It’s never revealed who came up with the idea, but director Grant Baldwin and producer Jenny Rustemeyer decided to make a movie about an unusual decision about their eating habits. Call it “dumpster diving,” call it “eating garbage,” but don’t call this movie a boring or dull examination about the way we grow, cultivate, shop for and purchase our food. In Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story, a Canadian couple sets out to determine how much of our food ends up wasted, and how our habits and perceptions determine what we buy, why we buy, and how long we keep it in our fridges and cupboards.
Everyone loves a villain. The best villains are always the ones you kind of root for, no matter how dastardly they are, they’re just too charismatic and/or funny to be ignored. The Iron Sheik is one such character. A perfect mixture of timing and personality made one man a household name, just not as Khosrow Vaziri. The life of The Sheik is an interesting one, with many highs and painful lows, but naturally he’s still more the sum of a simple character (or is that caricature) that he played in the wrestling ring. But does The Sheik sell us on that idea, and does it give us a reason to care beyond the mere celebrity of the man?
You don’t often hear about documentary sequels, but this year’s Hot Docs has a few of them. Although technically this is not a direct sequel, as it does not come from the same company or production team that made the 2012 Hot Docs hit Ai Weiwei: Never Story, the new film Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case does pick up the thread (gauntlet?) from that previous film. It’s quite a compelling threat too, because in this documentary, it must be asked just how Ai Weiwei, an artist and agitator in China, can continue to do what he does best when the Kafkaesque machinery of the Chinese state is literally watching him right outside his door.
Pere Cuadrado is not having a good time. He got roughed up a bit the day before in Madrid’s General Strike, and he’s got the bruises to prove it. “You were hit in the demonstration?” a friend asks. “Yes, but God isn’t saving me,” he says in response to his friend’s blessings. Pere seems like the sort who’s always mad about something, but if there is a central character in Demonstration, he’s kind of it. I’m not sure if the point of the film is to highlight characters though, as any movie that has 33 directors is probably going to be pretty frantic.
There are a lot of movies where the bad guy is an albino. How and why being an albino became an international indicator for predilection to commit evil, I don’t know, but after watching The Boy from Geita, what I do know is that many people with albinism in Africa are living in their own horror movies, ones in which they’re the victims. When the last Indiana Jones movie came out, some Russians took offence to being cast as the villains, but who’s standing up for albinos, who are almost always being portrayed as thoughtless killers in movies like The Da Vinci Code?
Divide in Concord is a typical tale of a sweet old lady trying to make her small town a better place, except her small town was ground zero for the American Revolution and the new empire she’s fighting is bottled water. Jean Hill of Concord, Mass. was on a mission. She wanted her town to ban bottled water, and the course of this documentary by Kris Kaczor follows her third attempt to make it happen. The film not only treats us to the enormous character that is Jean Hill, but reinforces the true struggle of grassroots politics and the idea that one person, no matter their age, can still make a difference.
In any given year, many Hot Docs entries are reserved for films about people fighting the good fight against a sometimes apathetic, and sometimes cruel system that are oppressing people in one way, shape or form. In some respects, Everyday Rebellion is like a highlight reel of protests over the last few years, including all the hits like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and the Ukraine. The “in” for this movie is the idea that inventive and grassroots non-violent protest can change the world for the better, and is better than the more violent, bloodshed variety of change. There’s something to that, but the message is murky because quite obviously, the small actions by the people profiled aren’t moving the needle much.
In Country is both fascinating and frustrating as the film follows a group of men re-creating Vietnam on their weekends in the forests of Oregon without irony. What they’re doing, and what they’re thinking, is left to the viewer to draw their own conclusions.
