Interview: Steve Hoover, Director of Oscar-Buzzing "Blood Brother"

Amir here. When Steve Hoover's debut Blood Brother, won both the audience and jury prizes at this year's Sundance Film Festival, it automatically became one of my most anticipated documentaries of the year. Lucky for me, I didn't have to wait long to see it. Hot Docs brought it to Toronto. Having now seen the film twice, crying through and laughing with it both times, I am confident this is one of the year's best films and deserves all the plaudits that will come its way.

a scene from Blood Brother

Blood Brother is a personal close-up of the director's best friend, Rocky - affectionately referred to by Indian children as "Rockyanna" - who has spent the past few years living in India in an orphanage where HIV-positive children and women are cared for. It is a character study of a man whose strength, humility and grace are unparalleled. Needless to say, the environment of the film is absolutely heartbreaking, particularly at the climax where we follow the story of a young boy named Surya and his experience with AIDS. What I didn't expect, however, was to leave the film filled not with sadness, but with joy and a new found appreciation for every little moment of my life. Hoover's film is anything but a tear-jerker. It maintains a fine balance between "extreme joy and extreme pain", as he put it, and in that balance finds a way straight to our hearts. 

On the occasion of Blood Brother's Hot Docs premiere, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Steve Hoover for a chat. Understandably, most of you haven't had the chance to see it yet and the intimate details of the films discussed here probably won't mean as much to you as they do to me, but this film is an absolute must-watch. I hope you'll seek it out and check back on this interview again then. 

AMIR: I’ll admit upfront that I’m a bit jealous of you, both because you’ve made such a wonderful film at such a young age and because you get to be friends with Rocky.

STEVE HOOVER: Thanks! You know, I’m 30. You still have a few years to get here.

AMIR: I’m not optimistic about my chances! But let’s get to your story. I want to ask you a bit about your relationship with Rocky prior to the film...

Steve Hoover (director) and his best friend Rocky (subject) in "Blood Brother"

Click to read more ...

Nashville Film Festival ~ Our Jury Prizes

As some of you know I attended the Nashville Film Festival last week as a juror. I haven't ever truly mastered the How To of reporting from film festivals -- I marvel at the blogs who seem to have time to see five movies a day and socialize with other festivalgoers AND review all of them as if there are 48 hours in each day -- so you're getting my jury notes super late! This time I was on the Narrative Feature Jury which meant 16 movies crammed into less than a week. I tried to see other features outside my slate but my eyes begged for relief after just two (The Spectacular Now and I Am Divine -- more on those later) since I wasn't able to stay very long this year.

Nashville is one of the USA's oldest ongoing film festivals and it doesn't get enough attention in the media. One of the reasons is surely the concurrent Tribeca, a far starrier affair. Still, I'd personally argue that festivals like Nashville are more crucial to the good health of cinema and here's why...

Click to read more ...

Hot Docs: Interior. Leather Bar.

Reports from the 2013 Hot Docs Film Festival

Paolo here. Because I tend to overreact to thing I proclaimed that last year's Hot Docs film festival here in Toronto was 'overtly sexual'! As it turns out, last year's crop had more diverse topics: death, culture, loss, legacy. And the same can be said about the documentaries this year but we won't abandon the docs about sex. Here's one now, James Franco's Interior. Leather Bar.

[NSFW Franco provocations after the jump]

Click to read more ...

Hot Docs: Pussy Riot - A Punk Prayer

Amir here, reporting from the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto.

Most critics who take notes during screenings will testify that, at least once, they’ve encountered a film that renders their notes useless. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer was one of those films, which is fitting since co-directors Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin manage to capture the anarchic spirit of Pussy Riot quite authentically. Having started my notes with a relatively balanced number of positive and negative points, I found myself with almost a page full of crossed-out complaints and a film I felt compelled and excited by in equal measure.

Pussy Riot, an HBO produced documentary, follows Nadia, Katia and Masha, the three leading members of the now infamous Pussy Riot movement – a group of feminists who organize spontaneous demonstrations against the totalitarian Putin regime in Russia. [more]

Click to read more ...

The Manor Opens Hot Docs '13

Amir here, with my first dispatch from Hot Docs, North America’s biggest documentary film festival.

My friends had parents who were dentists or ran stores. My parents own a strip club.”

So says Shawney Cohen, the director of The Manor, the Canadian film that opens the festival tonight. Advertised with images of the invitingly neon-lit entrance of a strip club and scantily-clad dancers, The Manor seems to have been chosen as the opening night film based on an old adage we know all too well: sex sells. It’s a risky move by the festival’s programmers because anyone going in to buy sex will surely leave the theatre disappointed. Those of us going in not based on the marketing material but on the promise of a great opener had nothing to worry about. The Manor is an intimate family portrait that explores universal themes of familial bonding through a sharp and wryly humorous lens.

Shawney was six years old when his Jewish parents – Roger, a European immigrant, and Brenda, a Torontonian – bought The Manor, a strip club in suburban Ontario with a hotel attached to it. The purchase of the club proved to be a turning point in the life of the Cohen family that, for better or worse, has remained tied to the locale for nearly three decades; and indeed, this tenacious relationship between the Cohens and The Manor forms the core of the film.

Very little of what happens on the stages of the club is captured by Cohen’s camera. The Manor isn’t even passively sexy; it’s actively unsexy. Cohen’s attention is directed at what the audience doesn’t want to see. He’s directed his focus on the all-encompassing impact that the strip club has made on the lives of everyone connected to it. From the concierge of the adjacent hotel – a former stripper at the club – whose overdose throws everyone for a loop to the arrest of one the mainstays at the club – an adopted son figure to Roger Cohen – everyone’s life seems irreversibly affected by their presence at The Manor.

The titular club hence becomes the film’s pivot; its importance not the product of the type of service it provides or the low-key glamour of its performers, but the consequence of the centrality it has for the Cohen family. Shawney, having lived his whole life trying to blend in with others and find normalcy in an unusual situation, sees no reason to glamorize or sensationalize a story that has become the only reality he knows. An hour and a half later, the curiously mismatched family members and their deceptive occupation grows into an intimate reality for the audience too.

Cohen doesn’t sex up his family’s story with sensual strip club lighting and alcohol. The club isn’t a guise under which a family film takes shape. As the story unravels, the impression becomes increasingly stronger that the only thing that forms the familial bond between the Cohens is the club. It is what hooks the family to the environment and often times to each other. Shawney takes a lot of mileage from the contrasting personalities of his family members to prove this point. His mother suffers from an eating disorder that has left her so thin and so weak that her hip shatters after a minor fall; his father suffers from a different eating disorder that has left him so obese he needs surgery to lose weight. His brother enjoys running the show at the club and dating the working girls from time to time; Shawney has felt the urge to leave his whole life. But even at times when they seem to share nothing in common, when marriages are about to crumble and relationships about to be broken, the club, its ownership and its problems bring everyone together.

All of this sounds incredibly personal, and it is; but that level of specificity allows Cohen to tell a universal story through his singular perspective. He questions the identities of his family members with intense scrutiny and asks them to reconsider themselves and their relationships at their most testing moments; and with a unique, dry sense of humor and a keen eye for finding the tender side of any situation, he invites us to do just as much.