Hot Docs Festival is back

And Eastern Europe never went away

The return of the in-person Hot Docs Festival is like the return of a pagan religious holiday in my household. After two sad years of streaming-only, the festival comes back with guests, panels and screenings in multiple cinemas, and each film gets a few days of geoblocked-to-Canada online streaming as well. As a rule, I am weary of streaming, but I realized as I was flipping through the program which came in the mail the other day that the streaming option allows one to spread the experience out, instead of bunching up the multiple must-see and nice-to-see films in three stressful days. A grudging nod to streaming.

TICKETS BOUGHT IMMEDIATELY. Hey it’s as if the problems of Eastern Europe never went away, or something.

The Navalny doc screening will include a Q&A with the director Daniel Roher and Bellingcat's Christo Grozev, and I’ve read excellent things about the film itself. This is probably the hottest ticket of the festival and I’m glad I bagged a lower balcony side seat without having to buy annual membership. TRAILER

Bigger Than Trauma: Twenty five years after the war in Croatia, the women who were raped by soldiers are not healed; the film is about a new group therapy approach that helps them come to terms with the past. This almost lost me – why rehash these events with these women quarter of a century later? – but the wounds are still alive because justice is extremely slow, there are two legal systems now in place of one, and many of the women still live among the men who raped them. It doesn’t help that the world has moved on – sadly, to other wars and other incidences of sexual assault in the news – but these women can’t. They are both Serb and Croat, and have endured sexual violence from the other side’s army. The ethnic division appears early on, and making it less relevant is part of the therapeutic process. TRAILER

The Killing of a Journalist: An investigative journalist in Slovakia is murdered in his home, and the shambolic judicial process leads to other journos organizing themselves to mobilize the public and unearth the corruption network between the politicians, the police, and the tycoons. No trailer yet for this world premiere, but here’s the CBC News segment about the events as they were unfolding. Murders and beatings of journalists are not unheard of in Eastern and Southern Europe; you will probably remember Anna Politkovskaya (killed in Russia in 2006), but fewer of you will know of the murders of three Serbian journalists in Serbia in 1990s and their immediate aftermath, Dada Vujasinovic, Slavko Curuvija and Milan Pantic. Montenegro unfortunately also finds itself on this list, with the murder of Dusko Jovanovic and the shooting of Olivera Lakic. All of them have been critical of their respective regimes and/or investigated the ties between organized crime and politicians/institutions. More recently, there’s been quite a bit of interest from the western media about the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

DEFINITELY PLAN ON SEEING

Gabor: Joannie Lafrenière’s doc about the photographer Gabor Szilasi (94), who is an immigrant to Canada and who over the many decades photographed it to understand it. The two friends revisit the “places that shaped him”. Just look at this adorable trailer.

Shelter: Filmmaker Tess Girard returns to her rural Ontario hometown, gets talking with residents, wonders if there’s anything stranger than home. Right up my (and my new book’s) alley.

Café Désirs by Raymonde Provencher, or how young, single men in Algeria navigate life and their desires in a strictly homosocial society obsessed with haram. There are three other Provencher films in this series, available to stream, and I have my eyes on Crimes Without Honour, a doc about the continuing tradition of “honour killings” in many ethnic communities around the world, and the four activists who are trying to raise awareness.

TO WATCH AT HOME

Five dreamers and a horse: this film about five random people in Armenia and their dreams, yearnings and life plans is absolutely my kind of thing.

Make People Better is about the geneticist credited with/blamed for the first designer baby. There have been more people working on the “project” but Dr. He Jiankui became the lightning rod for all the shock and anger once the thing became public; no wonder he’s gone AWOL.

 2nd Chance, about the inventor of the bullet proof vest and how the invention came to be, looks so delightfully mad and madly American, I just might watch it.

Am I missing anything important? What’s everyone else seeing?