According to CBC’s Chris Boyce, the goal of this weekend’s CBCMusic.ca Festival is twofold. First and foremost, the CBC wants to celebrate Canadian music. Second, it wants to celebrate CBC Music, the broadcaster’s online music service, which launched a little over a year ago.

In 1996, Theatre Columbus premiered playwright Michael O’Brien’s “freely adapted” take on the famous Beaumarchais play The Barber of Seville, which was written in 1775. O’Brien’s version mixed in music from the 1816 opera of the same name by Gioachino Rossini, as well as original tunes by composer John Millard. The adaptation also propelled the story forward a couple centuries, with pop culture references galore. With Theatre Columbus co-founder Leah Cherniak at the helm, the musical ended the season with six Dora Award nominations (it won three) and plenty of critical acclaim.

Seventeen years later, Soulpepper Theatre is remounting this zany reimagination of The Barber of Seville, updated once again by O’Brien, Millard, and Cherniak. But, for some reason—the change in decade, or company, or sense of humour—whatever had made the original so magical, has faded, save for a few key performances.

The minds behind previous Hot Docs hits Soundtrack for a Revolution and Nanking tackle an (arguably) lighter subject with The Hollywood Complex: the world of child actors.
Every spring, thousands of hopeful child actors and their parents migrate to Hollywood for the swath of auditions that coincide with pilot season, many taking up residence in the Oakwood apartment complex. Directors Sturman and Nelson set up shop in the bizarre building filled with diminutive divas, capturing the surreal and sometimes heartbreaking goings-on in the lives of these would-be stars. Surprisingly, the parents portrayed are not the expected assortment of failed performers attempting to live vicariously, but instead are bemused and beleaguered out-of-towners trying desperately to make sense of the world of acting, while struggling—and occasionally failing—to give their children normal or even healthy lives.
The filmmakers try desperately not to satirize the inherently nutty world of child acting, with mixed success. Judgemental undertones weave their way into the story, though they’re far too subtle to match the reactions of an audience aghast at the sight of children sleeping under tables and digging in dumpsters to follow a career almost universally known for failure.

In 1979, the People’s Republic of China instituted its one-child policy in an effort to control a swiftly swelling population. One horrendous result was a spike in child abandonments, particularly of newborn girls by families who wanted sons. In the years that followed, many of these girls would go on to be adopted by American families—one of them by director Linda Goldstein Knowlton.
Somewhere Between is an exploration of the experiences of four such Chinese adoptees, now in their early teens. With a foot in both their birth and adopted homelands, Knowlton’s subjects speak frankly on their situations and experiences, from realizing they were different from their parents to trying to connect with their distant culture. What could have been a sociological sequence of talking heads is instead a surprisingly emotional journey, as Knowlton follows the smart, affable girls over three years of growth and discovery.
Although it is primarily a comforting and educational letter to her future teenage daughter, Knowlton’s film also includes subtle undertones on parenting and American identity in a swiftly globalizing world.

Film owes a lot to the locust. Well, this might be a stretch. But there are some fascinating early 16mm prints of corporate propaganda films on how the locust plague of Genesis was nothing compared to what would happen if you didn’t dust your crops with DDT. This fear is where Robert Nugent’s Memoirs of a Plague begins. Incorporating archival footage from his youth, Nugent travels to the front lines on the war against the locust—a journey which takes him from his native Australia to Egypt, Ethiopia, and Rome. Nugent, however, increasingly finds himself on the side of the locust, and takes the audience along with him.
Memoirs of a Plague is a hybrid, non-linear memoir loosely narrated by a mumbling Nugent, mixed with Planet Earth–like shots of locusts, all tied together by a philosophical reflection on the nature of control. Nugent sets the surreal tone of the documentary from the outset, opening with a nameless person (none of the interviewees is named) getting a locust tattoo as the buzz of the needle and the classic score are overpowered by naturalistic locust sounds. Nugent clearly is exploring our relationship to the locust in the context of the plague that we are continually warned is coming. Yet, it never arrives. Rather, we wait. We wait for the clouds of locust to descend and even when they do Nugent subverts their mass power with incredible microscope shots of individual locusts. Like most things, when taken out of the mob and examined as individuals, it turns out that locust exoskeleton “faces” can become oddly endearing. And if this doesn’t win one over to the locust, watching one’s vivisection will. (Man: the cruelest animal of all).
Memoirs of a Plague is not a typical nature documentary. Die hard fans of Blue Planet and other such primo BBC television might find this anthropomorphic approach bizarre. Though the documentary certainly isn’t for everyone, some might be delighted to discover the locust lover within.

Another strong(ish) showing by the NFB at Hot Docs 2011, Lumberfros takes us into Boreal forest of northern Quebec. In the grand tradition of the NFB, Lanthier’s film serves as a slice of cinematic anthropology, enlivening the viewer’s understanding of the Canadian experience by providing them backdoor access to someplace they’ve never been.
In this case, “someplace” is a remote logging camp where several generations of brush-cutters live, work, and rough-house. Hardened Quebecois vets work alongside eager immigrants from Asia and Africa, all of them chasing the big money and romance of modern lumber-jacking. A fitting inclusion in the Workers of the World! program, Lumberfros hews closer to the workers than their work, giving us just enough of a sense of brush-clearing’s vacillations between tedium, danger, and excitement.
Lanthier lucked out considerably in Mamadou, an African immigrant who emerges as one of the film’s central figures (and easily its most likeable). Expressing discontent with minimum wage exploitation in Montreal, Mamadou chased the Canadian dream north. Comparing himself to Alexander Ovechkin, Mamadou takes due pride in his work ethic, while also finding a spiritual element to hacking through the roughage.
You can chalk Lumberfros‘ intermittent dullness up to the repetition of the labour, but it still nags. Lanthier’s film is meditative to the point of drowsiness at times, her social-anthropological inquiry often seeming wholly inert. You know, in the grand tradition of the NFB.

This is My Picture When I Was Dead doesn’t feel like a documentary, and it isn’t trying to. An unstructured, meandering profile of Bashir Mraish, the son of an assassinated Palestine Liberation Organization leader, the film conveys his feeling of dislocation by creating it in its viewers as well.
Mraish was four when his father was killed by the Mossad, and as an adult he tries to piece together an understanding of his father’s life through photos, old news clippings, and especially the stories shared by his friends. Mahmoud Al Massad understands that the first rule of story-telling—especially when your subject carries historical and symbolic weight—is specificity, and lets Mraish’s search unfold in all its particulars and idiosyncrasies, without forcing it into some pat political narrative. It’s a window into larger struggles faced by many Palestinians—violent trauma, fissures in family, and sense of place—but Mraish remains entirely his own man.
This is My Picture suffers from its own structural experiments, which feel more like clever afterthoughts than necessary to the story, and from a pace so slow that the film sometimes sinks under its own pensiveness. We never get a fully rounded sense of Mraish, who speaks less than just about everyone around him—but then again, that’s what Mraish is looking for, too.

The equation for a Morgan Spurlock film: some sort of cultural mega-target plus one gimmicky approach. It’s usually the sort of thing you probably could have come up with yourself (and thought was a really, really good idea) if you were stoned. In POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Spurlock’s big fish is the heavy hand of advertising in the movie-making industry. The shtick: in order to fund the making of a movie about the corporate funding of movies, he’s is going to sell off his film to corporate sponsors.
The movie’s main action is Spurlock calling up corporations and pitching them ideas about how theirs could be the official [insert product here] of the Greatest Movie Ever Sold. It takes a while before he gets a bite, but after a while he’s swiping his underarms with official deodorant (Ban), making tracks in his official shoes (Merrell’s), filling up his official car (Mini) with official gas (Sheetz), chowing down on his official pizza (Amy’s), and, of course, chugging his official beverage (POM Wonderful). (Call it a testament to the power of advertising: remembering those sponsors without notes was a breeze.) As the film rolls on, the very ads spots we’ve seen him pitch start to appear in the film itself, and the products we’ve seen him offer to hock start conspicuously peppering the screen.
If a send-up of advertising has you thinking ‘what is this, 1999?’ we’d understand. We’ll admit, though, that this film did remind us that just because we’ve grown inured to something doesn’t mean the issue isn’t still around. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold offers its audience the undeniable pleasure of feeling in on a joke—even if it’s not always clear that the joke has a clear political point to make or is really at anyone’s expense. The truth is that Spurlock’s sponsors come across as pretty decent types. After all, these are the corporations who are able to make fun of themselves enough to get involved with Morgan Spurlock and his exercise in irony to begin with.
This very meta documentary will hardly be remembered as a shocking exposé, but it’s often truly funny and always easy to watch.

It’s too tempting to describe Phnom Penh Lullaby as a “portrait of life on the fringes” or something. Because really, any interesting doc is about life on the fringes. Nobody would make a film about some white guy who wakes up and goes to work and watches Mike and Molly and falls asleep. But there’s “life on the fringes” and then there’s being an Israeli-expat working as a fortune teller in Cambodia, whose girlfriend may be killing your baby with her poisoned breast milk.
Against a backdrop of child prostitution, gun shots, glue-huffing, and thematically apropos consuming darkness, Pawel Kloc’s first feature tails Ilan, a tarot card reader who left Israel to start a new life in Cambodia. His alcoholic girlfriend, Saran, pressures him to get married and move back to Israel. (“Where’s Hollywood?” she asks earnestly, when Ian shows her his homeland on a map.) Saran has a baby with Ilan, one from a father living in Singapore, a couple more who have been adopted by Canadians—and there are intimations of others whose fates remain unknown. With this hanging in the background, it’s the lot of Ilan and Saran’s daughter that rests at Lullaby‘s emotional core.
No doubt, Kloc has crafted a complex, riveting, and monumentally despairing film. But it almost feels like emotional porn, especially as it sinks towards its climactic domestic blowout. But tricky though it may be to parse its ethics, Kloc’s film is doubtlessly powerful: a problematic portrait on life way, way, way, way on the fringes.

Those going to see Being Elmo in hopes of catching a feature-length profile of the cuddly red creature may be disappointed: the star of the film is Kevin Clash, the man behind the muppet.
As it turns out, he’s pretty cuddly, too.
The story of Clash’s rise from a Sesame Street–loving child in working class Baltimore to an inspired puppeteer working under the likes of Jim Henson and Captain Kangaroo plays out as a series of well-deserved good turns coming to someone absurdly talented and passionate.
Like Elmo himself, the film’s feel-good message is unflappable: Clash’s story seems to run along seemingly without any, well, clashes. The one bend in the unerringly positive narrative that goes largely unaddressed is Clash’s home life as an adult. We learn that he is divorced before knowing he was ever married; we witness the moments surrounding his daughter’s birth, and the next we hear of her, she’s a teenager emailing her absent father begging him to spend more time with her. It seems—though we can’t say for sure—that there is a workaholic-with-a-broken-family story lurking behind this film that goes all but untouched.
Though not especially complex or challenging, Being Elmo is a sweet, watchable film that offers interesting insight into the workings of puppetry. Clash, like Elmo, is someone you just want to root for, and it’s pretty heart-warming to see such a good guy succeed. Someone at the screening may have even teared up once or twice. We’re not saying it was us.

The Montreal neighborhood of St-Henri has changed quite a bit since the ’60s. Once a bustling home to poor French factory workers, the neighbourhood now plays host to punks, families, hipsters, junkies, weirdos, senior citizens, yuppies, students, struggling immigrants, Anglos, and Francos alike. On August 26, 2010, inspired by the 1962 documentary Á Saint-Henri le 5 Septembre, Shannon Walsh sent 12 film crews to the streets to capture a day in the life of this evolving working class locale.
The result is a study in contemporary urban identity: an older woman on welfare takes us dumpster diving in the Atwater Market; a masked street artist pastes posters under the cover of darkness; a milkman takes a moment to brag about his 16 hour shift. The subjects share little in common except their neighbourhood, but we quickly realize this actually amounts to sharing a lot.
Stark contrasts emerge as the film’s odd cast of characters vies over the same small space. We see two young kids come across syringes in their secret hideout, and bougie condo developments propped up against abandoned factories and working class homes. Yet rather than condemn the neighbourhood as an illustration of urban alienation, the film seems to revel in the dumpy goofiness of it all. Aided in no small part by Polaris Prize–winning musician Patrick Watson’s lighthearted score, St-Henri, The 26th of August makes the case that it is precisely from this unique confrontation of lives and spaces that a new sense of communal identity begins to emerge.

The school bus can be a harsh tribunal. A gruelling gauntlet of teasing, spitballs, “SKOOL SUX” graffiti, and abrupt stops at railroad crossings, entire adolescent reputations are forged on its four wheels, often before the first day of school has even begun. The Bully Project doesn’t focus entirely on the big, yellow bully-maker, but it reappears frequently, functioning as a microcosm for bullying endemic to American schools.

Hirsch and his crew track a handful of people differently embroiled in bullying. There’s a 16-year-old lesbian living in the Bible Belt, an abhorrent high school administrator with a full deck stacked with the “boys will be boys” card, parents whose children have taken their own lives as a result of being relentlessly picked on, and of course, the kids who get browbeaten on the bus (one of whom is sent to a juvenile psychiatric ward after bringing a gun on board in an attempt to avenge herself on her tormentors). If you’ve even been bullied, or bullied, the film is bound to hit home. But what’s even more alarming is the film’s depiction of how organized efforts to end bullying fall on deaf ears.

The Bully Project spends a bit too much time spinning its wheels, showing its juvenile victims sulking around by themselves, and not enough time dealing with these institutional issues. But by the time the film does come around to discussing the organized response to bullying, the results are powerful, and instantly memorable.