Hot Docs #3: What To See (and Skip) at the World’s Best Documentary Festival
By Original-Cin Staff
The Hot Docs documentary film festival is well under way and running until May 9 with hundreds of titles from around the world on offer. Original-Cin critics have screened dozens and dozens of features and shorts, offering tips on what to see, themes to ponder, interviews and more.
Here’s a few more films to consider.
Mau
(Austria, USA, 76 minutes)
D. Benoit Bergman and Jono Bergmann
Program: Special Presentations
Bruce Mau has given the profession of “designer” an aura of power previously reserved for architects and film auteurs. After establishing his reputation in fashionable graphic design projects, including collaborations with Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehrig, Mau’s Massive Change Network practice has promoted a corporate-friendly futurism with such buzzy precepts as “fact-based optimism” and “design beyond boundaries.” In this effusive celebration of Mau’s career, the very word “designer” seems to mean everything fabulous and important. If contrast is an important design principle, there just isn’t enough of it here, especially in the early going where one talking head after another pays tribute to Mau’s genius (though despite the prevailing hot air, he comes across as likeable). More interesting is the survey of Mau’s almost comically ambitious commissions; Reinvent Guatemala, rebrand Coca Cola as eco-friendly, redesign Mecca. In the closing section, we learn more about the man behind the brand and how a rough childhood on a farm near Sudbury led him a hyper-attention to his chaotic environment around him, and a dream that better design might save us all. - LL
Wednesday, May 5, 7 pm, as part of Hot Docs Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management, Bruce Mau and partner Bisi Williams Mau will join directors Benoit Bergmann and Jono Bergmann for a conversation with moderator Nathalie Atkinson. Following the event, the Q&A will be available to stream with the film.
Still Max
Still Max
(Canada, 70 minutes)
D. Katherine Knight
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Program: Canadian Spectrum
Artist and filmmaker Katherine Knight brings a sympathetic eye to the career and ongoing work of Canadian artist Max Dean, a charismatic character in his early seventies, opinionated about many things. Dean’s multi-disciplinary work, mixing performance art and robotics, is well-suited to the camera, with projects that puzzle and fascinate: A wooden chair that collapses and reassembles itself; a robot that allows viewers to either save or shred family photos; repurposed animatronic characters from a demolished Ontario Place ride. The central event in the film is his diagnosis with prostate cancer, and subsequently, his partner Martha Fleury’s diagnosis with ovarian cancer. The psychological impact becomes a metaphor in Dean’s art, including an installation that’s a 3-D homage to 19th-century artist Thomas Eakins’ operating room painting, The Agnew Clinic. One impediment here is that Still Max doesn’t provide us with enough information to assess whether Dean is being reasonable or pigheaded in avoiding a recommended prostatectomy. - LL
