Hot Docs Day One!

Today was the first full day of Hot Docs in Toronto, the largest documentary film festival in North America. This is the fifteen year of the festival and Hot Docs is celebrating the achievement by screening over 170 documentaries from 36 countries. Big time stuff!

I kicked off my slate of films with Anvil: The Story of Anvil. It opened the festival with an Eglin Winter Garden Theatre gala presentation last night, but I see it in the somewhat more modest Isabel Bader Theatre. Even though it has been less than a twenty-four hours since its premiere Anvil has already generated loads of positive word of mouth, and for good reason. There is something very powerful about watching people who are so dedicated to their passion. Lips and Robb are two people who are so dedicated to their band that they have been playing music and chasing success for over 30 years. They are the singer are drummer for Anvil, a Canadian heavy metal band that is well known among metalheads, but few others. Thirty years is long enough for Anvil to have been seen as pioneers, influences, veterans, and has-beens at various points.

Anvil includes some talking head segments with Slash, Lemmy, Lars Ulrich, Tom Araya and others to paint a picture of just how influential the band have been, but thankfully those pieces are only used by way of introduction. the bulk of the film concentrates on the trials and relationship of Lips and Robb. They are the kind of guys you really want to spend time with and director Sasha Gervasi, a long time friend of the band, achieves the kind of intimacy necessary for the film to work. Watching a couple of guys in their fifties still pounding out metal songs while recording their thirteenth album is an amazing thing. Anvil is very moving and very funny.

The movie also confirmed what I had suspected at the last night's opening reception: every one there who was wearing a leather vest and/ or giant hair was indeed in or related to the band. Yeah, that's right. I skipped the opening night screening but went to the party. So? The only points that stick in my mind about the reception were the multitude of bikes locked up outside the venue, the infuriating lack of a hard alcohol sponsor, and the fact that the entire place shut down just after midnight. These documentary enthusiasts have a lot to learn about partying on other people's dime. Those drunks at TIFF never would have allowed that. Oh yeah, the films. . .

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Running prior to Anvil was Green Porno, a vanity project of Isabella Rossellini's about the sex lives of insects. I had misgivings about every single aspect of these videos when I first heard about them, but they were wonderful. Colourful, homemade costumes and sparse, construction paper sets make these shorts seem like Sesame Street After Dark. And by 'shorts' I mean very short: each one is only about a minute long, detailing the sex act of one insect at a time. These were created with distribution on the web in mind, so hopefully they will be online soon.

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The only other screening I was able to treat myself to on Friday was Kids and Money, Lauren Greenfield's piece that interviews several teenagers of varying backgrounds in Los Angeles. The concentration is MONEY, both in the doc and in these children's lives. In a city where image is everything, the desire to at least appear wealthy is inescapable, even if you are only twelve years old. Most of the kids tackle the subject with surprising insight and clarity, save for a couple horrible little rich monsters that will make you want to wage bloody class warfare. When one thirteen-year-old girl's mother tells her she cannot have massages and lavender paraffin hand dips on a weekly basis the glare the child shoots her will haunt your nightmares. I believe this film was produced by HBO who also produced Greenfield's 2006 doc Thin, so it should be easy to catch soon enough. I bowed out of the midnight movie to sleep or whatever.

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The keenest of you may notice that this post seems to come from the past. That is what happens when you are trying to reconstruct notes from a notebook soaked through with degreaser. More on that later. I am now catching up, so bear with me.

Posted on 04/22/08 by: Aaron 02:45 PM