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Hot Docs Recap 1: Audience Top Ten, Marwencol, and Talhotblond
May 17th, 2010 by Nathaniel
Hot Docs Audience Top Ten
1. THUNDER SOUL (D: Mark Landsman; USA)A DRUMMER’S DREAM (D: John Walker; Canada)
2. A DRUMMER’S DREAM (D: John Walker; Canada)
3. MY LIFE WITH CARLOS (D: German Berger; Chile, Spain, Germany)
4. AUTUMN GOLD (D: Jan Tenhaven; Austria, Germany)
5. LEAVE THEM LAUGHING (D: John Zaritsky; Canada, USA)
6. RUSH: BEYOND THE LIGHTED STAGE (D: Scot McFadyen, Sam Dunn; Canada)
7. LISTEN TO THIS (D: Juan Baquero; Canada)
8. A SMALL ACT (D: Jennifer Arnold; USA)
9. WASTE LAND (D: Lucy Walker; UK, Brazil)
10. MARWENCOL (D: Jeff Malmberg; USA)
Hot Docs Recap 1
The 17th Annual Hot Docs Festival wrapped up on Sunday, May the 9th with the highest attendance ever with approximately 136,000 attendees, 170 plus of worthy and intriguing films, and the often revealing film festival advantage of Q & A sessions by the directors and producers of many of the films. We at blogUT tried valiantly to see a wide variety of films using previews, synopsis diving, and random serendipity to discover the best of the best, but have somehow missed the most well loved highlights of the festival (as judged by the Hot Docs 2010 audience award). This is, however, no slight against the consistently fantastic films we did manage to see. Out of the 10 most loved films by the audience, we managed to see just one, the fantastic Marwencol, an inspiring story of a hate crime victim who creates an eponymous 1/16th scale model Belgian town circa WWII and filled it with complex story lines in order to help resolve his anger and fear from a near death inducing beating. We also somehow managed to miss all of the films that won awards (again with the exception of Marwencol that won the HBO sponsored Emerging Artist Award). Most sadly, we missed the internationally critically acclaimed and massively sold out A Film Unfinished, a daring deconstruction of an unfinished Nazi propaganda film that depicted the Jewish ghettos as happy and quaint residential communities, which won the festival’s top prize of Best International Feature. Other major award winners we did not see were The Oath, a character study of a once bodyguard and driver to Bin Laden, which won the Special Jury Prize for international feature, and In the Name of the Family, an exploration of honour killings of girls in North America that was named Best Canadian Feature.
So what did we managed to see? Over the eleven days of the festival we caught 9 films and it is a testament to the quality of the festival that despite all but one not being audience favourites or award winners they were all thought provoking, emotionally poignant, often funny and insightful, and powerful. As such, in the next few posts blogUT will review and dissect the slight portion of the 2010 edition of Hot Docs that we were lucky enough to experience. Today we start off after the jump with Marwencol and Talhotblond.
Marwencol (D: Jeff Malmberg; USA)
First up in our recap is the above mentioned documentary Marwencol that follows Mark Hogancamp’s self-directed therapy for a brutal beating he suffered due to being a cross-dresser. In recovery he created a model town alternate reality that he populated with fantastic characters like a time traveling Russian witch and idealized versions of himself and his loved ones. The town was and continues to be an innovative attempt by Hogancamp to resolve his psychological trauma for which his health insurance had repeatedly refused to provide therapy. Through the fabricated story lines of revenge and empowerment that he inhabited the town with, the documentary explores in an earnest (but not naive way) how Hogancamp used the scale models and alternate world to help him solidify and resolve the spiritual and emotional ramifications of being beaten nearly to death. At the same time, the film also aptly tracks the additional benefit of how the model building also helped him to physically recuperate and relearn basic skills lost to brain damage through the intricately controlled fine motor skills needed to build, paint and arrange them.
The film is, however, much more than about the model town and its metaphorical, psychological, and practical benefits and is ultimately a much wider encompassing yet intimate character study. For a film with such peculiar subject matter which could have easily become patronizing and condescending, Marwencol is a confident and accomplished debut for director Jeff Malmberg who steers it past saccharine into a deftly handled and compassionate study into the remarkable individual of Hogancamp. While the premise invokes a nutshell criticism of large social debates of tolerance and hate crimes, the failure of inadequate and profit focused health insurance in the United States, and artistic commodification of the socially marginalized and dispossessed, Malmberg manages to avoid preaching or rehashing old rhetoric while still managing to explore the effects of all three by focusing on the individuals involved and the personal effects these larger social issues have on them. What emerges most strikingly from the film is the emotional strength and self awareness of Hogancamp, in his refusal to descend into bitterness and bravely strive towards a life of fulfillment and dignity despite the many hardships and limitations he has to overcome, and also the kindness, acceptance, and support of those around him. Wisely, Malmberg does not at first reveal why Hogancamp was beaten and only midway through the documentary reveals it was due to cross-dressing, allowing the audience to not only form a relationship to him as a person without any prejudice, but also allowing the audience to journey with Hogancamp as he slowly comes to terms and learns of why he was beaten since he himself remembers little of the events surrounding the beating. This adds poignancy to Hogancamp’s brave later embrace of who he was and is, and his refusal to let the beating and the fear to instill shame or dissuade his slow continual exploration of his cross-dressing.
The second stage of the film follows Hogancamp’s reactions to being “discovered” by the art world when New York art aficionados stumble across his photography that depicts the stories of his the model town. The film shows the fear and apprehension, but also the grace of Hogancamp as he is, after years of relative isolation and safety within a small community of loved ones, thrust into the New York city art scene. This second half of the film implicitly debates the nature of art, art as performance or personal reverie, and the potential benefits and disadvantages to those who have the title of art bestowed upon them from outside. Here the film also takes a very personal individual view of the process through depicting the tumultuous emotions that Hogancamp experiences in his debate on whether to embrace and take part in an art show of his work or to remain unknown and sheltered in the small town where he lives. Ultimately Marwencol is a testament to the strength that is necessary to rebuild a life of meaning after a devastating event and how meaning in whatever form it is embodied is essential to our sense of self and agency.
Talhotblond (D: Barbara Schroeder; USA)
Talhotblond is a story so sensational, convoluted, and tragic that one has trouble believing it truly happened rather than being just an episode of CSI. More than that, the fact that it is so unknown by the general public in today’s age of tabloid frenzy is almost incomprehensible. The documentary chronicles the sad evolution of an Internet love affair between a 40-something married with children man who re-imagines himself as an 18 year old marine, and a teenage girl that ends in murder and devastation for three families. There even is a last chapter reveal that is nothing less than scripted brilliance that juxtaposes the entire episode starkly and is further damning criticism to the dire desperate ennui of living in modern society. I won’t divulge here the details of the reveal so as not to destroy the effect and to help encourage people to watch this documentary.
Taking place in the deep south of the United States, Talhotblond, which is the screen name of the girl, reveals that truly the most addictive drug is that of the possibility of being someone else. Through one-on-one interviews of almost all of the individuals involved, pictures, and revealing snippets of thousands of pages of recovered IM texts and emails, the story slowly unfolds to show a lonely, unhappy man as he virtually gets deeply involved with an 18 year old girl and falls in love, becomes increasingly deluded and ultimately psychotic, fully collapsing into his fantasy persona and in a rage killing a competitor for the girl’s love. What is truly damning about the events covered is not that it is ultimately the fault of a single depressed and mentally unstable individual but the fact that all parties involved acted selfishly, arrogantly, and callously. In fact, the whole situation in its entirety is a brutal indictment on our society that is increasingly populated by deeply unhappy, angry, alienated individuals who feel powerless and worthless compared to an idealized paragon of being young, beautiful, and in love.
Personally, I had several grievances with the directorial choices in this film and while the documentary competently reveals the story, it almost does so in a fabricated way which distances the already sensational and unbelievable events even further. This was evidenced by the fits of laughter by the audience in wholly inappropriate places, especially if one remembers that the events depicted happened to real people. Several choices contribute to this effect but none were more distracting than the directorial choice to have the murdered competitor for the girl’s love, a 22 year old actual once marine, voiced by an actor who gives voice-overs throughout the film. The film is actually introduced and framed by this disembodied voice, reminiscent to similar cinematic choices exploited much more effectively and appropriately in films like American Beauty. In this way the director, Schroeder muddies the difference between a documentary and a tabloid expose. Other decisions such as having the IM and email text exchanges between the participants displayed on screen in neon blue or pink text in an advancing animation, the specifically structured and manipulated to achieve sensationalist effect final reveal rather than a more straightforward depiction, and the inclusion of the almost comically vague and meaningless philosophical musings of the case psychologist further detract from the experience. Ultimately the director should have trusted the subject of the documentary to be of enough interest by itself, which it clearly was, rather than have dressed it up with superficial effects.
