HOTDOCS 2007

It’s gonna be a moody, grey day and weekend. So if you’re looking for a quiet, moody meditation on life and art to match that weather, check out Forever, Hot Docs Outstanding Achievement Award Retrospective subject Heddy Honigmann’s poetic look at the artistic souls who visit Paris’s famous Pere-Lachaise Cemetery.

That famous site is the resting ground for some of the world’s most famous artists, including Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Maria Callas, Amadeo Modigliani, Frederic Chopin, Simone Signoret, and, of course, Jim Morrison.

Honigmann focuses her camera on a dozen or so people who find solace in visiting these graves....

You won’t listen to a telemarketer in quite the same way after watching Scouts Are Cancelled, a fascinating doc about poet John Stiles.

Stiles, born in rural Nova Scotia, lived for about 8 years in Toronto, where he took on a series of tough jobs to support himself, including door-to-door salesman (where he was told to sell in poor neighbourhoods, because the people would be more likely to listen to him and buy) and telemarketer.

During his telemarketing gig, he occasionally spoke to his unsuspecting customers in a series of colourful voices that harkened back to his small-town...

Unlike that other film festival, Hot Docs doesn’t rely on star power to sell its films. That doesn’t mean there aren’t celebrities attached to the movies, often providing voice-over narration.

But a couple of films at this year’s Hot Docs feature celebs in different ways. Paging through the program book, I thought I recognized Tilda Swinton’s (Orlando, Adaptation) high-cheekboned self in the entry for the film Strange Culture. Surely, I thought, some ordinary person can’t have the evil Queen of Narnia’s cold porcelain beauty.

Swinton, it turns out, plays one of the film’s real characters in a series of dramatic...

Looks like it’s going to be another gorgeous day, but try to find some time during it to catch the 4 pm screening of WAR/DANCE, husband-and-wife team Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine’s moving and uplifting documentary about children from war-torn northern Uganda who compete in a country-wide music and dance competition.

These kids are refugees in their own land. They’ve survived displacement, the murder of parents. The boys are caught and captured to join the hundreds of thousands of child soldiers in the rebel militia group, the Lord’s Resistance Army.

The directors focus on three children – Rose,...

My film Call of the Hummingbird is screening in just two days at Hot Docs. Launch time is on Earth Day — Sunday 4pm at the Bloor and I am heavy into countdown mode.

Forgive me if I'm writing in NASA-speak but I watched the opening film at Hot Docs last night and I guess it got to me. In the Shadow of the Moon is a visit with nine of the men on earth who have actually stepped foot on the moon and a recap of the space program that launched them there. And...

We've got a big issue tomorrow - The Green Issue and HotDocs. NOW's ecohottie Adria Vasil is on the cover with her new book, Ecoholic and NOW co-founder Alice Klein has her doc, Call of the Hummingbird screening this weekend at HotDocs. Both topics are getting some extra love online with HotDocs getting its blog on, in addition to the reviews and listings in-issue.

In other nowtoronto.com news, Join our flickr group and check out the green themed photos from our monthly competition. Give the photographer props and let 'em know NOW sent ya.

Now... back to my...