BLOOD BROTHER (Steve Hoover) Rating: NNN
Big-hearted but half-cooked, Blood Brother profiles Rocky Braat, a young American who discovers his vocation as a volunteer at an Indian orphanage for children with HIV/AIDS.
Adventurous and naive, Braat went abroad looking for “authenticity.” Instead he found great suffering tempered by the irrepressible joy of the children for whom he would become an inexhaustible caregiver and honorary big brother. Braat grew up in an unstable, sometimes abusive home, so the orphans offer him a kind of surrogate family – albeit one whose members are in constant danger of perishing from their deadly affliction.
Blood Brother is the directorial debut of Steve Hoover, the subject’s best friend. Bursting with saturated colours and dominated by images of Braat sharing his energetic charges’ highs and devastating lows, this earnest first-person documentary is frequently both spectacular and moving. Aside from some backstory off the top and a wedding at the end, it’s also fairly shapeless and could have benefited from more context and critical distance and closer attention to structure.
Hoover comes by his emotional wallops honestly. I just wish he could have asked tougher questions along the way.
Opens Friday (December 13) at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See listings.