On Friday the 29th, Hot Docs, North America’s largest and most important documentary festival, revved up for its 17th year. In the past, documentaries have been stigmatized as boring, staid, and educational in the worst “this is a bad 50’s educational school video” sense. However, reality is indeed often weirder than the more popular and box office-grossing fiction.

As each permutation of reality unfolds on tabloid websites, increasingly for better or worse, documentaries have continued to give greater depth and context to both the sensational and the often-forgotten. Documentaries have become better, more potent, diverse, and engaging than ever. Hot Docs as a festival has also evolved, becoming an event for world and Canadian debuts of new and challenging films while increasingly trying to dispel the unglamorous past of documentaries by reaching out to younger viewers.

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If you missed the opportunity to catch some light comedies at Cinefranco on Saturday, you can still do so tomorrow (Sunday) and all through this week.

BlogUTs picks for Sunday are the light romantic comedy Tricheuse/So Woman! at 7:15PM (reviewed below), the great Costa Gravas’s (director of the chilling but brilliant Missing) drama, East of Eden at 3:00PM, and Le Petit Nicolas, a family-appropriate comedy at 5:15PM, based on the nostalgic children’s books by René Goscinny, which I enjoyed very much  as a child.

Tricheuse (or So Woman! by its English title) has a recycled plot, very similar to Peter Weir’s Green Card, which itself was nothing new, about Clemence, who convinces her immigrant piano tuner, Farid, whose name she can’t remember or pronounce, to bring his two daughters to live with her so she can fake being married in order to secure her apartment and a lucrative litigation job which she needs to salvage her career. Since the piano tuner can barely afford electricity, he gets something out of the deal. Of course, they fight initially as their personalities and cultures clash: she is self-absorbed, superficial, and has a proclivity for boy toys, while he is the ultimate family man who cooks and cares for his daughter. But in the end, they fall in love, and all the conventions of a romantic comedy are met.

Tricheuse is a sweet film and a funny film and there are many scenes of mistaken identities worth a watch. For example, when Clemence’s landlord asks what Farid does for a living, she makes up a wild lie that he is a great sculptor; the building then requests that he make a sculpture for the courtyard and so Farid uses bicycles, toasters, and other objects to craft something similar to one of Clemence’s modern art sculptures in her apartment. When Clemence teaches the eldest how to write an essay, her teacher claims that plagiarism must be at work, so Clemence comes into the school to defend her as a parent and a lawyer. There are also moments of drama when Clemence gets Farid’s daughters to open up to her about their mother and they bond, though sometimes these feel a little emotionally forced.

Tricheuse is not a great film, but despite its predictability, it has some unexpected sophistication and turns, which make it a light enjoyable see for a Sunday afternoon.

What: Cinefranco, the Toronto French Film Festival
When: March 26 – April 3
Where: AMC Yonge & Dundas, right at Dundas subway station
Cost: Students – $8.50, Single Tickets – $10 and can be purchased in person or online. Arrive at least 30 minutes  early  to ensure tickets are available.

Cinefranco, one of the best small film festivals in Toronto, showcases French cinema from France, Canada, and other French-speaking countries that often won’t play in cinemas outside of France or Quebec. This year the festival has moved to the AMC Yonge & Dundas, a much better venue which provides comfortable seating, great screens, and stadium seating – you can still read the subtitles should someone tall choose to sit in front of you. Past years have showcased such gems as La Naissance des Pieuvres (2008), Ensemble C’est Tout (2008), and Peindre ou Faire L’Amour (2007). This year’s festival offers up a wide variety of films from comedy to drama.

Today’s schedule included a lovely laugh-out-loud comedy from France, Le Coach, about a life coach, Max (Richard Berry) who, in an effort to pay off his large gambling debts, takes on a job to coach a hopeless engineer, Patrick Jean-Paul Rouve), into becoming a good manager who can seal the deal with a difficult and important client. The engineer is a mess – from his bad clothes, to his total push-over attitude, to his tendency to get incredibly frazzled whenever having an important conversation, be it with a boss or a beautiful woman. And since the engineer’s bosses erroneously believe him to be the nephew of the CEO, the life coach is forbidden from revealing his true identity and forced instead to train the engineer under the guise of being a 50-year-old intern doing photocopies. Of course, hilarity ensues. (more…)

Attention for all film lovers, fans, nerds, and aspiring movie stars: here is your chance!

Project Fandom is an independent film project based in Toronto that hopes to bring a new concept of film-making to the film industry: interactive film-making.

Using a membership-based website, they are providing interactive “behind the scenes” content, showing how a feature film is created, produced and distributed. By combining social network tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, members can actually get involved in a film project by being part of it and having their voices heard by the production casts and crews! It is also a great learning opportunity on all aspects of film-making, such as screenwriting, acting, production, etc.

This is kind of like taking crowdsourcing to the next level, which encourages members’ creativity and contribution to the process, as well as promoting participation in an open casting call and other contests.

The membership is $19.95 USD, which lasts until the end of the production. This is a one-time fee: members get a chance to apply for a leading role, or be a production assistant, by uploading a video about themselves on to YouTube for online auditioning. That means no matter where you are (even if you are living in the North Pole), you get equal opportunity to be part of it. Also, members have the opportunity to edit the actual screen play and have their ideas and thoughts passed on to the production crew!

Don’t feel comfortable about being front of the camera? No problem! If you have talent in song-writing, poster-designing or editing, don’t miss this! There will also be contest for members to create the official theme song for the film, design the official poster or create your own trailer.

Members will also receive a limited edition graphic novel and DVD.

The movie itself is not “crowd funded” — it is being made regardless of the amount of members!

The location of this project will be taken place based on the majority of members located in the city. If the majority of members are from Toronto, then it will be taken place right here in our home city!

The actual draft of the script will be released to members in two weeks, and the production crews will start shooting in early spring, and the planing release date is set to be in December!

For more information, check out their Facebook page and Twitter.

Since it’s Hayao Miyazaki’s birthday on January 5th, I figured it would be nice to have an article published around that date. If you don’t know who Miyazaki is, all I have to say is, “Shame on you!!!!!!!!” Hayao Miyazaki is a renowned Japanese animation director. He’s responsible for a lot of wonderful movies like the 2002 Academy Award Winner Spirited Away and other classics like My Neighbour Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. His latest movie, Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea (watch the trailer here) was out in theatres during the summer.

Now, what is Studio Ghibli? Well, it’s the animation studio he co-founded with director Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki. This studio has seriously produced some really magical films.

Anyways, unlike my article on Japanese literature, I can’t just give “picks” on Studio Ghibli films, you have to watch them all! (If you’ve never seen a Ghibli film, I declare that you have no soul.) As a result, I’ll list the top 5 things that make this animation studio so wonderful. (more…)

You won’t be know how much it takes to make a music video until you get yourself involved! Just before the end of 2009 drew near, I got a chance to help out on a set of shooting a music video for U of T’s upcoming film festival. It was my first time getting involved in events like this and boy what a pleasant experience that was. Being on a set of video shoot can be chaotic sometimes, but you have to be pleased with the effort everybody puts in!

The theme of the music video is social justice and was directed by award-winning Iranian film director Babak Payami, who studied cinema at the University of Toronto decades ago.

Some technical stuff: When shooting a music video, usually the same sequence will be shot around 11 times so that it will provide enough material for the editors to edit during the post-production stage. However, the song will be played over and over again! By end of the day, almost everyone who worked on the set has the song inked in their heads!

Some additional photos:
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The U of T Film Festival celebrates the University of Toronto’s rich contribution to the arts through its student and alumni film and video makers. Now in its ninth year, the festival also welcomes films and videos from all emerging and established filmmakers, through we have not lost our focus on student work. For the 2010 edition our special guest will be Babak Payami.

The types of submissions the festival is looking for are:

• short films and videos of any length, genre and topic
• “Super 8″ films that are silent and played with live music
• 1-minute long “Shitty Films” for the annual Shitty Film Contest
• installation art, including site-specific proposals
• film and videos of any length that address social justice issues, especially social entrepreneurialism, providing innovative solutions to social problems.

The deadline is February 8th, and the festival takes place March 13 but early submissions encouraged. For a submission form and details, go to www.uoftfilmfest.ca or send an e-mail to info@uoftfilmfest.ca.