2009 Summer
Table of Contents

What is the connection between developping an AIDS vaccing and music sampling? How are we going to think about property now? It's been irrovecably changed. How do we face that?

Brett Gaylor

I was in front of a tremendous force of life, like a little, strong and thin gold shaft of wheat, who shines without any doubts.

Laura Bari

It's not overly serious at EyeSteel. It's social documentary work, but not too preachy. It's supposed to be more fun and adventerous. People who are self-starters and want to make their own films find that they can learn by working with us.

Mila Aung-Thwin

The films that I've made with Nick are always touching on two unanswerable questions: the relation between randomness and meaning, and the problem of evil.

Jennifer Baichwal

We left at the end of the shoot with five interviews. We'd driven so much business away from the motel, the owners siad it took three months for the numbers to recover. When I called the patriarch to ask permission to return he said, "Let me tell you something: No."

Alison Rose

Paul [Saltzman] looks good. Comfortable. When I sit down beside him, he smiles. It's been a long journey to get here, from the chance inception of the story, through four months of gaining trust in a small town high school, to the incredibly difficult task of talking to young people about their own biases and forms of racism in the 21st century.

Devyani Saltzman

Was it the moment that Werner Herzog walked into my cramped hotel room, or the end of the Albert Maysles interview when he gave that angelic smile he has and told me, “I enjoyed that”, or was it when I was huddling over one little space heater in a cold London garage totally entranced by Kim Longinotto and her great humanity?

Pepita Ferrari

Obomsawin montages idyllic paintings, archival photographs, and nature images into a reverie of a lost paradise where work was linked to land and water, and therefore spirit.

Maurie Alioff

As long as I have worked with the NFB there have been cutbacks, cutbacks, cutbacks. Over the last 15 years, the first places to get cuts were always the regions.

Betsy Carson

Call it truth in advertising; Sancho chronicles the making of a film in which exhaustion was not only a physical fact but an organizing artistic principle- Albert Serra's exquisitely minimalist Three-Wise-Men-And-a-Baby narrative Birdsong (2008).

Adam Nayman

If the broadcasters’ wishes are granted, it’s clear that the independent production sector is in for a rough ride, not to mention Canadian citizens as a whole.

Barri Cohen

POV INTERVIEW

EyeSteelFilm: You Say Radical Like It’s a Bad Thing.

An interview with Daniel Cross and Mila Aung-Thwin by editor Marc Glassman
POV talks to the founders and producers of EyeSteelFilm, the feisty indie company behind S.P.I.T, Up the Yangtze and RiP.


RiP: The Making of a Manifesto by Matthew Hays

Legal issues, hot club music and Walt Disney collide in this funny, exciting film by EyeSteel’s Brett Gaylor. Matt Hays covers this subversive new doc.


Seeing with Detective Antoine. By Allan Tong


Quebecoise filmmaker Laura Bari’s first feature doc is about a remarkable blind boy named Antoine. Tong covers the story of Antoine and this poetic film.


SINGULAR SUBJECTS


The Universe is Electric: Jennifer Baichwal’s Act of God by Adam Nayman


Baichwal’s film, the opening night feature at Hot Docs, is about luck, coincidence and fate. Nayman writes about the elegant, philosophical vision achieved by Baichwal and her partner, Nick de Pencier, in Act of God.


Filming a Blank Slate by Alison Rose


What’s it like to film a doc about a “by the hour” motel? Love At The Twighlight Motel's Alison Rose shares her intimate thoughts.


Politics Become Film: Sundance 2009 by Devyani Saltzman


Saltzman journeyed with her filmmaker father, Paul, to Sundance for his premiere screening of the feature doc Prom Night in Mississippi. She reports about Park City, Obama, tourism and political cinema.


THE NFB AT 70


Creating Capturing Reality by Pepita Ferrari


Capturing Reality, about the art of documentary, is very much a homage to the NFB as well. Ferrari takes us through her memories of the films and filmmakers she interviewed for her doc.


Full Circle: Alanis Obomsawin Then and Now by Maurie Alioff


Alanis Obomsawin, the Hot Docs lifetime achievement winner, has become an icon for Canada’s native people as well as a brilliant documentarian. Alioff profiles a legend.



National Film Board on the Edge by Ken Eisner


What does the NFB contribute to B.C.’s film culture? Eisner investigates.


DEPARTMENTS



Pointed View: Mark Peranson’s Waiting for Sancho by Adam Nayman.


Should critics make films? Nayman takes up the cudgels for critic and neophyte director Peranson.


Policy Matters: Outrage at the Canadian Media Fund by Barri Cohen


On the cover: EyeSteelFilm’s Mila Aung-Thwin & Daniel Cross.

Photographer: Will Lew