Saturday, April 25
>>> Chameleon
Shot and cut like a thriller, Ryan Mullins’s profile of Anas Aremeyaw Anas follows Ghana’s foremost investigative journalist on a series of exposés – busting an abortion provider who insists on having sex with his patients, freeing women forced into prostitution, rescuing children from an abusive religious cult. See review.
>>> Committed
Howie Mandel discovered balding, diminutive comedian Vic Cohen in the 90s, when Cohen submitted jokes to his talk show. Mandel hired him as a writer but mostly used the untrained, insanely confident Cohen as a lab experiment, urging him to follow his every impulse. See review.
Beyond The Fear
For more than a decade, veteran documentarian Herz Frank worked on a project about the relationship of Yigal Amir and Larisa Trembovler, an Israeli mother of four who left her husband for Amir. See review.
>>> The Circus Dynasty
The big top contains some big drama in this entertaining look at two famous European circus families who’ve staked their futures on their two attractive children. See review.
>>> The Amina Profile
This taut doc begins with a hot online affair between Montrealer Sandra Bagaria and the mysterious Amina, author of the online blog Gay Girl In Damascus, which then blows up thanks to a story in the Guardian. See review.
>>> The Cult of JT Leroy
If you know the truth about JT LeRoy – who came out of nowhere in 1999 with the gritty, apparently confessional novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things – then you’ll be a few steps ahead of Marjorie Sturm’s documentary, which plays out as a study of the mysterious author and holds back its key revelation as long as possible. See review.
>>> A Woman Like Me
Alex Sichel, a filmmaker with a Buddhist bent, tries to find a way to accept her terminal breast cancer diagnosis in this intelligent, emotionally charged pic. See review.
>>> Lowdown Tracks
Shelley Saywell’s profile of homeless musicians makes for an inspiring ode to the power of music to sustain people living on the margins. See review.
>>> Lanzmann
It took Claude Lanzmann 12 years to make his devastating, essential documentary Shoah, and those years exacted a terrible cost. In addition to the considerable psychic stress of interviewing survivors of the Holocaust, as well as the ordinary people who facilitated the Nazis’ final solution, Lanzmann spent a month in the hospital after a beating by the associates of SS officer Heinz Schubert, who discovered that he and his assistant were secretly recording their interview. See review.
Love Between The Covers
Laurie Kahn wants to rehabilitate the reputation of romance fiction, but though she starts to make a feminist-tinged argument and does include lesbian love stories, she avoids an essential element. See review.
Blood Sisters
Twins Julia and Johanna survived a month-long abduction together when they were nine years old, a horrifying event that perhaps forced them closer together as much as it left them feeling isolated from everyone else. See review.
Being Canadian
Having lived in the U.S. for a couple of decades as a writer for such shows as The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory, Alberta-born Robert Cohen decides to explore what it means to be Canadian by driving a minivan across the nation, asking ordinary people how they view themselves, and eating poutine. See review.
Unbranded
America has a wild horse problem over 50,000 mustangs have been corralled into holding pens waiting for adoption. See review.
Sunday, April 26
How To Change The World
Danny
Well-known lawyer Danny Williams, a protagonist in the Mount Cashel abuse case, leaves his practice to seek the leadership of Newfoundland’s PC party. See review.
>>> How To Change The World
Long before Twitter and Facebook, eco-pioneer/journalist Bob Hunter was “going viral” with analog “mind bombs” – consciousness-shifting news feeds that catapulted modern environmental activism into the forefront. See review.
Deprogrammed
Mia Donovan’s Deprogrammed looks at the cult hysteria of the 70s through the work of Ted Patrick, a flamboyant self-styled deprogrammer hired by worried parents to rescue college-age kids who’d joined ashrams or communes – although, in present-day interviews, Patrick’s “cured” subjects all admit they eventually just told him what he wanted to hear so he’d let them go. See review.
>>> Mavis!
This is pretty much flat-out hagiography, but you can see why Jessica Edwards couldn’t help herself. Gifted singer Mavis Staples, who has been a force for peace and racial harmony since she began singing with the Staple Singers at age nine, is irresistibly charismatic. See review.
Foodies
Foodies spends way more of its resources shooting gorgeous food than it does probing its subjects: five increasingly influential food bloggers. See review.
For Grace
The life and career of Chicago chef Curtis Duffy is examined as he works to launch his first restaurant, Grace. See review.
No Place To Hide: The Rehtaeh Parsons Story
Aspects of this summary of the shocking case of bullying victim Rehtaeh Parsons, who eventually committed suicide, betray its made-for-TV origins – especially its tendency to give short shrift to too many issues. See review.
>>> Beaver Trilogy Part IV
In 1979, Trent Harris was testing a new video camera in the parking lot outside a Salt Lake City TV station when a young man who called himself Groovin’ Gary wandered up and started talking to him. See review.
>>> Raiders!
Back in the early 80s, long before YouTube, a group of then 11-year-olds attempted to do a shot-by-shot remake of the blockbuster Raiders Of The Lost Ark using a borrowed camera, DIY sets and their imaginations. See review.
>>> Listen To Me Marlon
Stevan Riley’s look at the life and career of Marlon Brando is far more personally revealing than any previous biography. See review.
