The Hot Docs Festival wrapped late last week and a jury handed out awards on Friday.
Call Me Kuchu
I saw Call Me Kuchu after it won Best International Feature (each year they play three award winners during the festival's last evening). I had tried to avoid the movie because depression and anger aren't emotions I like feeling, especially with something that affects me on such a personal level. The anger is rooted in denial. I'd like to think that the struggle is over for LGBT people but it isn't in so many communities and countries.
"Kuchu" is a pejorative umbrella term referring to homosexuals, male or female, for Uganda's homophobic government and majority opinion. Directors Malika Zouhali-Worrall and Katherine Fairfax Wright follow a small group of gay activists in this hostile environment and focus on David Kato in particular. His violent death took place during this documentary's production. His murder sparked outrage in the Western world but Uganda's government and majority resent the Western interference in their policies.
One of the other movies given an additional screening was Nisha Pahuja's The World Before Her, which also made a splash at Tribeca. It won the top prize of Best Canadian Feature and $10,000. This documentary compares contestants of the Miss India pageant with young women of the same age toting guns in Hindu fundamentalist camps, exposing the lack of options for social and economic mobility of young woman in India. According to the CBC, Pahuja's previous credits include TV doc Diamond Road and it took her two years to gain access to the fundamentalist camps. More award winners after the jump.
The World Before Her
The third major award winner which showed on the final night was Ariel J. Nasr's The Boxing Girls of Kabul. It won the Inspirit Foundation Pluralism Prize. The HBO Emerging Artist Award was shared by two films; Tchoupitoulas by Bill and Turner Ross of the U.S. looks at teenage boys sneaking off for an adventure in the French quarter of New Orleans and Meanwhile in Mamelodi by Boris Frank of Germany and South Africa goes to District 11, one of South Africa's most impoverished places to watch a struggling man following the World Cup race on a blurry tv screen. The Mid-length documentary prize went to David Tucker's My Thai Bride, about the potential double-edged deception between the titular bride and her Caucasian husband who has given up everything to raise a farm with a woman he claims to be the love of her life. Who are we to judge, I guess.
For those of you reading right now that have seen and liked Tchoupitoulas -please visit its iMDb page because it's doing poorly there right now and those ratings are more important than we think they are. It's often my answer when I'm asked what my favourite doc was.
Tchoupitoulas
But Scarlet Road... a documentary about a sex workerfighting for universal legalization of sex work in Australia and an end to discrimination against her specialization, disabled men. Now my heart is saying that that's my favourite doc.