HotDocs Corner: The Films of Christine Choy

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

We are looking at some of the movies playing Canada's beloved HotDocs festival. This week we're taking a trip through the films of Christine Choy who is the recipient of the 2023 HotDocs Outstanding Achievement Award and is screening a series of her films.

Despite all of the increased attention that has been paid to documentaries over the last decade (and believe it has been a marked improvement!), it can still be frustratingly hard to see recognition for works made before that shift took place. Particularly so when you consider pre-digital and even pre-video era, where widespread praise tends to fall around a certain canon of titles.

As ever, who gets that build the canon does so by means of access and identification. For example, it’s hardly surprising that the films of HotDocs’ Outstanding Achievement Award winner for 2023, Christine Chow, aren’t as widely known or critically recognised when they have remained so hard to find. Even her Academy Award nominee, Who Killed Vincent Chin? from 1988, has been difficult to see for decades—and it’s not the only such title by Choy or otherwise. It’s hard to imagine these works, marked with the telltale signs of a medium that still didn’t quite have the budgets or the avenues to do so, making headway into the popular zeitgeist. Unless, as was often the case with docs that became big hits, names attached were the likes of Madonna, Michael Moore or Martin Scorsese or from pioneers of the form like Wiseman or Maysles.

But now that they are making their way back through the festival scene and on digital platforms like Vimeo and Criterion Channel (no Netflix yet!), it’s about time to address them.

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HotDocs Corner: 'The Stroll' Reclaims the Narrative

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

We are looking at some of the movies playing Canada's beloved HotDocs festival. First up is buzzy Sundance hit, The Stroll.

The conversation around Jennie Livingston's iconic 1990 documentary Paris is Burning has been happening for many years now. The conversation that its white cis director profited financially and professionally from the lives of its black and latinx trans subjects who got very little out of its production. Whatever one thinks of it, it's hard to deny that as much as a film like The Stroll is needed today, it was also needed back then, too. Co-directed by Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker—two women directors who identify as transgender—The Stroll is the continued reclamation of trans stories on screen by those who have lived and breathed the life that it documents.

As you might expect, with this comes a lot of emotions to unpack. But Lovell and Drucker have crafted a film (the former’s first, the latter’s first feature after the 2021 series The Lady and the Dale) that reverberates for many more reasons than just representation.

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Doc Corner: Little Richard and Brooke Shields

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Little Richard and Brooke Shields are not exactly two people I would expect to pair together. They are both icons, sure; albeit for very different reasons. Little Richard (aka Richard Wayne Penniman) is a musical legend whose flamboyant style as a singer and as an entertainer was matched only by the talent of his songwriting and his singing. Shields, on the other hand, was labelled the beauty of a generation and whose zeitgeisty cultural footprint dovetails into a variety of societal taboos that cast a long shadow over the entertainment.

What ties them together in this moment right now is that they are the subjects of two new documentaries...

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Doc Corner: You Must See 'Sam Now'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Reed Harkness’s Sam Now is really something special. A debut that taps into an achingly sad story within his own family, covering decades of pain and the smiles used to cover it up. I could not take my eyes off of it, reverberating as it does with a potent mix of tragedy and the relief that comes with finally getting it off your shoulders. In finally telling this story so many years in the making, Harkness has given us a documentary that taps into completely unexpected wells of emotion—a Boyhood (of sorts) where life’s dramatic turns offer us a portrait of male anguish that would be hard to watch if it weren’t so vibrantly made and open-hearted in its delivery.

Synopses describe Sam Now as a “mystery”, but that does it a disservice. There is a mystery, of course. But it’s solved pretty quickly. And what follows is a quiet reckoning that is more compelling than any true crime narrative could ever hope to achieve.

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Doc Corner: It's Child's Play and 'Living with Chucky'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

No space within movie fandom feels more like a genuine community like the space taken up by horror. Not to get too Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious franchise, but for many, horror is a family that ties and binds people together. Even more so for queer lovers of the horror genre. Horror is particularly amenable to subtextual readings as well as straight-up camp and gay storytelling for many reasons, but that bond comes at least partly because horror (as a broad concept) and LGBTQ+ people have so much in common. Not that you need me to tell you any of that.

These narrative strands come together in Kyra Elise Gardner’s Living with Chucky. Ostensibly a documentary about the killer doll franchise that began as Child’s Play and has morphed more famously into The House of Chucky. It is also a telling of how this franchise was able to do what it did and remain relevant three decades later. Gardner is the daughter of one of the visual effects and puppeteer masters who’s brought Chucky to life over the years, so you could say she has particular insight.

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