Anti-bully Beauty
Vimeo staff pick. Shane Koyczan. Collaborative artists animating each 20 seconds of powerful, stirring, anti-oppression spoken words. Enough said.
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Canadian gov’t approves filming immigration raid, deportation process for...
The Canadian government has approved what appears to be the crass exploitation of human suffering for entertainment. In a new low, Safety Minister Vic Toews approved the filming of an immigration...
View ArticleThe Hays Files
Matthew Hays is a prolific cultural critic who, aside from publishing many academic journal articles and books, wrote for years in Montreal on everything in cinema, from porn to puppets to gun culture...
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Bowling for Columbine turns ten
Editor’s note: Art Threat has launched a cultural archaeological project that involves digging up previously published but now inaccessible film reviews and cultural musings from Montreal-based writer...
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The Ghosts in Our Machine defends the animals on our screen
Over the last decade of programming political documentary for Cinema Politica I can say with confidence that there are two subjects that have always been decidedly divisive and caused the most...
View ArticlePrint your own gun
This week’s Friday Film Pick is a new 24-minute documentary produced by Motherboard and distributed by Vice Magazine, on 3D gun printing (video after jump). The film peaks into the weird and extremely...
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Return to Gummo
Harmony Korine has been making headlines for his new pop-culture romp, Spring Breakers, with the usual fanfare and some reviewers decidedly giddy with the possibility of maybe “getting it” or maybe...
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Hot Docs turns twenty
Twenty years ago today, it was a year like any other. The ceremonial swap between less liberal and more liberal leader of the United States took place when Clinton picked up where Bush left off...
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Fatal fish farms
Salmon Confidential is a new film by Twyla Roscovich on the government cover up of what is killing BC’s wild salmon. It is absolutely shocking to see the lengths the provincial and federal governments...
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Blood work: A conversation with the director of Blood Relative
One ongoing trend in documentary filmmaking involves privileged minority world saviours travelling to distant destitute lands in order to do good or capture the act of doing good on film. In films like...
View ArticleShow us your moxy
The newest agit-POP video from the folks at the Albino Squirrel Vimeo Channel asks Morgan Freeman and CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi to stand with Palestinians and consider cancelling an event set to...
View ArticleDisney abandons efforts to trademark Day of the Dead
Thanks to a wave of online backlash, Disney is withdrawing its application to trademark the term Dia de los Muertos — otherwise known as the traditional Mexican Day of the Dead holiday. The trademark...
View ArticleGay South Korean film director causes stir in Seoul with wedding announcement
Openly gay South Korean film director Kim Jho Gwang-soo announced he will symbolically marry his partner in a ceremony designed to both celebrate their love and make a statement on LGBTQ rights in the...
View ArticleCrack smoking Toronto Mayor animation
If this isn’t the strangest and most awesome video you’ll watch today, then you are watching some pretty strange and awesome stuff. Taiwanese animators have taken on the story of Toronto mayor Rob...
View ArticleTree-sitting among giants
This week’s Friday Film Pick is the Vimeo staff pick and festival favourite short film Among Giants. Image-rich and information-light, it’s a lovely meditation on activists putting the environment...
View ArticleWe will stop Monsanto: Docs on an agribully
Today in over 250 countries worldwide, thousands of people marched against agricorpo giant Monsanto. The St Louis based chemical company is known for genetically modifying crops and trapping farmers...
View ArticleDemocracy on Trial: The Morgentaler Affair
Abortion-rights activist and pioneer Dr. Henry Morgentaler died Wednesday of a heart attack. Appropriately, our Friday Film Pick is Democracy on Trial, a 1984 NFB documentary by Paul Cowen in which...
View ArticleFriday Film Pick: Blockadia Rising: Voices of the Tar Sands Blockade
This week’s FFP is a new one-hour documentary by Garrett Graham (in collaboration with the Tar Sands Blockade) about the direct action efforts of activists in Texas, who try to stop construction of...
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Friday Film Pick: Things are Different Now
Ryan Conrad recently pulled his film from the Frameline San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival because the festival, despite a robust budget and years of protest from filmmakers, audiences and...
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Game of Thrones and Racist Fantasy
Aamer Rahman has recently caused quite a stir among Game of Thrones fandom with his Tumblr post about the HBO show’s very problematic representation of race, most notably that hideous last episode of...
View ArticleThe Foodies vs. Miracle-Gro: bad advertising only perverted tomato squeezers...
Advertising can be an annoying, all-intrusive, manipulative way to hock a bunch of crap we don’t need, or it can be an entertaining and necessary cog in the wheel of any business. The most effective...
View ArticleVideo: Max Haiven on The Debt of Creativity
Activist and art professor Max Haiven recently delivered a TED talk at TEDxNovaScotia titled The Debt of Creativity, in which he elaborates on the ideas he discussed in his essay Privatizing...
View ArticleChildren 404: help fund a film exposing Russia’s crackdown on LGBTQ youth
In the Fall of 2013 a Russian documentary filmmaker contacted numerous LGBTQ activists and filmmakers in Canada and the United States with whom they had worked with in previous years to screen their...
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Remembering documentary film legend Peter Wintonick
You want to bring them back. Would they, if they could, return, after such a heavy crossing? You try, until the wish, almost disattached, gnawing, growling, finally bursts loose to call them....
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Gender Mender: XXY is a cinematic exploration of intersexuality
From a purely organizational standpoint, there are plenty of reasons for the gender binary. The system delineates male and female characteristics as separate and static, ostensibly facilitating a...
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The Act of Killing: Liberal Porn or Daring Activism?
The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Anonymous, Christine Cynn, 2013) is a documentary about Indonesia’s anti-communist purges of 1965 that thankfully abandons the traditional interview format in...
View ArticlePinko cyclists rejoice: Rob Ford film on the way
It was inevitable: a Rob Ford movie is coming soon to a theatre near you. Just one week after the book release of Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story, by Toronto Star journalist Robyn Doolittle, Canadian...
View ArticleContest: Win swag from Rhymes for Young Ghouls!
Rhymes for Young Ghouls, the debut feature film by Canadian director Jeff Barnaby that garnered well-deserved praise on the film festival circuit this year, including a top ten film nod from TIFF, is...
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Mars at Sunrise is a Cinematic Tone Poem
In times of stress we turn to torn fragments of ourselves and worship them as if they were whole nations (From Mars at Sunrise). Mars at Sunrise (2014) is director Jessica Habie’s first feature. Billed...
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The Act of Killing: a step forward in a country that must look back
Editor’s note: Christine Phang, the author of this article, has also responded to attacks on the film by BBC critic Nick Fraser. Indonesia’s history as an independent state has been a relatively short...
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The Act of Killing: My family lived through it
Editor’s note: Christine Phang has recently written a contextual analysis of the Oscar-nominated documentary, The Act of Killing. After we read her essay we asked her to give us her opinion on the...
View ArticleVoiceOver documentary reframes the 2011 London riots
VoiceOver | Riots Reframed (2013) is Fahim Alam’s first film, shot in the aftermath of the 2011 riots in London and other UK cities, while Alam was under conditional release and forced to wear an ankle...
View ArticleBanksy video asks that we stand #WithSyria on third anniversary of conflict
This week marks the third anniversary of the crisis in Syria, and a new campaign involving Banksy asks that we stand in solidarity with Syrians. #WithSyria asks the public to place pressure on...
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Hot Docs 2014 preview: politically punchy program, but diversity concerns...
It’s springtime in Toronto and that means Canada’s premiere documentary showcase is back for another jam-packed ten day event that will deliver the world of doc to eager local audiences and...
View ArticleEvaporating Borders explores asylum-seekers in Cyprus
“… it’s a place I call home, although I blend in only as a familiar stranger.” Evaporating Borders, written and directed by Iva Radivojevic, is a five-act exploration of asylum-seekers in Cyprus....
View ArticleEngaging and Enraging: A Review of The Secret Trial 5
The Secret Trial 5, director Amar Wala’s first feature, is an engaging and enraging look at five men labelled security risks by the Canadian government and detained without trial for a combined total...
View ArticleThe Condemned exposes the dark lives of convicted murderers
On the outside, The Condemned is what you would expect of a documentary about a prison: bad food, unsympathetic guards, tearful family reunions, letters from Lonely Hearts, and a lot of tattoos. But...
View ArticleThe Look of Silence: breathtaking in every sense
The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s stunning new film, is a sublime work that should more than satisfy the critics of its companion piece, The Act of Killing. Aiming to expose the ongoing...
View ArticleEthnography 101: La cour de Babel and La marche à suivre
The only thing I hate more than bad puns is bad ethnography, and La cour de Babel walks a fine line on that. Following an integration class for new immigrants at a Parisian high school, the entire film...
View ArticleMaidan: one of the most honest depictions of popular protest ever filmed
Sergei Loznitsa’s latest film, Maidan, falls firmly in the tradition of documentaries that use the real to question the possibilities of cinema. Those expecting a more activist documentary like Jehane...
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Screening Truth to Power: A Reader on Documentary Activism
Screening Truth to Power: A Reader on Documentary Activism is a collection of essays and interviews related to the films and filmmakers of Cinema Politica (CP), and as such provides an excellent source...
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Performing Aloha in Queer Times
In 2001, filmmakers Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe broke new ground with their documentary Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place. The film, which documents the lives, struggles, and aspirations...
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Filmmakers pull out of Istanbul festival in government censorship protest
Nearly two dozen filmmakers have yanked their films from the 34th Istanbul Film Festival in response to the last-minute cancellation of documentary screening about the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)....
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A Changing Chinatown
Julia Kwan’s NFB-produced Everything Will Be (Canada, 2014) examines the gentrification of Vancouver’s Chinatown as an uneasy balance of preservation, assimilation, and creative re-purposing. A flurry...
View ArticlePetition to Save Film Heritage in Former Yugoslavia
An appeal from the international community of film scholars, cinephiles and archivists: Dear Colleagues, Avala Film, the former Yugoslavia’s oldest film studio – which was at the heart of Mila...
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Hot Docs 22: CanCon and BrandCon
North America’s largest and most sweeping doc-deluge, the Canadian International Hot Docs Festival, is once again in full swing, and the moment wouldn’t be complete, for me at least, without some form...
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From Exposé to Opacity: With The Migrant Image, T.J Demos Rethinks...
Though often situated at the centre of grandiose political and activist projects, tasked time and again with capturing visible evidence of exploitation, violence, deprivation, and inequality,...
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Peter Kennard: A very unofficial war artist
The Exhibiton — Peter Kennard: A Very Unofficial War Artist, Imperial War Museum, London The Film — Zygosis: John Heartfield and the Political Image by Gavin Hodge & Tim Morrison (1991) The images...
View ArticleOur RIDM suggestions: urban development, rural Jesus, protest music, and more
RIDM always has way more films that look fantastic than any one person with other commitments can reasonably see in the space of ten days, which is a great problem to have. These are a few suggestions...
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Curating the North: Documentary Screening Ethics and Inuit Representation in...
Documentary festivals are certainly not immune to scandal and controversy, and this year’s RIDM, which took place in Montreal in November 2015, was no exception. Following on the heels of the...
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