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Hot Docs 2020 starts today. Having happened at the end of April and beginning of May for years now, it's four weeks late this year, and this time, what with Covid-19 upending our lives, it's online this time. For the next ten days - and for most of the films in the festival, 28 days - you'll be able to check out the cream of the crop of this years new haul of documentaries. Viewing tickets are generally $9 a film but you can bring that price down by buying in multiples of 5 tickets, and by becoming a member of Hot Docs. All the information about tickets and technical details can be found at the official website, here. In this article though, I'll report on the films I've already seen, chosen from the 140-or-so that are showing for their relevance to UrbanToronto readers' interest in all things architectural and urban life.
The place to start this year is with There's No Place Like This Place, Anyplace, the most UrbanToronto film at Hot Docs to date.
This is about Westbank Corp's redevelopment of Honest Ed's and Mirvish Village through the eyes of Lulu Wei, a filmmaker who, along with her partner, were renters in one of the Victorians on the affected block of Bathurst Street. They're an articulate, well educated, sympathetic pair.
The film Wei has made is largely a lovely nostalgia-laced tribute to the community that shopped at Honest Ed's or who lived and worked within the shops and studios along Markham Street. There's pretty of love for Ed Mirvish from his past artist tenants who appreciated that he was charging less rent than most places in the city. There's also time spent with the people of A Different Booklist bookstore who have temporarily relocated across Bathurst into the base of B.streets Condos, and at community meetings (I was at one of the ones filmed).
Full disclosure - one of the featured people in the film is Jonah Letovsky who at one time was a writer for UrbanToronto (for which I continue to be the Managing Editor). I consider a Jonah friend, if not in my closest circle. He now works as a development manager at Westbank, and is their spokesperson for this film. Jonah is a thoughtful guy, well meaning and well spoken, and has the unenviable task of acting as the public face for the type of corporation that most people often see simply as impersonal and avaricious.
Early on Westbank is twice referred to as simply “a luxury condo developer” but the film to its credit soon explains that the company has decided to go all rental here, and that rental is not a bad thing.
As time progresses with the project, along with plenty of appealing fresh and archival footage of the site while Honest Ed's was still a thing, the film gets into a good bit of demolition porn from when the store came down, and some construction footage since, especially aerial footage.
There are a couple of issues with the film, however. At one point, the building the film director lives in is bought, we are told by Westbank, but later it seems that it is not to be incorporated into the development, but will become the new home, at ground level at least, for A Different Booklist bookstore. That is not well explained, but at least there are no recriminations pointed Westbank's way in that regard.
A much larger issue is that near the end of the film, U of T Geography and Planning Department professor Dr. Deborah Cowen says—regarding the $200 million grant from the Feds to create 281 additional affordable units at Mirvish Village, (and after explaining how the definition that will be used for afforadability at the site is problematic)—"that $200 million is really going pretty directly into the pockets of developers." It's quite problematic that the director does not challenge that statement in any way, doesn't ask Westbank to comment on it, nor does Wei ever look into how exactly that money will be applied to the project. That's unfair and gives us a one-sided, biased, unbalanced—what have you—film. That's sad as earlier the film was reasonably balanced. Nevertheless, given that caveat, it's entertaining and worthwhile.
So, shorter overviews for the following:
This is Chicago in the run-up to their last mayoral election, looking at the complex issues that city has faced in detail, really serious detail: this film is basically for committed news junkies or those who are deeply interested in Chicago politics only. This is not a Chicago tourism piece in any way.
All about Baltimore Club Music, an expression of the city's young urban black culture, that redirects expressions of rage into outpourings of dance and music. That means it's only tenuously tied to UrbanToronto's focus through a look at some inner-city Baltimoreans dealing with poverty, but I had to check it out to see, and the upbeat and hopeful film was easily worth the time.
Don't Worry, The Doors Will Open
The morning commute in Kyiv, Ukraine starts before the sun rises, and few people appear fully awake on the city's Miska Elektrychka commuter trains that early in the morning. Oksana Karpovych takes her crew and films people aboard the trains, who gradually open up as the film progresses. Following a number of the riders home, we get a bit of a taste for life on the fringes of Kyiv. The result is a quiet and thoughtful portrait of a city where its citizens are doing what it takes to cope with the world today—or at least, pre-Covid.
A cross section of Hongkongers are presented by the filmmakers during the protests of Summer, 2019 and in the lead up to district council elections that November. Those profiled include a taxi driver who laments the disruptions to life, a protestor, a pro-democracy council candidate, a pro-Beijing incumbent seeking re-election, a young cop, a pro-cop tea shop owner, and a volunteer medic. Filmed on the streets, in the shops, at the racetrack, by aerial drone, at the barricades, and amidst the teargas, it’s quite the fascinating look at the city at this historic moment, and it seems pretty well balanced. Top marks for that, this is quite the story.
Spend several months with Mayor Musa Hadid of Ramallah and you'll see a bit of everything, from day-to-day headaches to chronic issues with the Israeli occupation to chaotic Israeli Army incursions into the city to harass the local Palestinian Christian majority. Amidst it all there are moments of humanity, of humour born of absurdity, of the struggle for dignity, and to just let your hair down and relax occasionally. That's powerful stuff. Amongst my favourites, this one's made a lasting impression.
A short, at 46 minutes, as much about the journey as the designation, this film should be enjoyed by civil engineers or any who marvel at complex structural forms. Our rather contemplative and poetic Irish-engineer-narrator chases the history of tension structures from Germany to France to Scotland and considers what it is that holds some of our more daring buildings and bridges together. Of course it wouldn't be a film about civil engineering challenges without including the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster, so while that's old hat, there's archival footage of its collapse that was new to me, so this rarer footage may be new to others as well. Tension Structures also delves to other tenseness in the world today, as you can see in the image from the film.
Tension Structures plays with the 14-minute-long Speaking for the Dead, which is snippets of protests and scrums and interviews with those who lived in or close to London's Grenfell Tower, in which 72 people were horrifically killed in June, 2017 when a fire raced up through recently installed flammable cladding.
Ostensibly about an apartment building in Warsaw which was restored to the heirs of the Jewish family that owned it pre-WWII, Zlota Street does cover some of the goings-on with recent troubling Polish retrenchment on reparations, and the need for affordable housing in Warsaw is a sub-plot to the narrative, but it's more about the family's scion and his wife who are managing the building and their personal issues. Still, it's well made, it's full of messy humanity, and you may find this up your alley.
I'll wrap this up out of alphabetical order for one of the festival's award winners, Prayer for a Lost Mitten
This film is not quite UrbanToronto material exactly either, but I'll include it as an example of something with the right ingredients, but a different cooking method. Prayer for a Lost Mitten is pitched as springing from encounters at the Montréal métro's lost and found counter, (so my thought was, well, that's pretty urban, and many of us Torontonians have spent time in and have a soft spot for Montréal), but the film's not really about the travails of the STM trying to reunite its customers with their lost items. What it is is a lovely (really beautifully filmed in black and white, but not really what I meant by "lovely") meditation on loss. Most of the film, is people being asked in settings like dinners or get togethers to talk about their experience with loss, and things get pretty deep and contemplative pretty quickly.
It's a slowly paced film. Occasionally the camera is drawn to wintertime activities like a couple of guys playing hockey, or friends ice skating, or snowboarding, or watching roads be plowed or hills be groomed. Street lights and falling snow make the best of the black and white high def videography. A chorale expression of what loss means turns out to be the film's drollest caprice. It's all lovely and humane, and in fact with the way Hot Docs is working this Covid year, it has already been announced as the winner of the Best Canadian Feature Documentary Award, but again, it's not really an UrbanToronto film. You might be moved by it though, but just so you know!
