Today, I did a volunteer shift again at HotDocs.  I was the 'usher' for latecomers so I got to watch both movies.  Plus I had bought tickets for an evening show.

During my shift I saw ...
How Many Roads & Glenn Gould Hereafter.
How Many Roads is about Bob Dylan and Glenn Gould Hereafter is about, you guessed it, Glenn Gould.  How Many Roads looks at the importance of the music of Bob Dylan to a variety of people from a hip hop spoken word artist to a teacher in her 50's who drives to every Dylan concerts she can make.  Dylan himself never appears in the film and it is not biographical.  It really looks at Dylan, the icon, and how his music and writing affected such a wide range of people.  Beautifully shot and edited.  Look for this on PBS, I'm sure it will get picked up by them.

Glenn Gould Hereafter
Glenn Gould is probably the most mythical and mystic Canadian musician.  The film maker uses old footage of Gould (and was he filmed alot!) combined with interviews with people who were moved by Gould's music.  Similar to How Many Roads, the film maker chose to interview people who were not 'experts' on the music but rather were emotionally close to it.  I didn't think I would watch this entire film but I found it quite interesting.  It had some beautiful shots but the editing could have been a bit tighter.  The film maker was from France but went to lengths to give Goulds lifelong home, Toronto, a role in the film.

During my shift, I also met Harvey, who volunteers at every single Toronto film festival including HotDocs.  Soon there is going to be a documentary made about Harvey (really, they start shooting next month).

Our Own Private Bin Laden and Ghosts of Mardin
The Ghosts of Mardin was a short piece about the film makers' family who fled their Armenian village in Turkey to Eygpt then left Eygpt for Montreal.  Using music and pictures we travelled back in time to show a common story amongst Canadians, how people have to leave their homes due to war and conflict.  It was a beautiful tribute to his family.

Our Own Private Bin Laden was an investigative doc that centred not on who is Bin Laden but on what many Americans asked after 9/11 'why does he hate us?'.  The film traces back the history of conflict in Afghanistan to the Soviet invasion and the eventual rise of Muslim fundamentalism.  The film makers' main goal was to show how after 9/11 Bin Laden became almost a mirror for all of the deepest fears in America and she wanted to understand the history with the hope of overcoming the fear. 

This was an interesting doc, challenging to follow at times but the film maker did a good job of handling the confusion by using narration to admit that the more she learned, the more confused she became.  By the end of the doc, it is clear that Bin Laden and 9/11 are really a product of a intricate web of geo-political events that occurred over the last 30 years.  It is a far more complex story than we see in most media outlets. 

There was a very interesting Q&A after in which the film maker said that no American festival, even ones that asked her to submit her piece, were after viewing it, willing to screen this documentary.  This should be screened on PBS but may be too controversial for that network.  Perhaps it will get aired on The View From Here?