Hot Docs Planner: Cooking, Gambling, and Polaroid Portraits

By Torontoist

Every weekday and Saturday throughout Hot Docs, Torontoist is looking at a handful of festival offerings, recommending the worthwhile and de-recommending the not-so-worthwhile.

Still from Ernesto Cabellos’ Cooking Up Dreams.

On offer Saturday: Cooking Up Dreams, a look at the culture of cooking and cuisine in Peru; Small Wonders, a Canadian doc profiling the extinction of the mom-and-pop shop; and The Player, a largely unproductive doc probing the mind of the obsessive gambler. Torontoist’s Hamutal Dotan, Ashley Carter, and John Semley give you the skinny on all three, after the jump.

TORONTOIST’S RECOMMENDED PICKS GET A

Cooking Up Dreams

Directed by Ernesto Cabellos. Peru. 75 minutes.
Food is universal: we all need it, relish it, express ourselves through it when we cook. But food is also incredibly, deeply specific—to a country, to a region, to a time of year, to a family, even—and food-oriented films tend to work to the extent that they convey this specificity. A film about food needs to transport us to a precise moment, to an exact place, if it’s going to capture our imagination. Otherwise, it risks relying too much on the universal tropes, falling back on the trivially true fact that food is an integral expression of culture or nationality or community.
Cooking Up Dreams is a soulful but ultimately very frustrating film. It wants so badly to convince us that food is important, but it does so only in the most generic of terms. A culinary portrait of Peru, Cooking Up Dreams keeps Peruvian cooking tantalizingly, infuriatingly, at arm’s length. If you aren’t already familiar with Peruvian dishes, if you don’t know their names in Spanish, this film won’t do what we so hoped it would: pull back the culinary curtain and show, in glorious detail, what Peruvian food actually is. (A representative line from the film’s English subtitles: “The dishes they serve remind the people that they belong to this land. ‘This is carapulcra with sopa seca.'”)
Though Cooking Up Dreams has interesting interviews aplenty, and some gorgeous footage of every imaginable kind of food (raw, cooked, rustic, refined), it provides little by way of historical or cultural context. There are snippets of information about the Incas, the Norte Chico civilization, and the ingredients and techniques that the Spaniards brought when they colonized Peru, but these threads are never knit into a larger narrative. “Integration, globalization, all of these concepts are becoming very modern,” comments a chef at one point, “and there is Peruvian cuisine, which has been mixing cultures in a very balanced way for five hundred years. That’s what’s magical, that’s what makes our cuisine attractive.” It’s a helpful insight, but comes fifty-eight minutes into the film—far too late to serve as a helpful key to the culture for those who weren’t already familiar with it.
Cooking Up Dreams leaves us hungry. In the literal sense, that’s a good thing. In the metaphorical sense, less so.HD
Screens Saturday, May 1 at 1:30 p.m. at the Cumberland 3 (159 Cumberland Street) (rush tickets only) and Sunday, May 9 at 9:30 p.m. at the Cumberland 2 (159 Cumberland Street) as part of the Made in South America series.

Still from Tally Abecassis’s Small Wonders.

Small Wonders

Directed by Tally Abecassis. Canada. 52 minutes.
Not to be confused with the similarly-titled ’80s sitcom about the suburban family whose daughter is a robot, Small Wonders is a hearty tribute to mom-and-pop shops—the kinds of places where you can get your hair did and a key cut simultaneously, or where all transactions come out of a fat leather wallet—and their increasingly uphill war against the big box megastore.
Shot over the course of a decade by Montreal-based director Tally Abecassis, the film follows the owners of three neighbourhood fixtures: a Polaroid-only portrait studio, a small, cluttered hardware store located steps from a Reno Depo, and that common urban oddity, a double-duty watch repair and barber shop.
Given its subject matter, Small Wonders is no doubt quirky and entertaining, but the film’s short running-time works to its detriment in that you have no time to really get to know all three of these characters—as well as their three businesses—in any meaningful way. Though their stories are familiar and compelling, moments meant to strike a chord fall a bit flat with such a broad focus. Still, it’s an optimistic look at fierce independent types hoping for a change. Worth watching for anyone with a DIY spirit. AC
Screens Sunday, May 2 at 5:00 p.m. at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Avenue) with Flawed as part of the Canadian Spectrum series.

Still from John Appel’s The Player.

The Player

Directed by John Appel. Netherlands. 85 minutes.
A fella once said, “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” Sage-like wisdom, to be sure. But such sober judgment rarely clouds the mind of the hardcore gambler. John Appel’s film begins with a letter his father once sent to him. Appel the elder had alleged to have concocted a foolproof system for winning at roulette, one which would ensure success despite the wheel’s chaos-neutral ambivalence. Of course, like so many other would-be high rollers, Appel’s father was ruined by his purportedly watertight scheme for taking down the house.
This personal connection to the gambler’s fraught psyche suggests an intimacy to Appel’s film that rarely manifests in any satisfying way. Instead, The Player devotes most of its screen time to Appel conversing with a cheery horse track bookie and a con man whose pathological need to scam others keeps landing him back in the clinker. Instead of more thoroughly plumbing the motivations of compulsive gamblers, Appel prefers to let his camera linger over their compromising faces while tinkling piano music further cheeses up the proceedings. There’s a great documentary to be made on the subject of the gambler’s self-destructive instincts. This isn’t it. JS
Screens Sunday, May 2 at 7:00 p.m. at the Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles Street West) and Monday, May 3 at 1:45 p.m. at the ROM Theatre (100 Queen’s Park) as part of the International Spectrum series.
All stills courtesy of Hot Docs and Polaroid Portraiture.