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Hot Docs Planner: City Planning, Child Soldiers, and Finnish Rugby Machos
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 Tahani Rached’s Neighbours.
Among the films unspooling this Wednesday at Hot Docs: Neighbours, an examination of architectural and cultural upheaval in modern Cairo; Raymonde Provencher’s Grace, Milly, Lucy…Child Soldiers, the story of three Ugandan women forced into military service as children; and Freetime Machos, a look at masculinity through the lens of a Finnish rugby team. Torontoist’s Hamutal Dotan, Steve Kupferman, and Kasandra Bracken review all three, after the jump.
TORONTOIST’S RECOMMENDED PICKS GET A 
Neighbours
Directed by Tahani Rached. Egypt. 105 minutes.
Neighbours is a gorgeously shot, delicate exploration of Egypt in the twentieth century, told via the stories of one Cairo neighbourhood. A winding, carefully constructed upper-class enclave, Garden City was commissioned by the British during their colonial occupation of Egypt to house commercial and diplomatic activity. Its circuitous streets are meant to keep potential attackers out, and many embassies are still found in Garden City for this reason. Neighbours meanders through Garden City’s streets and in and out of its houses, interviewing long-time denizens: everyone from ambassadors to street-sweepers, speaking in Arabic, French, and English. Piece by piece, various aspects of Egypt’s social and political history get teased out, combining to form a layered portrait of a country that’s undergone several massive changes in course over the past century.Rached is astute in her choice of subjects, exercising that elusive ability of inducing you to care about their lives, and about their memories from fifty and sixty years ago. Neighbours is slightly marred by clips from older Egyptian cinema, which are interspersed as counterpoints to the interviews throughout the film. Though the contrasts are interesting at times, these asides prove largely distracting, breaking the spell of a interview without offering enough compensatory insight. For the most part, though, Neighbours is both compelling and insightful, a great example of how personal narratives can be an invaluable tool in understanding larger historical forces.
Screens Friday May 7 at 9:30 p.m. at the Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles Street West) and Saturday May 8 at 4:45 p.m. at the ROM theatre (100 Queen’s Park) as part of the Focus on Tahani Rached retrospective.
Still from Raymonde Provencher’s Grace, Milly, Lucy…Child Soliders.
Grace, Milly, Lucy…Child Soldiers
Directed by Raymonde Provencher. Canada. 71 minutes. Over the course of more than twenty years, the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group, has kidnapped thousands of Ugandan children and forced them to become warriors in Uganda and Sudan. In Grace, Milly, Lucy…Child Soldiers, a truthful but never tasteless doc from director Raymonde Provencher, three Ugandan women who were kidnapped by the LRA as children tell their stories.All three women are now middle-aged and long past their days of forced soldiering. Milly Auma and Lucy Lanyero have founded an outreach organization called Empowering Hands, which helps former child soldiers readjust to life in Ugandan villages where even unwilling association with the LRA carries a powerful stigma. Grace Akallo, who escaped the army just a few months after being kidnapped, went on to graduate from an American university, and is the doc’s most eloquent voice.
Grace, Milly, Lucy stays away, for the most part, from tawdry reenactments and sad music. It lets its subjects do the talking, and it’s all the more powerful as a result.
Screens Wednesday, May 5 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, May 8 at 4 p.m. at The Royal Cinema (608 College Street) as part of the Canadian Spectrum Series.
Still from Mika Ronkainen’s Freetime Machos.
Freetime Machos
Directed by Mika Ronkainen. Finland & Germany. 86 minutes. Freetime Machos is a documentary about sport, but not really. While the film follows Oulu, a Finnish rugby team (the world’s ‘third-worst,’ no less), the rugby is more the drive for the drama—an excuse for a guys’ night out, an environment where the post-pitch brews and sauna sessions are of equal or greater importance than the game at hand. Barring prior research, you’d hardly think Freetime Machos is a documentary. While shot beautifully in fine film form, it plays out more like a sitcom. It’s the common story of a group of gents and their daily routines, from their sweaty locker room to their even sweatier sauna, on the bus or on the pitch, at home with their girlfriend or wife doing their day-to-day grudge work, whether in rugby stripes or suits and ties.The camera most closely follows two characters—Miiko, the married entrepreneur and father figure whose wife spends as much time pregnant as not, and Matti, the young, engaged builder and rugby devotee who can’t get past the queer quips. Miiko, always with child in hand, serves as a mentor to Matti, as we spend the majority of the film trying to figure out if and when he’ll stop teetering on the edge and just come out already.
Freetime Machos provides an insider’s eye to daily life in Finland, its industry and economic state, and most pertinently, its social norms and expectations and the way a few men perceive them. It’s a blunt, and sometimes vulgar eavesdropping session on a gang of macho-ish-men shootin’ the shit, or maybe ruing the day’s loss. They’re unsure, uncertain, but they find release in the roughhousing on the field and comfort in talking it all out in the sauna afterward. They’re a foolhardy bunch: they fall, and they certainly fail—but somehow their shortfalls feel laughable, somehow endearing. But surely, none of them should be quitting their day jobs anytime soon.
Screens Wednesday, May 5 at 6:30 p.m., at Cumberland 3 (159 Cumberland Street), and Saturday May 8 at 6:45 p.m., at The Royal Cinema (608 College Street) as part of the World Showcase series.
All stills courtesy Hot Docs.