Capturing nature’s beauty, it bears repeating, may be easy for filmmakers, but that may not be the same for people. This isn’t to say that the characters in Philippe Muyl’s The Butterfly are unsympathetic, there are worse films. I’ll remember what I didn’t like in a film that is mostly fine, but let’s get to the plot. Julien (Michel Serrault) is an elderly Parisian who only cares about butterflies until a kid walks into his life. That little girl is Elsa (Claire Bouanich), a latchkey kid without a latchkey, nor a way to contact her mother Isabelle (Nade Dieu). Julien has two choices – either l ..read more

Bigger isn’t always better! Need proof of that claim? Look no further than the short documentaries at this year’s Hot Docs.  Short Docs can make you laugh, cry, and curse the world just as well as feature-length films can! Here’s a list of three shorts we’re still thinking about a long while after we watched them. Enjoy! 1.The Everlasting Pea (Dir. Su Rynard) In this documentary short, the audience is asked to meditate on how plants pre-existed us on the planet, and how they might outlast us. As the narrator explains, plants are mysterious. Even after what seems like an eternity co-existi ..read more

The brief for the program is “Power, sexual freedom, and the politics of standing up for what you believe in”.  Sometimes the documentary filmmakers point the camera at themselves, telling their own stories. And at others, they point the camera to the world that grows at a different pace than their subjects, which the subjects have different feelings about. Those feelings understandably exist while these subjects either create art or just be themselves. Sarah Grant exposes a lot of herself in her documentary short debut Big Moves, a thing that normally happens when one tells their story ..read more

Aqueronte – Manuel Muñoz Rivas What does it really mean to feel connected? Is it as simple as sharing a space and working together toward a common goal? Picture passengers on a ferry, crossing vast waters. Each person, in their own way, is trying to make time fly by, all united in the journey ahead and the bigger dreams awaiting them. As the day unfolds, time seems to slow down. People find comfort in their vehicles, surrounded by the soft glow of evening light. The ferry glides along, water gently splashing against its sides, while the beauty of nature shimmers in golden hues. Suddenly, the f ..read more

As a middle millennial, I only remember the tail end of the Yugoslavian Wars, the air strikes. Living in an anti-American household, America was bad, Yugoslavia was good, but even my father saw nuance. It was the first time I heard the term ethnic cleansing, the thing Milosevic inflicted upon the Bosnians – Srebrenica is a town name that brought chills to those who bothered to know. What I and presumably many people didn’t know about was the mass rapes of Bosnian girls and women. So this documentary tries to shed light on what happened to them in Foca, Bosnia in the 1990s. It does it in its ow ..read more

There’s a difficulty in making any topic interesting and I’m deliberating on whether this documentary accomplishes this. As documentaries do, it tells its story through its images, like the high angle shot of the Atlantic. The Atlantic’s isolating infinity somehow reflects the feeling of its main subject, retired Cape Verdean fisherman Mr. Quirino. Mr. Quirino is the last resident of a Cape Verdean island village, a village depicted through some flashbacks. Viewers may think that those flashbacks depict Mr. Quirino as a child, and that may be the case here. A third into the documentary, one ma ..read more

Disco’s Revenge is a glorious deep cut reminder of how the great unifiers in our world are born out of love rather than hate. Writer/Directors Omar Majeed and Peter Mishara take audiences well beyond the surface veneer of Disco to remind us of the music’s origins born from the social upheaval of Stonewall and the Civil Rights Movement as a genuine piece of counter culture whose mandate was simple; love and acceptance for all… Black, White, Latino, Straight, Queer, so long as you could dance. Via some miraculous music clearances, fantastic archival footage and extensive interviews with the peop ..read more

Peter Porta’s The Click Trap dives headfirst into the muddy waters of online advertising and tracking algorithms, trying to decipher and disseminate them in a way that makes them more accessible to the general public. From explaining how your phone can seemingly know exactly what you want to buy next before you even make a concerted decision, to how hate speech and disinformation have managed to become the prevalent news of the day. The Click Trap lays out compelling information from organisations like the ‘Center for Countering Digital Hate’, ‘Check My Ads’ and ‘Sleeping Giants’ that clearly ..read more

In the very literally titled A Band of Dreamers and a Judge, director Hesam Eslami takes us to the hills of Northern Iran. Here under cover of the night, bands of would-be treasure hunters take to illegally digging, looking for promised treasure of the pre-Islamic era. Enticing them are videos posted on Instagram of other diggers displaying their finds from behind Guy Fawkes masks. Hesam eventually focuses on one group, a quartet of would-be thieves looking for a better life. Meanwhile, on the other side of debate, is a no nonsense judge and her warrant officers who spend nights scouring the h ..read more

A lot of things happen when a person speaks up – they enter a world and they leave another behind. The brief for this year’s Hot Docs’ third shorts programme is as follows. ‘The freedom to say what you feel in a world of walls’. This program has its viewers seeing the world and hearing the words of a Quebecois couple, a queer French Tuinisian writer, and a bunch of annoying Americans. Let’s begin. The voices of a Quebecois couple are the first we hear in this program, courtesy of Auceane Roux’s Washed Away. The husband in that couple narrates how he went back into his own house despite the dam ..read more