Hot Docs ‘09: Subjects on the Margins

A scene from Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson's "Mugabe and the White African." Image courtesy of Hot Docs.

As documentary filmmakers hone their pitches to industry delegates at the Toronto Documentary Forum, attempting to attract funding and interest in their projects by finding the perfect hook, they would do well to look at a number of films screening at Hot Docs, which continues through this weekend - they share the best kind of hooks: indelible, well-chosen subjects and, usually implicitly, the complicated and delicate relationship their directors have with them.

Many of the festival’s offerings focus on subjects who are often marginalized by society to a greater or lesser extent - ranging from those who are true outsiders due to physical, racial, cultural, or economic differences to those who are simply quirky or a little “off.”

Among the former, one of the best is Rosie Dransfeld’s verite world premiere, “Broke.,” which uses the day to day dealings of a pawnshop to explore the realities of life for the poor, hungry, and addicted. While the curmudgeonly store’s owner is the film’s central figure, his interactions with all manners of down-on-their-luck regular customers are the core of the film and provide it with its humor and poignancy.

Also employing humor effectively to expose a very serious subject is “The Red Chapel,” another world premiere, in which director Mads Bruegger brings two (South) Korean-Danish comedians to North Korea under the pretense of presenting a performance sympathetic to dictator Kim Jong-Il’s regime. Key to the film is Bruegger’s relationship with one of the comedians, Jacob, a self-described “spastic” with speech and physical handicaps. Jacob finds himself questioning the deceit implicit in their visit to North Korea, even as he notes both the way their hosts infantilize him and the disturbing absence of any other persons with disabilities in the country.

Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson’s world premiere, “Mugabe and the White African,” tackles another government and its repressive policies, by focusing on the legal struggle of a white Zimbabwean farmer and his family to keep his land in the face of President Robert Mugabe’s corrupt and racist land reform policy. Exploring the question of what it means to be part of the white minority in an African country, the directors risk their own safety by secretly filming incidents of violence intended to intimidate whites off of their land.

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