A Better Man seems to have a concise albeit well-filmed production. It’s structured around a few confrontational chats and therapy sessions, along with a brief tour of pivotal locations mattering to filmmaker Attiya Khan and ex-lover Steve. The truth is A Better Man has been 20-plus-years in the making.
The Canadian Sport Film Festival sprints to Toronto for its ninth year. This weekend (Friday, June 9 – Sunday, June 11), audiences will be able to watch a diverse selection of feature films, documentaries, and short films about athletic subjects and themes. Wylie Writes’ Shannon Page received a sneak peek of the festival by watching the Emmy-award winning opening night selection Keepers of the Game, along with a haunting doc titled Hillsborough.
There’s not much to say about Matt Schrader’s ever imaginatively titled Score: A Film Music Documentary. A documentary made in praise of the Hollywood elite composers (who, to be fair, deserve the praise), Score has the presentation quality of a TV special or DVD bonus feature with no original thoughts about its subject.
If documentaries were solely graded on how much they teach, then Charles Wilkinson’s Vancouver: No Fixed Address would get full marks.
I love my mom, which is why I won’t be taking her to see Mom & Me for Mother’s Day. Well, to be fair, we live four hours apart from each other, so we were planning on spending this day apart anyways – her card is in the mail. But, if there were a sudden change of plans and we could watch a movie together, I would still insist we steer clear of Ken Wardrop’s doc.
Botanist and author Diana Beresford-Kroeger guides us through the forests of Vancouver Island, California, Germany, Japan, and Ireland in Jeff McKay’s documentary Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees. Like many ecological documentaries, the film emphasizes the relationship between trees and other organisms that make up complex forest ecosystems as well as how this ecosystem is connected to the earth’s oceans and atmosphere.
The ReelAbilities Film Festival returns to Toronto on Wednesday, May 10 after a successful debut. The festival, centring around noble stories of disability cultures, will screen feature films and shorts around the city until Thursday, May 18.
Birth of a Family (DIR. Tasha Hubbard) Birth of a Family follows four siblings, three sisters and a brother, who were taken from their mother and placed in separate families during the “sixties scoop” – a period of three decades in Canada that saw tens of thousands of indigenous children removed from their homes and sent to live with non-indigenous families throughout North America. Now middle aged, the siblings meet for the first time and attempt…
Girl Inside (DIR. Maya Gallus) Hot Docs’ Focus on Maya Gallus programme features a screening of the documentarian’s 2007 Girl Inside, a film that chronicles a three-year process towards a substantial surgery for transgendered adult Madison.
Close Ties (DIR. Zofia Kowalewska) The audience, from afar, watches a stubborn married couple in Zofia Kowalewska’s short-form doc Close Ties. They bicker about money and time spent in the bathroom just as often as they look at each other and give “that look” that they’ll always be there for each other.