A Hard Name is rough, sparse and full of talking heads, but despite, or in many instances because, of all this it is an incredibly compelling watch.

Alan Zweig’s documentary (recently nominated for a Genie) tells the important story of a collection of ex-convicts who speak candidly about trying to stay out of jail and what brought them to a life of crime in the first place. Told completely through one on one interviews with five men and two women who spent the majority of their lives in and out of jail, the film is not the uplifting tale of people who have turned their lives around. Rather, it allows its subjects to tell the stark truth of how hard it is to survive in jail and how much harder it can be to survive once released.

Zweig is clearly sympathetic to his cast of characters. His style of filmmaking is more conversational than constructed, and while at times it seems his banter from behind the camera may become too intrusive, it actually proves to enrich the film as he honestly exposes the connection he builds between himself and his subjects.

While the subjects, who have committed crimes spanning from bank robberies to drug deals to assaults, are presented as sympathetic, no one here tries to justify what they’ve done. Rather, each explains the painful stories of how crime became a part of their lives. One man was abandoned by his family as a teenager when they literally moved away leaving him with nothing; another grew up with a father who constantly brought home men to have sex with him, while another was both abandoned by his mother and then repeatedly molested by his guardians at the Mount Cashel orphanage in St John’s, Newfoundland, (which gained notoriety when allegations of sexual abuse from as many as 300 residents came to light in the 1980s and 1990s. The orphanage itself was closed in 1990).

Aside from telling their deeply saddening back stories, Zweig asks each subject to explain what it was like in jail, talking about the dynamic between prisoners and survival techniques (which include never eyeballing anyone, ratting anyone out or borrowing anything off another inmate). While some of his subjects are determined to maintain their freedom - they recall how going to a mall and being around people for the first time in years was liberating or how being able to get a call from one’s children is more important than making tons of money as a criminal - others concede that life would be easier if they were back in jail because they don’t know how to keep going on the outside.

A Hard Name doesn’t carry any big message. It just gives us a glimpse into what could happen to anyone if their life took a different path.

Director and cinematographer Don Argott’s latest doc, The Art of the Steal, strangely made me feel the same way I felt last year when a news story came out about a woman in the Greater Toronto Area who was forced to get rid of her garden by the municipal government. Reportedly, the woman had a very unruly front garden that spanned her entire lawn, but she said it was made up of hundreds of rare plant life. Her neighbors, on the other hand, said it was an eyesore.

It’s frustrating when one person’s art is another person’s annoyance. And in The Art of the Steal, which tells the story of Dr. Albert Barnes’ multi billion dollar art collection and the strange voyage it takes after his death, it’s equally as frustrating when one person’s art becomes another’s commerce.

Argott’s doc shows a collection, ordered by Barnes in his will not to be removed from its space or opened for public viewing, which is torn between students of the Barnes Foundation and the City of Philadelphia which wants to exhibit the art in a public gallery. The story is shocking, compelling and at times ridiculous, as Lincoln University’s representative goes against the will at every turn in order to make money to renovate the space that housed the collection. When the collection opens to the public and the residential neighborhood in which the art is kept becomes bombarded with tourists, the fate of the collection and Barnes’ wishes, take a turn for what his supporters deem to be the worst.

However, another similarity between this doc and the articles about the woman’s garden is I felt manipulated by both. Following the story of the “stolen” garden, readers were lead to feel sympathy for this woman and anger toward the government and her neighbors. While perhaps her neighbors did care too much about the formality of a front lawn, it later came out that maybe that garden wasn’t so rare, and there was a chance it was really just a bunch of weeds. While Barnes’ collection is by no means a bunch of weeds - it contains 181 Renoir’s, 69 Cézanne’s, 59 Matisse’s and 46 Picasso’s - what happened to his collection may not be quite the travesty it is made out to be.

As an art lover, and someone who usually roots for the underdog and the misunderstood as opposed to the powers that be, it’s likely that I would have taken up the cause of Barnes’ supporters even if the doc had been more balanced, but the doc clearly villainizes the bureaucrats and city officials responsible for moving (and cashing in on) the collection and rallies behind Barnes’ supporters. So, while the story of Barnes and his collection is fascinating, I can’t help but feel that the doc could have benefited from a little more balance.

The Art of the Steal will have its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

When my friends told me about a documentary akin to American Movie about a man trying to relive his past glory as a demolition derby champion I was warned of two things: one, it’s a great watch, but two, I was going to feel guilty watching it.

I think the guilt they felt came from laughing while grown, lower-middle class men tore apart cheap cars in preparation to ram their vehicles into each other. Sure the subjects of HotRod: The Movie say funny things, and they get drunk on camera a fair bit, but I think the shame would only come if it seemed the directors were mocking the subjects in the making of this film. Watching the doc, I didn’t get that feeling.

The director and writer of HotRod, Michael Morrow, is from Lansdowne, Ontario, the home of Joe “HotRod” Kemp. Growing up in the home of a demolition derby, Morrow knew of Kemp, who had won the derby in 1998, and decided to follow him as he prepared for the 2003 match.

While the background of the derby is interesting - it’s hard to believe anyone wants to take part in these things when you see footage of people catching on fire when their gas cells ignite and other such horror stories - the most compelling part of the doc is watching these men, Kemp included, break down and rebuild their cars in preparation for game day.

The object of a demolition derby is to smash up your opponents’ cars while keeping yours in the best condition possible. If your car stops running or gets completely destroyed, you’re out. So, competitors strip the cars to the bare bones, removing the windows, bumpers and a lot of the guts to essentially create ramming machines.

While the guys say that they love smashing up their cars during the derby, the smashing they have to do to get the cars ready also looks like a lot of fun. One competitor who called his car The British Bulldog let a little boy stand on the hood to throw a rock through the windshield, while other men used power tools to cleanly remove the windows. However, protective clothing does not appear to be popular with the subjects of this doc. Only one man mentions protective glasses as he’s breaking the windows of his car, yet we see he’s only referring to the sunglasses on his face. At one point HotRod cuts himself with a grinder when it jacks backward, slicing his bare hand. His reaction: he makes the cut sing “Who Let the Dogs Out.” Naturally.

HotRod really proves the old adage: it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you smash up cars without getting arrested that matters.

Joe Berlinger’s exploration of Chevron/Texaco oils’ affect on Ecuadorian communities in Crude doesn’t immediately draw comparisons to gang culture in South Central L.A. But Stacy Peralta’s Crips and Bloods: Made in America does share the same crucial theme of minority cultures suffering due to social, political and economical factors.
In Crude, it is a big corporation dumping toxic waste in waters that serve to hydrate and clean 30,000 Ecuadorians. Berlinger documents the legal battle between the oil company and its team of lawyers and health experts versus the grass roots and human rights lawyers trying to make it right - “it” being the polluted water causing livestock and livelihood to die, teenagers to get cancer and two week old babies to be covered in rashes head to tie. The quest for justice and awareness is hopeful, thanks to coverage in Vanity Fair, support from Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa and from Trudie Styler (co-founder of the Rainforest Foundation).
In Crips and Bloods, Peralta explains the genesis of gang culture by going back in time to slavery, the Watts riots, the banning of “undesirables” from certain neighborhoods and the Rodney King riots which all helped form the largest gangs in North America. Other factors like fatherless families, poor education and a gun culture has created a new family unit - the gang.
It’s the same story for both documentaries, that no resources and an unequal battle has led to dire circumstances, although in Crips and Bloods, it’s a little harder to define who is the enemy in the battle.
But Crips and Bloods does end on a hopeful note too, with some former gang members opening up groups and centers to give black youth opportunities that don’t involve guns or red or blue colors. Peralta’s doc also claims the support of celebrities, NBA star Baron Davis (who served as producer of the film), Snoop Dogg and Lil Wayne.
Both films document fights that for all sorts of reasons should be major issues, but have somehow never found sustained interest from the media, politicians and everyday people - unless you count 1-minute news clips about a gun fight or dead body in Compton. Crude and Crips and Bloods deserve to be seen.

Valentino: The Last Emperor is the portrait of a fashion designer as he reluctantly winds down his long storied career. Directed by first time director and Vanity Fair contributor Matt Tyrnauer, the film has incredible access on the man himself, and his longtime business partner and companion Giancarlo Giammetti.

This warts and all documentary gives a sense of what Valentino Garavani has contributed to haute couture for almost 50 years, with a lavish anniversary party and retrospective in Rome, which brought together gowns from collections dating back to 1962 and the hundreds of celebrities, editors and style mavens that have contributed to Valentino’s success.

In the run up to the show, audiences get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of seamstresses painstakingly trying to bring Valentino’s sketches to life, the rush of getting a collection out, models lurking about, and muses doing whatever it is that muses do. And of course, there are also Valentino’s five beloved pugs, Molly, Milton, Monty, Margot and Maude running about.

The stress and importance of the show weighs heavily on Valentino, who at the time refused to admit that retirement was in his future, although the party hinted loudly that this was his last fashion hurrah, as well as on Giancarlo, which often led to heated exchanges between the volatile pair. One notable heated argument concluded with the low blow from Giancarlo that Valentino was looking fat, presumably the worst thing one can say to someone in fashion.

While the main event of the documentary is gearing up for the glitzy party celebrating Valentino and his work, it is the interaction and love between Giancarlo and Valentino that becomes the focus. Tyrnauer continues the aim of hisVanity Fair article that led to the film’s creation by bringing Giancarlo up to level footing with Valentino and showing that he had as much to do with Valentino’s success as the designer himself. Their business relationship is long and successful, and is entangled with their romantic relationship.

Getting insight to both the relationships amidst all of the glitz and glamour makes the film one to watch, and is a great farewell to Valentino’s fashion career.

Once Upon a Time in Norway is the story of Norway’s biggest export: black metal.

The doc is basically an oral history of the beginnings of this extreme genre of metal, as told through interviews with those who were integral in its creation; at least those who are still around to talk about it.

The band Mayhem is one of the originators of black metal, a style of metal that was faster and heavier than most other genres of metal, and that was called “black” because it was also darker than typical metal. Before watching this doc the one thing I knew about Mayhem was that their lead singer shot himself in the head and the picture of the aftermath was used as the band’s next album cover. That event is explained in this doc, along with others that equally fit the “dark” imagery they depicted in their music.

Because the doc is put together through back to back interviews with members of Mayhem, Emperor and Cadaver, among other Norwegian metal bands from the mid-to-late ’80s and early ’90s, it shares interesting stories, but not much more than you could just read about with the same amount of intrigue. Also, for a music doc, there’s only roughly two minutes of black metal played throughout the film. If you have some spare time today I suggest you look up ‘Norwegian black metal,’ ‘Mayhem’ and/or ‘Øystein Aarseth’ online.

The mysterious, seemingly non-descript title of the doc 65_Redroses refers to what a child calls Cystic Fibrosis when she’s too young to pronounce it. It’s also Eva Markvoort’s screen name on a cystic fibrosis social networking site.

Markvoort is a young woman suffering from CF who, like other patients with the same affliction, cannot spend time with other people with the disease for fear of spreading super bugs between them. While she waits for a double lung transplant which will give her roughly five more years to live, she finds comfort and understanding in her friends with CF online. One of her friends, screen-name Spirit of Kina, knows what she’s going through as she’s had a lung transplant before, one which her body seems to be rejecting.

Like many medical docs, 65_Redroses is at times hard to watch, particularly when Eva is coughing uncontrollably and gasping for a breath, but watching her discomfort and then seeing evidence of her unbreakable spirit makes the viewer root for her. It’s remarkable how she remains so positive when she can barely breathe, nevermind the fact that she’s being followed by filmmakers Philip Lyall and Nimisha Mukerji the whole time.

Through the deep access Markvoort gives the filmmakers, 65_Redroses gives viewers a deeper look into a disease that kills young people while sending a clear message about the importance of both organ donation and social networking for people who are too ill to leave their hospital room.

Old Partner highlights two things that most of us have forgotten or try very hard to forget. The first is that we will age and eventually die. The second is that machines and technology have separated us from the relationship we once had with animals.

In director Chung-ryoul Lee’s film, the three main characters are nearing the end of their lives. Choi Won-kyun is 79 and his wife Lee Sam-sun is 76. At a time when advertisement and entertainment industries are pushing for youth, it is a little jarring, and yet relieving, to see close ups of the married couple’s wrinkled sunken faces and hunched backs from daily labor in their farm in a remote village in South Korea. The third character is Choi’s beloved ox, the forty-year-old animal whose shaggy bony old body shares similarities to Choi’s face and body, much like the pet dogs and cats that start to look like their owners.

The deteriorating health of both Choi and the ox are painfully obvious. Choi’s neurologist tells him to rest and stop working so hard, and another doctor tells him he has a broken bone in his toe that can’t be reset because he never let it heal. In preparation, Choi and his wife get funeral portraits taken. The ox is predicted to have just one more year in him. It is inevitable that by the documentary’s end, one of them will die.

It is the film’s focus on the relationship of Choi and his ox that makes this a moving, captivating film. While neighboring farmers are seen using their machines with ease, Choi stubbornly refuses to move from his decades of tradition and keeps to the backbreaking methods of manual labor. While his wife weeds by hand, ankle deep in mud, Choi finds dandelions to feed the ox.  Clearly, this man loves his ox. At one point, the half deaf farmer proclaims, “To me, this ox is better than a human being.” This is much to the chagrin of his poor wife, who constantly nags her husband that he takes better care of the ox than her. It oddly has a ring of truth, as she complains that she’s overworked, has lost her teeth and won’t be getting false teeth because Choi won’t take care of her. He crouches silently on the porch as she talks, then gets up to scratch the ox’s face, who was trying to get to it himself.

As the film nears its conclusion and the ox and Choi near closer and closer to their deathbeds, the intense connection between human and animal is poignant, and is reminiscent of an almost forgotten time when man and beast had a tender working relationship with one another.

Activist/filmmaker Velcrow Ripper’s latest documentary, Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action begins as a sort of tribute to his slain friend and colleague Brad Will, who was shot and killed while the two of them were documenting a paramilitary crackdown on protesters in Mexico. Ripper, the narrator of the film, becomes introspective in the wake of what happened to his friend, and confronted with his own mortality, asks questions about the nature of what it is he is doing as a documentarian and activist.

Thus the crux of the film comes into focus. Fierce Light, co-produced by the NFB in association with Big Picture Media and distributed in Canada through Seville Pictures and in the US through Lorber HT Digital, is an exploration of the spiritual dimensions of non-violent social and political activism. Although much of the film focuses on North America and the United States particularly, the broad-ranging themes - such as the legacy of figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - reach all over the world from South Africa to India to Vietnam. The film also includes interviews with the more prominent spiritual figures involved in the major activist struggles of the past century, particularly Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Civil Rights activist-turned-congressman John Lewis.

Some of the iconic social and political struggles of the last 50 years are discussed, with a focus on what Ripper sees as the underlying spiritual motivation behind the activism. Ripper seems to argue that the spirituality involved, whether it is based in Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, or Baptist Christianity, is fundamentally non-dogmatic and essentially non-denominational - a view much in line with Ripper’s confessed Baha’i roots.

The film also suggests that all these causes, from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, to the Civil Rights movement in Alabama, to the struggle for the rights of the “untouchables” caste in India, and even the tree-sitting campaigns in the redwood forests of the United States, are truly something of a united cause after all: the campaign for a better world.

There are glaring omissions, however, in the movements that the film showcases, particularly the respective brands of activism within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where there are a plethora of religious dimensions involved, although perhaps not strictly spiritual in the way that Ripper may define it. Although the conflict, as we’re exposed to it in the media, is predominantly violent, non-violent movements within both parties do exist, if small in size and exposure. Conversely, violent wings of both the Civil Rights and anti-apartheid movements did exist as well, but in Ripper’s film, they are not even acknowledged in passing.

At the same time, Ripper does not completely avoid the subject of violent conflict in his film, particularly by using the backdrop of the Vietnam War as part of his exposé of Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh’s walking meditations - although the film emphasizes Hanh’s struggle for peace and reconciliation ever since that brutal war.

To bookend his film, Ripper uses the South Central Farm protest (subject of 2008’s The Garden) as a kind of metaphor for how the “better world” campaign is doing, and even though the film ends with the eviction of the South Central Farmers from their urban “garden of Eden,” which is then bulldozed, the scene is later followed by a caption stating that the farmers planted a new one on a large plot outside just outside LA. This all seems to say that, while “the power of guns and money” - in the words of one feminist leader included in the film - won out, the audacity of the human spirit and what Gandhi called “soul power” still perseveres and can triumph.

The message of Fierce Light then comes full circle, as it’s suggested that the better world being pursued by activists such as Ripper is already here, if only manifested in the human heart.

It was a Sunday night and nothing else was on. That’s my reason for tuning into the Britney Spears doc For the Record. But once I started watching, I was mesmerized. The girl is more in touch with reality in this authorized documentary special than she seems to have been in the past year or two. I actually had a hard time connecting the girl quite coherently and contemplatively answering the questions about her troubled past with the gal that was splashed all over celebrity magazines shaving her own hair and spontaneously running into the ocean in her underwear. The dazed look is gone these days, perhaps due to her father running a tight ship–as he has legal permission to control her financial and personal affairs–and the doctors she says she checks in with frequently. At the same time, these are the same people Spears blames for making her feel locked in and are too in control of her life. Sometimes a gal just wants to be able to drive down the freeway with her baby son on her lap.