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Film Fests & Special Screenings Movies & TV

Human rights get personal at Jayu Film Festival at Hot Docs Cinema

Got time for one last microfestival before the holidays? Then check out the Jayu Human Rights Film Festival at the Hot Docs Cinema this weekend, screening three days of documentaries to mark Human Rights Day on Saturday (December 10).

In its fifth edition, the festival – named for the Korean word for freedom – focuses on personal stories rather than sweeping social studies. Which isn’t to say this year’s lineup lacks urgency, just that it also feels oddly intimate.

The opening night film, Don’t Tell Anyone (Friday December 9, 6 pm), arrives bearing a well-deserved Peabody award from its airing in PBS’s POV showcase last year. It’s a profile of Angy Rivera, a Colombian-born New Yorker who outed herself as undocumented to become an activist for immigrant rights.

A writer of an advice column for undocumented youth, Rivera’s open and unflinchingly honest, and director Mikaela Shwer makes the most of her subject’s willingness to address aspects of the immigrant experience – like sexual exploitation – that aren’t discussed nearly as often as they ought to be.

Saturday at 3 pm, Geeta Ghandbir and Perri Peltz’s Prison Dogs offers a heartening look at the Puppies Behind Bars program, which provides convicts in New York prisons with the opportunity to raise Labrador retriever puppies as service dogs. (Some of the pups will go on to help veterans with PTSD and other battle injuries others will serve as explosive detection dogs.)

As in the 2014 documentary Dogs On The Inside, there’s plenty of footage of burly inmates bonding with their adorable puppies and rediscovering their capacity for affection and love, growing as people in the process, but Prison Dogs gets a little deeper into the program and its ultimate effect on people.

The festival closes Sunday at 6 pm with Who’s Gonna Love Me Now, a British-Israeli documentary about Saar, a gay Londoner preparing to return to Israel and tell his very religious family about his HIV-positive status.

Filmmakers Tomer and Barak Heymann go a little heavy on the uplift, but I guess I can’t really blame them they’ve found themselves a terrific story, and Saar’s membership in the London Gay Men’s Chorus naturally leads to several rousing musical numbers. And, again, the intimate focus of their film speaks to a larger issue: Saar isn’t the only person who’s had this experience. He’s just the person having it in front of a camera.

Get more special screenings here.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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