The Docs Are In

Many of the documentary films at this year's Hot Docs festival in Toronto aim to illuminate history through stories of individuals – extraordinary and ordinary.

This series of short reviews will formally initiate what may already be obvious to readers of The Mark: a regular column called “Reelpolitik” – reviews that not only critically address directorial vision, acting, mise-en-scène, cinematography, and technical effects, but also situate films in the social political context in which they were made and highlight some of the larger cultural themes addressed.

Documentary cinema will always provide an angle that the dry prose of history texts cannot: recorded images, voices, explanations, and the justifications of participants involved in events often much larger than themselves. At the same time, contrasting narratives remind us that the sweep of history is not simply a matter of the events themselves, but deeply contested interpretations of those events. Because the peaks of history – wars, military coups, assassinations, revolutions – have multiple causes, both structural and proximate, it is often easier and, let’s face it, more interesting and enjoyable, to make sense of the difficult and the confusing through individual stories, regardless of whether the individuals in question were the prime movers and shakers of events or perhaps the less fortunate – those to whom history simply happened. Many of the documentaries at this year’s Hot Docs festival try to do exactly that.

In Bhutto, the viewer is taken on a journey through the history of Pakistan via the life story of Benazir Bhutto. The daughter of former president and prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and twice prime minister herself, Bhutto was assassinated in 2007. The murder of the first woman to head a Muslim state remains unsolved, but Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency is implicated here, as it has been in many reports. This tribute to Bhutto’s life and career does not so much avoid the darker side of her political legacy as it denounces such suggestions as politically motivated untruths concocted by her long-time rivals. Pakistan’s long history of poverty, inegalitarian development, near-constant war with neighbouring India, military rule, nuclear proliferation, and courtship with and rejection by the West all converge to form an uneasy and bewildering backdrop. The impossibility of internal or external consensus – on the history of Pakistan, Bhutto’s life, or the larger tragedy that accompanied her family’s commitment to the nation’s public life – are all too clear.

Citizen Boilesen examines military rule and the cozy relationship between Brazil’s entrepreneurial elite and the state’s security apparatus in confronting “communism” and “terrorism” in the 1960s and 1970s. In this case, the story is personalized in the biography and eventual assassination of Henning Boilesen, high-society playboy and then president of Ultragaz, Brazil’s liquid gas giant. Boilesen, an enigmatic and self-made Brazilian of Danish origin, was deeply implicated in the activities of a unique military-civilian joint venture, Operação Bandeirantes (OBAN), which employed a take-the-gloves-off approach to the interrogation and torture of suspected militants. Boilesen’s nefarious activities are denied by his son and downplayed by his cronies, many of whom are interviewed here. A rather bizarre ex-post-facto psychoanalytic explanation is offered, largely by the Danes interviewed, who appear rather embarrassed and apologetic for the behaviour of their prodigal son.

Beirut! Not Enough Death To Go Round attempts to provide a voice for the usually unnamed and unknown victims of history, in this case civilians caught between the warring factions of Lebanon’s civil war. In particular, the film brings the camera to a community of urban refugees in West Beirut after an Israeli bombing in 1982 has destroyed their homes. Lives are ruined and fragmented by misfortune. The film invites an obvious sympathy, yet the director’s commitment to cinema verité generates too much repetition of anger, poverty, and misery to make sense of (which may indeed be the point). The film presumably aims to promote outrage and celebrate resistance but delivers didacticism devoid of context – not recommended for those who do not want to hear Israelis constantly referred to as the “murderers of Sabra and Shatila.”