The Hot Docs film festival is becoming an annual staple at our house since they started doing streaming. I didn’t get around to writing my impressions of the films last year, but I will try this time around.

Blue Island

This film about the civil unrest in Hong Kong uses a unique re-enactment technique, which casts participants from the recent protests as older people who lived through various upheavals in HK’s past.

Let me give an example, using some pseudonyms because I can’t remember the actual names. In one segment, we see a young man (Josh) being interrogated by law enforcement. This is actually a re-enactment of the experiences of an older man (Raymond) who was arrested in the 60’s. Josh-as-Raymond ends up sitting in a jail cell, but then we cut immediately to Josh-as-himself, sitting in the same jail cell and still in costume, talking about his arrest and imprisonment in 2019/2020.

Later, we also see the older Raymond(-as-himself), sitting in the same jail cell set, together with Josh(-as-himself). They have a conversation about the shared trauma of being arrested and beaten and jailed, and Raymond questions Josh about whether it’s really worth it. Does he really believe in the cause? Will the cause still matter to him in ten years, after he gets out of prison and the world has moved on?

It’s a powerful scene, made even more powerful by the fact that Raymond, in the 60’s, was imprisoned for speaking out against the British government, in support of the Chinese Communist Party. Josh, on the other hand, got in trouble for essentially the opposite: protesting against the CCP, in favour of democracy.

This scene in particular really drove home for me the complexities and contradictions of how HK even exists. It’s been easy to take sides for or against the recent protests, but this film provides the historical context which shows that Hong Kong has always had a fragmented identity. It makes it feel inevitable that the city would eventually fall apart. Someone says in the film that Hong Kongers themselves have never been able to control what happens to them and their city, and it’s a heart-breaking sentiment.

OKAY! The ASD Band Film

This was a nice dose of positivity. A lot of documentaries are about difficult social problems, so I wanted to choose at least one film which landed more on the “feel-good” side of things.

We follow a pop/rock band made up of four individuals on the autism spectrum as they write and record songs for an album (Fireflies, well worth a listen), and we get some background on their family lives and upbringings. It’s meant to be inspirational and it works. I found myself wanting to see more of the friendship that develops between the four band members, but I suppose part of the point is that their bond is based primarily on the music that they make together, and not on more neurotypical ideas of interpersonal interactions.

I don’t usually pick on film titles, but surely they could have come up with something more meaningful than OKAY! It doesn’t represent or signify anything that happens in the film (say, for example, a catchphrase that the band members use with each other). Why not pick a song title or lyric from the band’s album?

Also, it seems to have led to some indecision about capitalization and punctuation in publications on the Internet. I’m seeing:

• Okay! (The ASD Band Film)
• OKAY! The ASD Band Film
• and even OKAY!: The ASD Band Film

Which exclamation-point-plus-colon combo I kind of like, actually.

To the End

I worry a lot about climate change, but I struggle with translating the anxiety into action. I simply don’t know what to do. I’m sure this is true of a lot of people. Watching this documentary about four women at the forefront of climate activism (one of which is the famed politician, AOC) amplified this helpless feeling for me. If these four people who are more passionate, more powerful and let’s face it, more youthful than I am can try so hard and still only manage to barely to move the needle, then what can I really do with my limited reach and resources? But on the other hand, seeing that they are out there and fighting as hard as they can does open up another, more hopeful perspective: that the needle does move, even a little, and it’s happening close to the top of the power pyramid.

As far as storytelling goes, the film could have used a bit more contextual information. There are mentions of political slogans and taglines (“Build Back Better”, “Green New Deal”) that I was only peripherally familiar with, and congressional votes and elections that I had trouble fitting into an overall timeline. The results of said votes and elections would have had a more dramatic impact if the stakes were clearer.

The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales

This film follows a handful of Disneyland employees who are struggling to get by because of low wages and increasing living costs. Although it focusses on Disney as an employer, the inequality problem is a universal one across the U.S. I don’t think there was anything revelatory here for me, but that’s no fault of the film itself. I just happen to fall on the socialist side of the economic spectrum, and I believe that it does the world no good for wealth to flow unceasingly in one direction. As such, I tend to steep myself in anti-capitalist commentary online. There are some cool animated segments in the film which describe the history of capitalism, but again, it was nothing that I didn’t already know.

An interesting layer to this story is that one of the directors of the film is Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of one of Disney’s founders. I have a lot of respect for her speaking out against her own family’s legacy, even though she’s kind of saying, “Inequality is a problem, and the company that my family created is a big part of that problem… BUT, if my family was still in charge, instead of the corporate fat cats that took over, we would never have let this happen.”

This may be true, but it adds a bit of a narcissistic flavour to the documentary. Abigail herself appears in scenes where she interviews the Disney employees or various economic experts, and to me, it was unnecessary to insert herself in this way. Unfortunately, I think it weakens the message by making the viewer wonder about her motivations.

As a final note to self, my choices this year were on topics that I was already interested in, and I think it was detrimental to my overall enjoyment of the festival. More care needs to be taken next time to explore a more diverse slate of subjects.