A little over a month ago, I attended the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival for the first time. There was a wide variety of subject matter, and I appreciated that most (every?) showing included filmmaker Q&As after the credits. I’ll go again next year, as long as the festival’s apparent financial woes don’t tank it in the meantime.

Grand Theft Hamlet

United Kingdom | 2024 | 89m | English

When the COVID-19 pandemic leaves a couple of Shakespearean actors out of work, they decide to stage a production of Hamlet entirely inside of Grand Theft Auto Online. There is nothing mind-blowing here to anyone who was raised on Machinima, but there were plenty of moments where I laughed along with the theatre. I overheard an older couple (by older, I mean people who definitely do not play GTA Online) talk favorably about this movie afterwards. Personally, I wished there was more of an exploration of why the filmmakers chose Grand Theft Auto Online for the Hamlet production. There are other games they could have done this in: VR Chat, Second Life, Roblox, etc. So what is it about GTA specifically that lends itself to Shakespeare? The movie doesn’t explore this, which was a big missed opportunity.

If YouTubers made this, it would have had an entirely different feel. For starters, they would not have had to artificially recreate certain moments, such as when a key actor drops out of the project. In an era of livestreaming, there is no excuse as to why that part couldn’t have been captured live. Still, I appreciate the filmmakers’ commitment to their concept; 100% of the movie takes place in-game. I think you’ll know right away if the concept of this movie interests you. Go with that gut feeling as you decide if you want to watch this.

2/5

Black Box Diaries

United States of America, United Kingdom, Japan | 2024 | 102m | English, Japanese

Black Box Diaries is a documentary directed by Shiori Itō about her own sexual assault and subsequent efforts to seek justice. The movie shines an unflattering spotlight on Japanese judicial and societal norms regarding rape victims. There’s a police officer who has it within his power to make a positive difference in Itō’s case, and yet he chooses to do nothing because he’s worried about backlash from his higher-ups. Rather than being depicted as the craven coward he is for refusing to help in all but the most minuscule manner, Itō tearfully thanks him, and her documentary generally portrays him as a uniquely heroic figure within the Japanese police system. It was frustrating to watch, but I suppose that’s the point.

Itō herself was in attendance at the screening and came on stage to answer questions after the film concluded. About 4 or 5 people in the audience prefaced their questions by mentioning that they, too, have been victims of sexual assault, and so they appreciated Itō’s courage and determination in creating this film. Black Box Diaries is a deeply sobering and depressing movie, but one that deserves to be watched.

3/5

Eternal You

Germany, United States of America | 2024 | 87m | English, Korean

Eternal You is about the digital afterlife industry: those companies that use data from deceased people to create chatbots or 3D avatars out of them.

In one scene, we see a mother speaking to her dead “son” in a chat interface. She asks him how he’s doing and he replies that he’s cold and lonely. She asks him where he is and he answers, “I’m in hell.” Tears start falling from her eyes. In my Toronto theater, this moment elicited upset gasps from the audience. The director told us afterward that when he screens his film in Europe, audiences respond to that moment with laughter. The next scene in the documentary showed an interview with the creator of the dead-person-chatbot. He, too, laughed, saying that he doesn’t feel any guilt whatsoever. “I would tell her, ‘I think your entire worldview is misguided,’” he says with a grin.

It’s an attitude that I see all the time in tech. Far too often is there an implicit assumption that everyone is some flavor of techno-utopian atheist progressive, and anyone who deviates from that worldview is a backwards rube who deserves to be dragged kicking and screaming into our Brave New World.

The scene where the Korean mother interacts with her daughter in a VR environment, moaning and weeping, pawing at empty space in front of her in the vain attempt to feel the face of her dead child one last time was genuinely one of the most fucked up things I’ve seen in a movie in a long, long time. I cried hard in the theater. Eternal You is a documentary that will raise all kinds of uncomfortable questions and leave you not with answers but with dread towards where the future is headed. A must-see.

4.5/5

Rouge

United States of America | 2024 | 90m | English

Rouge tells the story of the River Rouge High School basketball program, from its peak in the 1950s to its decline, to its revival with a modern team roughly 70 years later. I went into this without knowing anything at all about this team, so I figured there must be a story here to make the documentary worth it. By the end, though, it seemed to me that the people who will enjoy this movie the most are those in the actual River Rouge community. Sure, the cinematography is good, but the narrative of the documentary is completely and utterly decimated when COVID-19 forces a premature halt to the modern team’s basketball season (and championship dreams).

I appreciated that Rouge is Michigan-centric. Even Tom Izzo, the basketball coach from my alma matter Michigan State University, makes an appearance. To me, the movie was fine. Basketball fans more familiar than I with the River Rouge team might get more out of this.

2/5

Red Fever

Canada | 2024 | 104m | English

Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond travels through North America and Europe to discover why certain depictions of indigenous peoples – think feather headdresses, teepees, etc. – continue to endure in popular culture, despite the fact that most indigenous people today don’t dress or live like that at all.

The most eye-opening part for me was when the documentary explored how the United States’s own notion of democracy drew inspiration from colonists’ encounters with indigenous forms of government.

Red Fever didn’t leave much of an impression on me, but it wasn’t bad.

2/5

Secret Mall Apartment

United States of America | 2024 | 91m | English

This movie is painfully Gen X. It tells the story of a small collective of young, bohemian artists who discover and subsequently move into a hidden space inside the Providence Place shopping mall in 2003. Their “secret mall apartment” lasts for four years before its discovery and dismantling.

More than anything, this is a documentary about Michael Townsend, the artist for whom the secret mall apartment was simply one of his many avant-garde projects. There’s a lot of material in the movie about Townsend’s other endeavors, because the truth is that there isn’t enough to say about the secret mall apartment to fill the 90 minute run time, despite the hours upon hours of video camera footage that exists of the apartment.

Alright, so who cares? The documentary vaguely motions towards an anti-capitalist, “stick it to the Man” narrative by claiming that the Providence Place Mall itself was seen as an unwanted intrusion back when it was opened in 1999, and so the denizens of the secret mall apartment were simply re-appropriating land that was taken from the Providence community. Eh, I wasn’t convinced. I didn’t think that this non-story really had any business being a full length movie, but at least it held my attention.

2/5