The Bloor Theatre, and right next door, Ghazale, which sells Toronto’s best shawarma sandwiches

In order to attend Hot Docs, I flew to Toronto on Friday April 18 and arrived in time to catch the premiere of Club Native at the Bloor Cinema. At that beautiful theater with capacity for 850 people, Tracy Deer’s documentary played to a house full of her supporters. The film depicts the complexities of Canada’s Bill C-31, which declares that First Nations women who marry non-natives are allowed to maintain their native status. The conflict arises as some groups who do not accept the bill’s decision tacitly force Native women to abandon their reserves when they marry non-native men. Deer focuses on the Mohawks on the Kahnawake reserve in Quebec. Some great things about this film: the range of the women featured in the film whose articulate accounts were both moving and aware, and the wealth of archival footage specially that documenting the 1990 clash between Mohawks and the town of Oka. This stand off lasted almost 4 months and resulted in three deaths. One of the subjects in the film, Waneek Horn-Miller, was fourteen years old at the time, and she recalls being stabbed by a Bayonet and knocked to the ground by Canadian military as she carried supplies for her fellow Mohawks. It was an enraging sight to behold—four adult men fully armed bullying a small teenager. Horn-Miller also recounts being so consumed by this memory that she allots all her energy and attention to water polo to avoid dealing with her trauma. She becomes an athlete and leads the Canadian women’s water polo team to the 2000 Sydney Olympics. After retiring from sports, however, Horn-Miller has to work out her violent experience. The film can be a bit messy in how combines the disparate footage, and there are several talking heads that do not add much to the conversation. Still, what a breath of fresh air was to watch a documentary about Indigenous people made by one of their own!

A view of the CN Tower, the world’s tallest building

Another account of community—albeit one based more on a perceived rather than a material outsider status—is fleshed out in Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard’s Beautiful Losers. The “losers” of the title are the skaters, punk rockers and graffiti taggers (predominantly men, with the exception of Jo Jackson and the late Margaret Kilgallen) who congregated around Rose’s Lower East Side art gallery and would come to great success in the art world in the 1990s. The film incorporates beautiful cinematography with intentionally (Mike Mills) and unintentionally (a bloated Harmony Korinne) funny anecdotes. It also includes a touching remembrance of Kilgallen, a painter who tagged abandoned train cars with hobo self-portraits.

Not-to-be-missed is Be Like Others. In contemporary Iran, homosexuality is illegal, but sex reassignment surgery for diagnosed transsexuals is not. The film, directed by Tanaz Eshaghian, follows several people about to undergo surgery. Some of the subjects are supported and embraced by their families. We see a mother who makes the transition as well as her offspring. She even confronts the male hairdresser fiancé who won’t marry her daughter. Sadly, the film also shows the characters who—although not female-identified, but rather persecuted for their effeminacy—have no choice but to pursue surgery as to avoid harassment, prison, or worse. Set in the surgeon’s office, there is a scene in the documentary that pits a radio journalist against a conflicted patient. This is a crucial moment in the film as the patient passionately articulates his oppression: in a society that will kill him for being who he is, he has to become someone that he is not—and is that life worth living? The film was well paired with Faisal Aziz’s short, The Unbearable Whiteness of Being. In eleven minutes, Aziz presents a South Asian brother and sister living in England, as they peddle their skin whitening cream at a trade show. Interviews with customers reveal yet another awful remnant of colonialism’s legacy. Eshaghian and Aziz were present for a lively Q&A session, although most of the questions were aimed at Eshaghian, who disclosed that she only featured male-to-female subjects because female-to-male Iranians did not want to “come out” on camera as transgender for fear of harm.

Q&A session with filmmakers Faisal Aziz and Tanaz Eshaghian

Other notable films I saw were British filmmaker James Marsch’s Man On Wire, which debuted at Sundance and is deservedly receiving many accolades; and Tiger Spirit by Min Sook Lee (another awesome female Canadian director premiering at the Bloor). I expected more from Victoire Terminus: described as a portrait of female boxers in Congo and set amidst chaotic presidential elections, directors Renaud Barret and Florent De La Tullaye fail to find storylines for their subjects. In Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker? German director Barbara Caspar constructs a loving and complicated biography of the transgressive experimental fiction writer. I loved the great archival footage of Acker in interviews and performances. She was truly a magnetic artist and this film is a timely tribute to her. There is some confusing juxtaposition using archival footage, however. For example, grainy footage depicting Acker’s move to New York in 1974 is underscored by Le Tigre’s song “Bang! Bang!” which makes reference to the NYPD’s shootings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond in the 1990s. I did enjoy seeing Acker’s friends reminisce about her, especially Kathy Brew, whose new project, Beauty Behind Bars, we fiscally sponsor. Another highlight: Kathleen Hannah stating that Acker told her after a reading that she should share her thoughts and feelings wth the world and form a band. Hannah promptly did as she was told. The rest, as they say, is riot grrrl herstory.