Film reviews: At DOXA Documentary Film Festival, after-death AI, Indigenous star lore, a Japanese #MeToo case, and more
Eternal You, A Man Imagined, Black Box Diaries, nanekawâsis, and other intriguing offerings at the celebration of new nonfiction film
Black Box Diaries
Eternal You
HERE’S A FIRST look at some of the films playing at DOXA Documentary Film Festival this week, with subjects that span haunted cyberspace and homelessness, sexual assault, Indigenous healing, and sci-fi cinematic poetry.
ETERNAL YOU
May 9, 6 pm at SFU Woodward’s
DOXA opened in 2013 with Google and the World Brain, a noble but muddy attempt to get a handle on the company’s trashing of rights and privacy but also, ultimately, its weird obsession with building an Artificial Intelligence. Eleven years later, AI is with us and the ethical problems are much clearer. Eternal You, by directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, focuses on one of the most unsettling: the advent of “digital afterlife services” like those offered by the December Project, which feeds private information through its AI tools to build an avatar of your deceased loved one. The film is strenuous in its effort to maintain some sort of balance on the topic, but those evangelizing for the tech appear uniformly arrogant, foolish, and spiritually lost. Growls one CEO, “Fuck death and the hyperbole about nature and ‘we have to deal with it.’” In contrast, users come across as thoughtful and sympathetic, if misguided, like the woman who’s told by her dead lover: “I am in Hell.” William Gibson conceived of a haunted cyberspace back in the ’80s, and some of the participants in Eternal You think there’s something going on here beyond the ones and zeros, as if they’ve stumbled upon the electronic equivalent of the Ouija board. All we need to know is that a tiny startup called Soul Machines raked in over $100 million from investors including Spotify, Zoom, and Google, and we should therefore assume the worst. The film also brings in psychologists and an “AI ethicist” to remind us that the transhumanists of Silicon Valley religiously seek transcendence through machines and, as such, they’ll probably get the afterlife they deserve. AM
A MAN IMAGINED
May 8, 6:30 pm at the Cinematheque
A small but persistent detail in this portrait of a homelessness man named Lloyd is the jewellery and other trinkets that he improvises for himself over the two-plus years that he spent with NFB filmmakers Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky. His chance charisma radiates in other ways, not least of all from a kind of hard and beautiful physiognomy that holds your gaze; he looks like he stepped out of an image from a medieval Russian monastery. Lloyd is also schizophrenic and embodies a walking indictment of Canada’s social and healthcare services—we follow his routine of finding and selling garbage to passing motorists in a hellishly loud industrial neighbourhood, or washing himself in a gas station bathroom—and the filmmakers must navigate a tricky line when he becomes the subject of their artistic interventions, whereupon A Man Imagined morphs into a very fetching spectacle of off-kilter image and sound design. There’s a lot of technical talent here, piggybacked onto a subject who might himself have been a formidable creative force under better circumstances—and minus a mysterious childhood trauma, the full extent of which Cassidy and Shatzky cannot quite coax from him. The film ends on another unsettling ellipsis when, after spending an hour with Lloyd, we know that he’s absorbed back into an invisible underclass. AM
BLACK BOX DIARIES
May 5, 6:45 pm and May 6, 8 pm at VIFF Centre
What sets Shiori Itō’s fearless investigation into her own sexual assault apart is the way she puts her methodical training as a journalist to work. In one of Japan’s first #MeToo reckonings, the young reporter documents her attempts to sue the high-profile media figure who raped her. She does this by meticulously digging for proof, and recording phone calls with bureaucrats, lawyers, and sometimes-lecherous investigators along the way. The evidence presented up front is as chilling as it is damning: security footage of a semi-conscious Itō, unable to walk or stand, being carried by her suit-wearing predator past worried but silent taxi drivers, doormen, and concierges to a hotel room. Two years later, she takes on the emotionally ravaging struggle of mounting the landmark case in Japan, going public in a country where the judicial systems and societal norms around shame and blame are stacked squarely against her. In the widely televised case, critics call her a prostitute for wearing unbuttoned blouses and an insult to Japan itself for pursuing her case in the first place. But Itō galvanizes a small, growing female public that’s ready to push back at the patriarchy. Mixing her factfinding with unfiltered diary entries and moody shots of Tokyo, Itō offers a rare, intimate inside look at the experience of bringing a #MeToo case to justice. JS
NANEKAWÂSIS
May 8, 7:45 pm at VIFF Centre, and May 10, 8:30 pm at SFU Woodward’s
In a visual style redolent of the artist’s works, archival footage, poetry, and language are stitched together between contemporary interviews with George Littlechild in his biography film, nanekawâsis. At the age of 65, the nêhiyaw (Cree) visual artist reflects on the evolution of his career, while the evocative score guides viewers through scenes from his life, from cathartic to serene. Vision Chant by Cree composer Andrew Balfour opens the work on a note of Indigeneity, but with resemblance to a hymn. A survivor of the ’60s scoop, Littlechild grew up in the foster system. Viewers are invited into the home where he grew up, and to visit his birth mother’s grave. The camera follows an early-career Littlechild while he explains a painting to its two buyers at an exhibition, telling them about each ancestor whose photos he’s incorporated. He recounts searching for information about his lineage, learning from elders, and seeing a photo of himself as a baby for the first time. So Many Men, So Little Time by Miquel Brown shifts the film’s rhythm, as Littlechild reflects on his experience as a two-spirit person. An upbeat Easy Keepers by Tex Crick ushers in a film photo montage of Littlechild and two-spirit artist John Powell throughout their lives, warmth emanating from the screen. Skillfully captured by Métis filmmaker Conor McNally, nanekawâsis allows viewers to get to know Littlechild in his own words, witnessing his humour and positivity, while being treated to an audibly captivating work about an artist who has led conversations on the harm of colonialism for decades through a distinct artistic style. MR
AM I THE SKINNIEST PERSON YOU’VE EVER SEEN?
As part of the Love Was Here Love Still Is Canadian shorts program, May 10, 12:30 pm at SFU Woodward’s
The quote that is the title for this NFB documentary short comes near the opening, posed by a young, heartwrenchingly emaciated 18-year-old to her doctor. She’s studying images of her own anorexic body of 56 pounds. Launching off from this shocking footage, filmmaker Eisha Marjara creates an arresting, poetic exploration of the factors that took her to that point—and thankfully, out of it alive. As an adult, she looks back on being a Punjabi girl in small-town Quebec “revolting”—against womanhood, her homesick mother, Indian food, and much more. Marjara traces the descent down the rabbit hole of dieting and calorie counting, and her quest to look like the skinny supermodels who filled the glossy magazines of the 1980s. Achingly honest, the filmmaker wraps all of this pain up in a fascinatingly artful package, mixing archival advertising footage, old photos, and impressionistic re-enactments with her own narration—direct, stern, and taut, but also deeply insightful and poetic. JS
WILFRED BUCK
May 9, 7:45 pm at VIFF Centre
Wilfred Buck, the titular character of Anishinaabe writer-director Lisa Jackson’s hybrid documentary, has a habit of dropping nuggets of wisdom with disarming nonchalance. “One of the reasons we go into a sweat lodge is to understand that we’re part of something that we can never understand,” the Cree elder and Indigenous star lore expert tells a room full of American Ivy League researchers, in one memorable scene of this sweeping and affecting film. “And it’s okay if we never understand it…because if we try to understand it we get big, huge, massive heads: ‘Yeah, I know everything.’” It’s one of many moments of gently irreverent humour threaded throughout this intricately woven film, which floats back and forth through present, past, and future, artfully blending cinéma vérité, archival footage, and stylized reenactments. There are also narrated excerpts of Buck’s 2021 memoir, I Have Lived Four Lives, which highlight his skill as a storyteller (“I began to see that I was surrounded by assholes” begins one memorable tirade that manages to be both hilarious and poignant). Interjections of dreamy images of night skies, sturgeon, and meteorites—sometimes layered together—appear in transitional moments, like supernatural visions. On its surface, the film documents Buck’s journey through displacement, addiction, and trauma, as he finds healing in reconnecting with Indigenous knowledge and ceremony. But it also carries a much bigger story—of the unspeakable tragedy and generational pain felt by Canada’s Indigenous peoples, and of the power of cultural reclamation and self-determination to make them whole again. JW
LAST THINGS
May 2, 6 pm at the Cinematheque
Geological time is no easier to grasp than the size of the Universe, so Chicago-based artist Deborah Stratman turns to a kind of sci-fi cinema poetry with this captivating collage of faintly apocalyptic texts and ambient music wedded to scientific illustrations and imaging, NASA animations, microscopic timelapse photography, and other fantastic images of nature made alien. It tells us that animal life is really mineral life taking new form, with mitochondria as the 2.5-billion-year-old “geologic memory in all our cells”. Inside this timeline, even a type of rock can become “extinct” once the conditions of its origin taper off into an endless and turbulent future. It’s like a materialist’s attempt to grasp animism, without saying as much, but apparent in the repeated images of cold matter exhibiting lifelike behaviour. Stratman’s film might remind viewers of essayist Chris Marker and author J.G. Ballard, whose 1966 novel The Crystal World anticipates the film’s cosmic revelations of time, scale, and matter. Highly recommended, Last Things is short, weird, and it rocks. AM 
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