What a difference a year makes at the press conference announcing details of the annual Hot Docs film festival. But if you like to watch reality, gloom is always going to prevail, especially among those dependent upon a precarious funding system to keep making their idea of art. The pop-up box-office at Hazelton Lanes should itself be a sign — fewer high-end retail tenants to pay rent means Hot Docs can afford a splashier ground-floor storefront. Yet, the inclusion of six Canadian films given completion grants from Canwest — part of their federal obligation after gobbling up profitable specialty cable channels from Alliance Atlantis — takes on a morbid turn when the over-leveraged company is almost certain to need a government bailout to survive the spring.Hot Docs has crept a few weeks down the calendar, to the first ten days of May, with better weather counteracting the gloom associated with the festival — even if it incorporates a program titled “Let’s Make Money.” The recent combining of the Canadian Television Fund with the New Media Fund, meanwhile, is evidently a blow to those independents focused on self-contained feature-length treatments of a topic. Based on their podium comments this morning at the Revival Bar on College Street, director Jennifer Baichwal and producing partner Nick de Pencier want to stick up for that old-school packaging — and have the Hot Docs opening night, April 30 at the Winter Garden Theatre, in order to prove it: Act of God is their exploration of the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning. The selection is markedly more homespun than the movie Hot Docs kicked off with last year, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, whose multimedia momentum has now lasted for an entire year — culminating in a theatrical opening next month and acquisition by VH1 that risks market overkill for the local heavy metal underdogs. But this is how the game must be played today: the quaint festival find isn’t likely to get accidental attention. Conversely, most potential talking-points need to cast a wider net than offered by a one-way screen.Fittingly, among the offerings at Hot Docs with a broader context is We Live in Public, the documentary about dot-com millionaire Josh Harris and his Y2K-countdown experiment in online voyeurism relayed via a debauched bunker on website Pseudo.com — until it was raided, and he turned the cameras on his self-destructive self. Guaranteed to contain more drama than Twitter!Also from the web-culture category at Hot Docs: 65 Red Roses, about three internet friends who bond over their need for lung transplants; Another Perfect World, a Dutch production about the now-passé realm of Second Life; Graphic Sexual Horror, a Swedish offering about a torture-porn empire; and Winnebago Man, about the aftermath of viral video infamy brought on by expletive-laden television commercial outtakes from an RV dealer having a bad day.Meanwhile, the festival lineup features a few directors whose time served behind a camera has made them local demi-celebrities. A Hard Name, by Alan Zweig, steps outside his “mirror trilogy” of self-loathing confessional epics to focus on ex-convicts re-assimilating into society. Albert Nerenberg, fresh off the despised Let’s All Hate Toronto, retaliates with a film about his possibly fraudulent experiences as a professional laughologist; and, just like he promised in January, there’s a retrospective focus dedicated to the films of Ron Mann. But quite encouraging is a Hot Docs that features a few hyperlocal movies: Clubland focuses on the battles surrounding the downtown district whose right to silence is being defended Footloose-style by Councillor Adam Vaughan; Jackpot is about the improbably surviving Delta Bingo hall on the fringes of St. Clair West; Invisible City follows a pair of adolescents from Regent Park grappling with manhood; and When We Were Boys focuses on a couple of eighth-graders at a — conspicuously unspecified for the time being — area private school. Generally, it would follow that more goodwill could be generated in Toronto for financial support of quality documentaries about Toronto than funding for local filmmakers to dart off to other places. And, considering the growth of contempt for the Hollywood infestation associated with the TIFF, a festival where professional hometown stories was the main selling point would probably help transcend the corporate sponsor deprivation on display. No one wants to hear about hard times for a medium fixated on exploiting other people’s hard times.
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