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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Doc Corner: Steven Yeun Narrates 'Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Let’s be honest. Artist bio-docs are a dime a dozen. Many artists have received the treatment, even though documentary is (almost as if entirely by the medium’s nature) a not particularly good artform of its own within which to interrogate the life of somebody like Nam June Paik. Despite video being so integral to his work, much of its impact inevitably comes from being able to see his work flicker in front of your face rather than on the TV screen. Screens within screens.

For that reason I suspect Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV would be really great to see theatrically. Where the kaleidoscopic colours and swirling digital artistry could be brought to life in as immersive a way as they probably possibly could beyond seeing them in the technological flesh.

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