At rep cinemas this week: A lament for rep theatres, a coming-of-age story set in Toronto, and a genre-crossing thriller.

Big Picture Cinema (1035 Gerrard Street East)
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Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
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“You never see someone walking out saying, ‘That sucked,’” Kevin Smith observes of repertory movie theatres early in Morgan White’s The Rep, an illuminating history of independent theatres that soon turns into a lament for them. Seeing a film one already knows and loves with a rapt audience or viewing a rare print among fellow esoteric types can reduce even the most hardened cinephile to tears, but The Rep hinges on the premise that such euphoric moments are not long for this world, given the sorry state of the industry since the switch to digital projection and home video.

Embedding himself with the programming and managerial team of the recently departed Toronto Underground Cinema, whose very brief rise and subsequent struggle the film chronicles, White considers the strange mix of heart, business acumen, and foolhardiness it takes to run such theatres in an age where repertory programming is endangered on multiple fronts. He does a good job of delineating the personality clashes of the Underground Cinema’s staff, three very different people bound by an all-consuming job that never quite pays off, for all its perks. But White’s greatest coup is his ability to fit his insights into Toronto’s repertory scene within the larger North American context, all without losing sight of how rep programming affects its passionate (if eccentric) audiences, who are as hungry as ever for good films, even as their numbers decline.

Picture Day
Directed by Kate Melville

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
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Before she landed a premiere slot at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2012, Toronto filmmaker Kate Melville cut her teeth on work as diverse as the CBC’s adaptation of Timothy Findley’s play Elizabeth Rex and several episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation. Odd as it might seem on paper, Melville’s experience with both the high and low ends of the cinematic spectrum pays off nicely in Picture Day. Starring up-and-comer Tatiana Maslany as Claire—a victory-lapping high school senior who befriends her former babysitting charge, moody ninth grader Henry (Degrassi’s Spencer Van Wyck)—the film turns out to be rather more than its familiar tale of coming-of-age growing pains would suggest, thanks to Melville’s ease with young actors and knack for guiding them through tricky, dramatically charged dialogue.

Promising as it is, Picture Day often betrays its humble origins, both as a play that Melville first conceived while she was a teen and as a first feature. It relies too heavily on its wall-to-wall indie soundtrack and clever situations to advance the emotional lives of its characters. Despite that occasional awkwardness, though, this is a tender and surprisingly nuanced portrait of youth. The film is brave enough to let these kids explore their unseemly sides and behave in ugly ways that teen movies usually sanitize. The film is also a star-maker, sure to expose the luminous and very funny Maslany to wider audiences than the handful who noticed her in more standard fare like The Vow.

Side Effects
Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
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If Steven Soderbergh’s insistence that Side Effects will be his last theatrical release turns out to be true, he’ll have mustered an impressive filmography by the time he takes his early retirement. His movies make an oddly diverse group, from the heady science fiction of his Solaris remake to the micro-budgeted Bubble, through to his recent spate of experimental star vehicles (for MMA fighter Gina Carano in Haywire, and former adult film star Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, to name just two). As last films go, Side Effects is on the slight side, but it’s very much in keeping with the freewheeling spirit that’s defined Soderbergh’s work since he burst onto the world stage at Cannes in 1989.

The film starts as a melodrama about mental illness, then changes without warning into both a courtroom procedural and a trashy sex thriller in the vein of Fatal Attraction. The story, inasmuch as it can be described without spoilers, centres on Emily (Rooney Mara), a young woman with a mood disorder that is triggered for the first time in years when her financier husband (Channing Tatum) is released from prison after time spent there for insider trading. Her intense depression takes her to a new psychiatrist, Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who is all too happy to ply with her a profoundly mind-altering new drug pitched to him by a motley crew of pharmaceutical lobbyists that includes Emily’s former doctor (Catherine Zeta-Jones).

Zeta-Jones’s hammy demeanor in her early scenes tips us off to some of the more surprising tonal mutations Soderbergh has in store for us later on. Some of these are more fruitful than others. In particular, one late plot turn is simultaneously homophobic, misogynistic, and callous toward those suffering from mental health issues—an unholy trifecta. Still, one does not go to a thriller for moral instruction, and Side Effects works perfectly well as an efficient delivery system for Soderbergh’s career obsession with playing at the crossroads between different genres.

At rep cinemas this week: a kidnapping thriller from the Philippines, a prizewinner from Mexico, and Chris Marker’s ode to cats and cosmic accidents.

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
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The kidnapping thriller is a hoary old genre, so credit to Ron Morales for giving it new life in the tense, eerily assured Graceland. A Filipino riff on bigger-budgeted American cousins like Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, Graceland transcends many of the films it resembles by casting off frills and staying focused on its bruised protagonist, a man seriously out of his depth.

That questionable hero is Marlon (Arnold Reyes), a morally-comprised driver to scummy Filipino congressman Chango (Menggie Cobarrubias), for whom he regularly picks up (and then deposits) a host of underage sex workers. It’s not long before this bad behaviour is punished with a botched kidnapping that finds both men’s daughters snatched from Marlon’s car and delivered into the hands of a menacing guy with a longstanding grudge against Chango. That makes Marlon, who knows just a bit more than his boss, both the lone witness to a major crime and the chief negotiator for the kidnapping, despite his deferential temperament.

Though the film is generally tightly plotted, its tangents are weak. Attempts to develop Marlon’s hospital-bound wife and Chango’s own long-suffering spouse seem out of place, and could be discarded without much fuss. Ultimately this is a film about the sins of a pair of co-implicated fathers being visited upon their innocent daughters. On that front, Morales delivers. Graceland goes to some dark places, but the destination feels earned.

Aquí y Allá
Directed by Antonio Méndez Esparza

Big Picture Cinema (1035 Gerrard Street East)
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The Critics Week Grand Prize winner at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Antonio Méndez Esparza’s debut feature, Aquí y Allá, is simultaneously bold and muted—a dense work that reveals itself only gradually. Shot on location in Guerrero, Mexico, the film follows Pedro (Pedro De los Santos) as he returns to his home village after two years of working menial jobs in the United States. Pedro dreams of being a musician, and tests his guitar compositions out on his giggling daughters and wife, but Esparza is more interested in the day-to-day grind of life in the village than in Pedro’s more extravagant hopes.

Despite its structural echoes of the returning-hero journey in The Odyssey, Pedro’s story is a modest one of feeling like a drifter at home, and so it’s stretched to its breaking point by its protracted running time. Gorgeously composed as they are, some of Esparza’s static shots of characters lounging before the camera in idle conversation can feel like formal experimentation at the expense of his cast. But the overriding tone here is affectionate, and Esparza’s patient and observational approach pays dividends in several lovely, long takes of family members indulging in one another’s company, betraying their feelings with the slightest, but most humane, gestures.

Sans Soleil
Directed by Chris Marker

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Thursday, May 16, 6:30 p.m.

Sans Soleil is often held up as the highest—and ostensibly the clearest—example of the essay film, a protean genre that roams back and forth between documentary and fiction. The first of the film’s many cheeky turns is its ambiguity about its own authorship. On the face of it, what we see is a travelogue in the form of a cinematic letter from a mysterious cinematographer named Sandor Krasna, who details his travels to locations as disparate as Japan and Guinea-Bissau. But without Krasna to vouch for it in person, the letter needs a translator, an unnamed friend who reads from those letters as the images they expound upon flicker across the screen.

Beyond even the disembodied voice of our female narrator, though, there’s the distinctive tenor of director Chris Marker, a kind of unseen Cheshire cat. Cats are important to Marker, who titled his 1977 look at the unfulfilled potential of France’s New Left movement A Grin Without a Cat, and who in later years took to offering a photo of a cat in lieu of one of himself. (The Criterion edition of the film appropriately comes stamped with a drawing of Marker’s feline companion Guillaume, and his signature of approval by proxy: Guillaume’s paw print on a certificate.) Cats are just as important to Sans Soleil, where Krasna shows us a temple in Tokyo consecrated to the animal, and reminds us that the code words used to launch the Japanese offensive on Pearl Harbor were “Tora, Tora, Tora,” the thrice-repeated name of a missing pet whose owners we see mourning in the film. It’s also the Japanese word for tiger.

That happy cosmic accident is the kind of mystery in which Marker revels. These are in evidence throughout Sans Soleil, with its brilliant juxtapositions of unrelated events in Japan and Africa and its otherworldly soundscape. While Krasna’s musings are often about memory and the film image, the hidden subject and guiding star here is contingency—the chance encounter or furtive glance, held for just a moment. “Not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure,” Krasna muses at one point, thinking about the random intrusions of American television commercials. Marker’s work cuts deeper than such ads, no doubt, but requires that same spirit of generosity toward what is not immediately understood.

Still from Deaf Jam.

At rep cinemas this week: a celebration of deaf cinema, a political comedy-drama from Chile, and a sci-fi romance.

Randolph Theatre (736 Bathurst Street)
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The Toronto International Deaf Film and Arts Festival gets its fourth edition since 2006 this coming weekend, and will include a wide array of films about the deaf experience. The festival aims in part to raise the profile of deaf cultural production, and also to give a platform to rising artists.

This year’s highlight might be the Canadian premiere of Judy Lief’s Deaf Jam, which has made the rounds at a number of international festivals. The film follows American Sign Language poet Aneta Brodski, an Israeli teen living in Queens, as she prepares for poetry slams for both deaf and hearing audiences. It’s a lively and fascinating profile of ASL poetry as a resistance against efforts to streamline deaf communication with education and cochlear implants. It also forces a deep reflection on the roles of the body and language in performance arts, which should make it appealing to anyone with an interest in spoken-word poetry.

Also compelling is Austin Unbound, Eliza Greenwood’s portrait of a deaf transgendered man who yearns for a surgical procedure to remove his breasts, so that he can stop binding his chest. Though it’s over-reliant on its country score to hit major emotional beats, the film is an accomplished study of an engaging personality, and a smart look at overlaps within transgender and disability issues.

No
Directed by Pablo Larraín

The Royal (608 College Street)
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It’s a strange honour, but No surely qualifies as one of the funniest films about the Pinochet regime. The third entry in Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s trilogy about the dictatorship—shot entirely with analog technology that visually flattens the difference between archival footage from the ’80s and scripted material, making everything seem like a news dispatch from that era—the film tells the story of the 1988 plebiscite on whether to grant the Chilean general another eight-year term as president. It’s told from the perspective of René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), a young ad man who finds himself in charge of the television campaign for the “No” side of the vote.

René’s portfolio of hyperactive soda ads—which always make time for a mime’s smiling reaction shot—makes him an odd choice for the job, and a seemingly poor fit for the “No” campaign’s brain trust: a broad coalition of leftist politicians, community organizers, and broadcasters, endangered and driven underground by Pinochet’s oppressive rule. The schism between the campaign’s social democratic messaging and René’s tendency to boil things down to buzzwords and jingles—the shades of David Axelrod’s management of the Obama ’08 campaign and its promise of “Hope” and “Change” are surely not accidental—is gripping stuff. It’s also unexpectedly moving, as when the campaign’s banal sloganeering (“Joy Is Coming!”) becomes a populist anthem during a non-violent rally crashed by the police.

Most of all, though, it’s funny, thanks in no small part to Bernal’s buoyant performance as a gentler sort of Don Draper. No is the rare political movie that’s dead serious about its subject without being unduly enamored with itself. Lighthearted but sincere, it strikes roughly the same balance that makes René’s campaign a success.

Upstream Color
Directed by Shane Carruth

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
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Whatever else he might be—auteur, metaphysicist, haughty intellectual—Shane Carruth is indisputably a major talent, the kind of artist you put your trust in even when he’s at his most baffling. Nine years after the mind-bending time-travel drama Primer was unexpectedly named the Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance, Carruth returns with Upstream Color, an altogether warmer affair that nevertheless bears the same mark of a filmmaker gifted at bringing science-fiction tropes to recognizable worlds.

While the film beggars traditional description, on its most basic level it’s a twisty romance between damaged strangers Kris (Amy Seimetz, terrific) and Jeff (Carruth, less impressive as a performer), who meet on a bus, but who seem to know each other already on a more primal level. Their stuttering love story connects in enigmatic ways to a couple of seemingly tangential plot strands, including the trials of a pig farmer who moonlights as a sound recordist and technological Svengali (Andrew Sensenig), and a low-level thug who trades in a mysterious mind-altering drug brewed from blue orchids.

There will be many who see Upstream Color as a puzzle to solve, and there’s plenty for those types of viewers to do here—especially with the opening montage, which seems destined for the kind of banal hyper-analysis usually reserved for the work of Stanley Kubrick. One wonders, though, how productive this Sherlock Holmes stance is, given that even the most mysterious plot points are explained, sometimes too literally, by the film’s end. A more rewarding approach might be to go along with the associative logic of Carruth’s elusive editing style and bask in its emotional textures.

Canadian Sepctrum is unique among the 11 programmes on this year’s Hot Docs schedule, because it features only films by Canadian documentarians, be they veterans or first-timers. Hot Docs’ mandate is to promote our national film culture, so the docs that fall under this heading are particularly important components of the festival.

Click any of the images below for more information about a particular Canadian Spectrum film. Or, check out our nifty Hot Docs 2013 hub for a list of all our reviews to date.

TALES FROM THE ORGAN TRADE DIRECTED BY RIC ESTHER BIENSTOCK

NCR: NOT CRIMINALLY RESPONSIBLE DIRECTED BY JOHN KASTNER

THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE DIRECTED BY LIZ MARSHALL

CHI DIRECTED BY ANNE WHEELER

BUYING SEX DIRECTED BY TERESA MACINNES AND KENT NASON

ALIAS DIRECTED BY MICHELLE LATIMER

15 REASONS TO LIVE DIRECTED BY ALAN ZWEIG

International Spectrum is the most polyglot of Hot Docs 2013′s 11 film programmes, with a slate made up of submissions from countries that include Egypt, Serbia, Brazil, Finland, Denmark, and China, to name just a few. You won’t necessarily find many familiar names or topics among these selections, but then that’s the whole idea.

Click any of the images below for more information about a particular International Spectrum film. Or, check out our nifty Hot Docs 2013 hub for a list of all our reviews to date.

12 O’CLOCK BOYS DIRECTED BY LOTFY NATHAN

LOVE STILL DIRECTED BY GUZMÁN GARCIA

THE LAST STATION DIRECTED BY CATALINA VERGARA AND CRISTIAN SOTO

FOREST OF THE DANCING SPIRITS DIRECTED BY LINDA VASTRIK

DRAGON GIRLS DIRECTED BY INIGO WESTMEIER

ANOTHER NIGHT ON EARTH DIRECTED BY DAVID MUNOZ

DIRECTED BY TINATIN GURCHIANI (Georgia, Special Presentations)

SCREENINGS:

Saturday, April 27, 1 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)

Monday, April 29, 8:45 p.m.
ROM Theatre (100 Queen’s Park)

Thursday, May 2, 6 p.m.
Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond Street West)

In 2011, Tinatin Gurchiani put out a casting call for Georgian citizens between the ages of 15 and 25, asking specifically for people who felt their life stories were worthy of being put on film. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear, an award winner at Sundance, is the odd and intermittently enchanting fruit of that labour. It’s a set of interviews with the would-be stars, conducted by the director and spliced with a docudrama about hardscrabble Georgian life starring the newly deputized actors.

Gurchiani’s bifurcated structure is an interesting approach, insofar as it invites viewers to think about the staged reality of well-known neorealist films like Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, which make similar dramatic use of local faces and settings. The fictionalized passages yield some stunning images of the Georgian countryside, as well as nicely realized snapshots of families in crisis and prayer. The interviews, with the subjects centred against various dilapidated backgrounds, are good-natured, if occasionally morose. One only wishes that Gurchiani’s delved a little deeper into his subjects’ stories than he does in both sets of vignettes.

DIRECTED BY INIGO WESTMEIER (Germany, International Spectrum)

SCREENINGS:

Saturday, April 27, 9:15 p.m.
The Royal (608 College Street)

Monday, April 29, 10:30 a.m.
ROM Theatre (100 Queen’s Park)

Sunday, May 5, 11 a.m.
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)

“You need rules in a family and laws in a country,” an instructor explains in Inigo Westmeier’s Dragon Girls. The film is an uncommonly rich look at the lives of three female pupils at the Shaolin Tagou Kung Fu school in China, which houses over 20,000 students. Following the instructor’s deliberate interweaving of family and nation, Westmeier considers how the Kung Fu institution functions simultaneously as a school, an orphanage, and a training ground, both in filial loyalty and nationalist self-discipline.

The film’s relative brevity keeps it from reaching the depth of fellow observational documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s examinations of the complex workings of large systems as disparate as ballet companies and hospitals, but you’d be hard-pressed to think of anything Westmeier has left out. The most absorbing parts of the documentary consider how the girls are encouraged to swallow their emotional responses to the harshness of their surroundings. Over and over, we hear the students recite prescriptions against crying, which often come across as the internalized dogma of an institution that trains its adherents to think of every abuse as an opportunity for character formation. This is fascinating stuff, beautifully and fluidly lensed by Westmeier, a seasoned director of photography making good on his talents in this feature debut.

DIRECTED BY DAMON VIGNALE (Canada, Next)

SCREENINGS:

Saturday, April 27, 9:30 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)

Monday, April 29, 1 p.m.
Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond Street West)

Longtime television writer-director Damon Vignale has a corker of a story in The Exhibition, which simultaneously focuses on a massive police search for 69 missing Vancouver women and the large-scale paintings of Pamela Masik, who recreates investigators’ posters of the women’s faces for an upcoming show at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology. Alternating between a multi-year procedural account of the botched investigation and Masik’s preparation for her show, Vignale tries to give a multi-faceted perspective on how these women disappeared and how they can be re-integrated into the public consciousness. At least that’s the goal.

Late in the film, we get a better sense of how some activist groups in Vancouver see Masik’s work as a careerist exploitation of her subjects. The experts interviewed to support her project don’t do much to help her case, making vague assertions about how her paintings “focus on the problems that led to these killings.” The film’s emphasis on these ethical and economic aspects of socially conscious art like Masik’s—including canvas costs and going rates for paintings—is well-observed, and the families’ stories are sobering, but the horror-movie aesthetic does both a disservice. Moreover, the two halves never quite fit together despite Vignale’s smooth cross-cutting between the police exposé and Masik’s frantic work.

DIRECTED BY RIC ESTHER BIENSTOCK (Canada, Canadian Spectrum)

SCREENINGS:

Sunday, April 28, 7 p.m.
Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles Street West)

Monday, April 29, 1 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)

Thursday, May 2, 4 p.m.
Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond Street West)

How do you regulate black-market organ trafficking around the world when the demand in developed countries far exceeds the supply from legal donors? That’s the animating question behind Emmy-award-winner Ric Esther Bienstock’s Tales from the Organ Trade, an intelligent and engaging look at the transnational politics, economics, and ethical quagmires of organ donation.

Narrated by a bemused David Cronenberg—a perfect choice, given his own filmography’s fixation on the horror of squishy organs in alien bodies—the film is foremost a wide-ranging outsider’s look into a complex system. Rather than simply lambasting the self-interested and exploitative work of a top clandestine surgeon nicknamed “Doctor Frankenstein,” Bienstock is more interested in tracing the good and (more commonly) bad effects of a largely uncontrolled industry that thrives on the unmet needs of middle-class recipients on their last legs, as well as the dire situations faced by impoverished donors in the Philippines, for whom a donation is something far more complicated than a gift.

Overlong and too reliant at times on statistical charts to set the scene, this is nevertheless an admirably restrained and informative look at how such an intimate medical procedure is inflected by a wide array of geopolitical forces.

DIRECTED BY BARTOSZ M. KOWALSKI (Poland, Made in Poland)

SCREENINGS:

Thursday, May 2, 9:45 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)

Friday, May 3, 5:30 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)

A Dream in the Making opens in the Wola district, one of the most impoverished areas of Warsaw, where a young man named Bartek is training to be a stuntman under the tutelage of best friend and all-purpose big brother, surrogate dad, and talent agent Pawel. While the opening shot of Bartek in bed under a poster of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon prepares us for a scrappy coming-of-age story inflected by American pop culture, the camera’s trained gaze is ultimately more revealing of director Bartosz M. Kowalski’s minimalist, observational approach to his subject.

Kowalski sets modest goals here, refusing to turn Bartek and Pawel’s relationship into a superficial allegory about youth in Poland. That approach yields some strong stuff, not least in the men’s candid conversations with one another about their hopes for the future, which Kowalski doesn’t overburden with tired documentary tropes like a disembodied narrator or archival footage. This is also a handsomely shot film, full of tasteful compositions and fluid camerawork that keeps a steady pace behind the documentary’s subjects. Even if the story is a bit thin, the footage of Bartek’s lithe movements as he trains to jump faster and higher is undeniably cinematic.

Of Hot Docs 2013′s 11 individual programmes, Special Presentations is the heavy hitter. These films are the headliners, and among them are many world and international premieres. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’ll all be great, but if you’re looking for docs that will surely get talked about, this is a good place to start.

Click any of the images below for more information about a particular Special Presentations film. Or, check out our nifty Hot Docs 2013 hub for a list of all our reviews to date.

THE MANOR DIRECTED BY SHAWNEY COHEN AND MIKE GALLAY

PUSSY RIOT—A PUNK PRAYER DIRECTED BY MAXIM POZDOROVKIN AND MIKE LERNER

BLOOD BROTHER DIRECTED BY STEVE HOOVER

AFTER TILLER DIRECTED BY MARTHA SHANE AND LANA WILSON

DIRECTED BY ALAN ZWEIG (Canada, Canadian Spectrum)

SCREENINGS:

Saturday, April 27, 6:30 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)

Monday, April 29, 1:30 p.m.
Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles Street West)

Sunday, May 5, 1:30 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)

Inspired by Ray Robertson’s eponymous essay collection, Toronto filmmaker Alan Zweig’s 15 Reasons to Live offers a series of vignettes about why life is worth prolonging despite its inherent trials. As the high concept would suggest, this approach yields something of a mixed bag, with stories ranging from the deeply poignant (a novelist who must retrain himself to read after a stroke) to the mawkish (a couple’s attempt to rescue a whale, captured on home video), but Zweig’s characteristic warm embrace of his subjects and grouchy-cum-friendly narration makes it an amiable ramble all the same.

One wonders at times whether the source text doesn’t hurt the film’s structure more than it helps. That’s especially true in Zweig’s profile of local activist Adam Nobody, whose injuries and detainment at the hands of police during Toronto’s G-20 summit are a bit cryptically introduced as “humour.” But the best portraits, including Zweig’s sweet reminiscence about Toronto film staple Tracy Wright and another segment about an elementary school student who openly resisted the religious dogma of her institution, have an uncommon depth and generosity to them that makes up for such hiccups.