COAST MODERN (Mike Bernard, Gavin Froome). 56 minutes. Friday to Sunday (July 6-8) and July 12 at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See Indie & Rep film. Rating: NNNN
UNFINISHED SPACES (Benjamin Murray, Alysa Nahmias). 86 minutes. Some subtitles. Friday to Sunday (July 6-8) at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See Indie & Rep Film. Rating: NNN
When the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema first announced its new mission statement, dedicating itself to 80 per cent documentary programming, I wasn’t the only person wondering how long it would be before the theatre quietly shifted back to more conventional second-run programming.
There just couldn’t be enough docs in circulation to fill the schedule, could there?
Well, this is the part where I eat my words. The Bloor’s found plenty of documentary programming, both esoteric and mainstream, and it’s discovered the value of appealing to specific interests. This weekend, for example, a series of architecture docs screen nightly from Friday through Sunday, making a sort of design mini-festival.
The story behind Benjamin Murray and Alysa Nahmias’s Unfinished Spaces, a look at the construction of Cuba’s National Arts Schools, sounds like a shaggy-dog joke. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are playing a round of golf at a country club in 1961, and Castro decides their lovely surroundings would be better served inspiring artists. So he commissions a massive campus, to be designed in just two months by his country’s finest visionaries. But once construction gets under way, the political winds shift just enough to knock the project out of favour, resulting in its abandonment.
Murray and Nahmias tell their amazing, stranger-than-fiction story in the standard talking-heads-and-photos format, which might have been a better idea if Unfinished Spaces were half an hour shorter. It takes a while to get to the good stuff.
In contrast, Michael Bernard and Gavin Froome’s Coast Modern is pretty much all good stuff. Running just under an hour and bringing a fluid, almost experimental aesthetic to its study of the stunning modernist homes that run along the West Coast between Vancouver and Los Angeles, it’s a documentary more interested in form than function.
Bernard and Froome’s camera glides through a series of beautiful houses that have been thoughtfully designed into their surroundings. In several instances, the homes are actually built into the coastline, their wood and concrete frames almost flowing into the earth.
Scored with ambient music – a good deal of which Bernard and Froome perform themselves – Coast Modern gives the viewer room to consider the way these homes offer a different perspective on the idea of environmental space. (It’s playing with Zaheed Mawani’s charming short doc Three Walls, which explores the history of the office cubicle.)
Given that no one’s likely to start up a Toronto Architecture Film Festival any time soon – though I wouldn’t put it past this town – this is probably the only chance you’ll have to see these titles on a big screen.
So there you go: only at the Bloor.
normw@nowtoronto.com
