It’s my job as a film critic to find trends in a festival’s programming. And what I’ve seen at Hot Docs this year keeps bringing me back to obsessive personalities.
This makes perfect sense, since interesting subjects are the greatest asset to any documentary filmmaker – and people whose commitment to an idea or a behaviour goes above and beyond a conventional level of interest are pretty damn interesting.
Consider Darius McCollum, the subject of Adam Irving’s Off The Rails. He’s so obsessed with the New York City transit system that he’s compelled to steal buses and drive them crosstown, picking up passengers and making all requested stops.
Jay Cheel’s How To Build A Time Machine introduces us to two men driven to recapture the past: one metaphorically, by building an exact replica of the vehicle from the 1960 movie The Time Machine, and another literally, by becoming a physicist and researching theoretical time travel in the hopes of reconnecting with the father who died far too young.
John Bolton’s Aim For The Roses finds intriguing parallels in the stories of daredevil Ken Carter, who tried to jump the St. Lawrence River in a rocket-propelled Lincoln, and musician Mark Haney, who set out to make a concept album about Carter’s stunt three decades later.
And there’s the mysterious puppet master behind the events of Tickled, whose attempts to intimidate journalist David Farrier and co-director Dylan Reeve into abandoning their investigation into the world of competitive endurance tickling lead them to unpack a pathology that’s as fascinating as it is monstrous.
It’s not just individuals: Vitaly Mansky’s Under The Sun peels back the carefully manicured image of North Korea to reveal a culture entirely obsessed with its own illusion of happiness and perfection, while My Scientology Movie lets Louis Theroux document the tactics the Church of Scientology uses to discourage outside inquiry by inadvertently calling them down upon himself.
Hey, I can stretch this even further and include De Palma, a profile about a director who’s so compelled to repeat and restage his favourite Hitchcock moments that he actually remade Vertigo and called it Obsession.
And, yes, I know that seeking out patterns in unrelated works of art is a kind of obsessive behaviour in itself there’s probably a movie about it somewhere in the festival. And if there isn’t, well, there’s always next year.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
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