The world’s biggest documentary film festival, Hot Docs, has something for everybody at this year’s edition, the 16th, which runs in Toronto from April 30 to May 10.
A preview:
Larry Weinstein’s Inside Hana’s Suitcase, blending factual narrative with dramatizations, is a story of heartbreak and hope.
Czech-born Jew George Brady and his younger sister, Hana, form the core of this movie, which is co-presented by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival.
George and Hana, from the town of Nove Mesto, had what seems like an idyllic childhood. But after Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, their parents were arrested and eventually murdered by the Nazis. Shorn of a mother and a father, they were taken care of by relatives.
In 1942, they were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, near Prague. He was 13 and she was 10. They were then shipped to Auschwitz, where he survived, but she perished.
This touching 90-minute movie, set in the Czech Republic, Japan and Canada, fleshes out their lives through the prism of Canadian and Japanese school projects and raises awareness of the dangers of intolerance and hatred.
Hana’s life, tragically cut so short, unfolds as the director of the Holocaust Education and Resource Centre in Tokyo – a sensitive woman dedicated to fighting racism and promoting understanding – helps pupils solve a mystery about the ownership of a battered suitcase from Auschwitz.
As she talks about Hana and the Holocaust, Canadian students relate the telling details of Hana’s life, while George, who promised to look after her no matter what the circumstances, passes on her legacy to his family in Canada.
By turns sombre and uplifting, Inside Hana’s Suitcase is a well told tale. It will be screened on Thursday, April 30, at 9:30 p.m. at the Winter Garden Theatre and on Sunday, May 3, at 1:30 p.m. at the Isabel Bader Theatre.
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Two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, were kidnapped by Hezbollah as they patrolled the Lebanese border on July 12, 2006. In response, Israel attacked Lebanon, precipitating a 34-day war.
Chronicle of a Kidnap, by Nurit Kedar, focuses on efforts by Goldwasser’s wife, Karnit, to rally Israeli and international support for his release.
Unfortunately, her work was in vain, since Goldwasser was probably killed when his armoured personnel carrier was ambushed. His remains were returned to Israel in July 2008 in an Israel-Hezbollah prisoner exchange, thus closing a circle of despair.
Kedar’s 55-minute film is a portrait of a determined woman who is initially hopeful that she and her beloved husband will be reunited.
She lobbies the Israeli and Russian governments, as well as French President Nicholas Sarkozy. She also travels to the United States to present her case.
Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, shrugs his shoulders and is uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Sarkozy briskly pledges to help. A Russian official claims that Goldwasser is still alive.
It is left to a former deputy director of the Mossad to deliver the bad news. He warns Karnit not to be sanguine. He also believes that Israel was not aggressive enough in trying to gain his freedom, and that some informants were simply practising extortion.
In addition to mining information from a whole host of officials, Kedar talks to Goldwasser’s parents and Karnit’s father, who all offer different perspectives on the situation.
Ultimately, Karnit comes to the bitter realization that she will never see Goldwasser again, and that it is better to move on than to wallow in depression.
Chronicle of a Kidnap, a film steeped in sorrow, will be screened on Monday, May 4, at 7:15 p.m. and on Wednesday, May 6, at 12 p.m. at the Royal Ontario Museum and on Sunday, May 10, at 7:15 p.m. at the Cumberland 3 Theatre.
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City of Borders, directed by Yun Suh, examines the gay/lesbian scene in Jerusalem through the medium of the Shushan, a bar where Jews and Palestinian Arabs can mingle freely without fear.
Suh interviews the proprietor of the Shushan, who happens to be the first openly gay city councilman in Jerusalem; a drag queen from Ramallah, where homosexuality is strictly frowned upon; a Jewish and Arab lesbian couple who live together; and a gay from a settlement on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
He discovers that the Shushan, teetering on the edge of insolvency, is a place where you can be yourself, and that Jews and Arabs, particularly those from traditional and religious backgrounds, revile homosexuals and lesbians.
“We have to kick them,” says a Jewish woman.
An Arab woman adds, “They mar the beauty of Ramallah.”
City of Borders will be screened on Sunday, May 3, at 3:45 p.m. at the Cumberland 3 Theatre and on Monday, May 4, at 9:30 p.m. at the Cumberland 2 Theatre.
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Worlds collide in Samantha Buck’s 21 Below.
Sharon, 28, returns to her mother’s middle-class home in Buffalo, N.Y., after learning that her younger sister, Karen, is pregnant yet again.
Karen, 21, is the black sheep of the family. Her previous children have been born out of wedlock, and the man who fathered her latest child is an African-American drug dealer.
The plot thickens when Karen finds out that her previous baby, still a toddler, has Tay-Sachs disease – a genetic ailment common to Ashkenazi Jews – and that the child will die before she is three years old.
There is potential in this story, but the script leaves much to be desired and the characters are surprisingly bland.
21 Below will be screened on Wednesday, May 6, at 9:15 p.m. at the Cumberland 3 Theatre and on Friday, May 8, at 4 p.m. at the Royal Ontario Museum.
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Simon El Habre’s Lebanese film, The One Man Village, is about an unusual man who tends to a herd of dairy cows and a flock of chickens in a bleak, deserted village high in the mountains. It was virtually destroyed during the civil war in Lebanon.
“I love it here,” says the man, who awakens to the call of a rooster.
Scheduled to be screened on Friday, May 1, at 9:30 p.m. at the Royal Ontario Museum and on Monday, May 4, at 11:30 a.m. at the Isabel Bader Theatre, The One Man Village observes not only a man who goes against the grain, but a fractured society with an uncertain past and present.
