Rachel Lears’s Knock Down The House, which captured Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s emergence from obscurity to become the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress, will have its international premiere at the 2019 Hot Docs film festival in April.
Ocasio-Cortez was one of four progressive candidates followed by Lears and her crew through the recent U.S. midterm elections. The documentary won the Festival Favorite Award at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and was snapped up by Netflix for a reported $10 million. It’s one of 15 titles announced as Special Presentations on Tuesday, March 5. However, it is unclear whether Ocasio-Cortez or fellow subjects Cori Bush, Paula Jean Swearengin or Amy Vilela will accompany the film to Toronto.
Films set to make their world premieres as Special Presentations at Hot Docs are Laurie Lynd’s Killing Patient Zero, which sets out to clear the name of the Quebec flight attendant identified as the Typhoid Mary of the AIDS epidemic, and Phyllis Ellis’s Toxic Beauty, an exploration of the underside of the cosmetics industry.
Canadian filmmaker John Walker – the subject of last year’s Focus On retrospective – returns with the North American premiere of Assholes: A Theory, which applies the observations of Aaron James’s 2012 book to our current political and social reality Swedish documentarian Fredrik Gertten’s Push, about the fight to have affordable housing recognized as a human right, will also makes its North American premiere at Hot Docs.
International premieres include Jacqueline Olive’s Always In Season, about the 2014 lynching of North Carolina teenager Lennon Lacy Jeffrey Palmer’s N. Scott Momaday: Words From A Bear, about the Pulitzer prize-winning Kiowa author and Elizabeth Carroll’s Nothing Fancy: Diana Kennedy, a profile of the 96-year-old Mexican chef.
The seven Canadian premieres in the section cover a wide range of subjects.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is tackled in Rachel Leah Jones’s Advocate, a profile of human-rights lawyer Lea Tsemel (one of the few Israeli lawyers who regularly defends Palestinians), and in Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell’s Gaza, a portrait of everyday life in the Palestinian territory.
Geopolitics and the tenuous state of representative democracy are explored in Fred Peabody’s The Corporate Coup d’Etat, which focuses on the gradual subversion of government in America by corporate interests rather than citizen groups, and in Petra Costa’s The Edge Of Democracy, which looks at Brazil’s recent political convulsions with the participation of that nation’s former presidents Lula Da Silva and Dilma Roussef. Henry Singer and Rob Miller’s The Trial Of Ratko Mladic finds the man called the Butcher of Bosnia as he’s brought to justice at The Hague for crimes committed during the Yugoslav War.
And on the more human side, Adam Bolt’s Human Nature weighs the pitfalls and potentials offered by genetic engineering in the age of CRISPR, while Heddy Honigmann’s Buddy considers the relationship between service dogs and their owners, picking up where last year’s crowd-pleasing Pick Of The Litter left off.
Hopefully, this means we can look forward to more dogs on the red carpet this year. Dogs are nice.
Hot Docs has previously announced that American director Julia Reichert is the recipient of Hot Docs outstanding achievement award and Julia Ivanova Ivanova is the subject the festival’s Focus On retrospective, having been designated this year’s “significant Canadian filmmaker.”
This year’s country-specific Made In program will focus on Italy.
The 2019 Hot Docs festival runs April 25 to May 5 the full program and schedule will be announced on March 19. Further details are available at hotdocs.ca/festival.
