February 8 at the Cumberland cinema. I suggest you catch it on the opening weekend since there’s no guarantee how long the run will last. Seeing it on a big screen really does make a difference.

(9/10)

Tagged as: china

A Table In Heaven (Director: Andrew Rossi, 2007): Sirio Maccioni first opened Le Cirque in New York in 1974, after years and years of working his way up from busboy to waiter to maître d’hôtel. His star rose through the 70s and 80s and the restaurant attracted the rich and famous, including Henry Kissinger, Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan. But as the film begins in 2004, the place has grown a bit stale, and the crowd of old regulars (and the emphasis is clearly on “old”) are dying off and no new customers are replacing them. Sirio decides to close and reopen in a new location. With his three sons Marco, Mario and Mauro, he sets out to plot the future of the family business. A new restaurant will be a fresh start, with a new location, a new chef, a new menu, and a new attitude. At least that’s what the younger generation wants. Sirio is from the old school, though, and is not willing to give up his micromanaging ways. Andrew Rossi’s camera was there to capture it all: Sirio’s charming tale of an uneducated Tuscan immigrant made good, his years of building relationships with New York City’s most rich and famous denizens, the gradual fading of his reputation, and then his family’s often fractious effort to get their groove back. Though it seems at times like a particularly rancorous episode of the Food Network’s Opening Soon, there are greater forces at work in the Maccioni story. Sirio complains bitterly of getting old, and refuses to retire. And yet the restaurant culture has changed and passed him by. His sons recognize this and want desperately to attract a younger clientele, but Sirio’s loyalty is to the people who helped him make it, and it hurts his new venture. Resistance to change is really about the fear of oblivion (through death and forgetting) and Sirio’s struggle is one that all of us can understand.

Luckily, the story doesn’t end when the film does, and it appears that the new Le Cirque is finally adapting to the new environment. Instead of singling out celebrities and treating everyone else as second-class citizens, the new culture prefers that everyone have the same experience, and from all accounts, they’re trying. The menu has been freshened as well, despite Sirio’s objections. A bad review from the New York Times, along with the footage of the opening, made it painfully obvious that the restaurant needs more than nostalgia and a charismatic owner to appeal to the new generation of diners.

Rossi has captured more than a restaurant or a family story. He’s given us a glimpse of a man on the run from his own mortality, a man who’s cultivated “friendships” among the most visible and powerful only to realize that it won’t save him in the end. It’s heartbreaking and a little bit terrifying. For me, the most satisfying moments are not in the restaurant at all, but around the table when Sirio’s longsuffering wife Egidiana serves up a simple meal of pasta to the whole family. It’s a shame that the man has so little time for that sort of meal.

Here is the Q&A with director Andrew Rossi from after the screening. Hot Docs/Doc Soup programmer Sean Farnel moderates and asks the first few questions himself:

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Duration: 13:46

Official site for the film

(7/10)

Tagged as: Doc Soup, Documentaries, Toronto Film Festivals