Hot Docs Festival: Nelly & Nadine, Framing Agnes and over a hundred more

28 Apr 2022 - photos supplied by publicists & Stephanie Owens

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't,” has become a cliché. Mark Twain certainly couldn't have imagined how far truth would get stretched and contorted thanks to tabloids, reality TV and podcasts. And we have no idea how he would have rated the veracity of the Ken Burns documentary that purported to tell the story of Twain's life and place one of the first celebrity authors into historical context. Because a documentary also always has a point of view, a context of its own creation. And these days everyone has a point of view and a lot of those points of views are producing documentaries. The Hot Docs Festival calls its mission, "Insipiring change through storytelling" and "to celebrate and advance the art of documentary by bringing outstanding films to our audiences."

The Hot Docs' curatorial team also has the arduous task fof winnowing down the thousands of documentaries flooding forth to the one hundred plus films that make up the festival. Either the curators are experts or their tastes align with mine as I have yet to be disappointed by a Hot Docs presentation. If only I had time to see them all. The festival does make it easy to binge as each film gets a pair of showings at the luxurious Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema while also being available for streaming. I was fortunate enough to get screeners for two of the specifically LGBT films being presented and they are both fascinating and absorbing in totally different ways and styles.

Nelly & Nadine is a serpentine investigation into the lives and love of two women who met while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. While the premise sounds salacious and provocative, the execution is anything but. Nelly & Nadine begins with footage of survivors of the camps, mainly women, arriving in Sweden in 1945. Their faces are jubiliant and this fascinated filmmaker Magnus Gertten. One of the faces in the crowd, that of Nadine Hwang, was imposingly stoic and inscrutable. From there the film tells the story through Nelly Mousset-Vos's granddaughter who lives on an idyllic French farm that is lovingly shot despite being infested with cats. The granddaughter is persuaded to open steamer trunks that have been stashed in the attic and which contain diaries, photographs, super 8 films, and an unpublished autobiography written by Nelly and Nadine. All material that the granddaughter had, hitherto, found too painful and difficult to peruse.

This is a love story and it is as joyful as it is harrowing. Nelly's diary entries from the camp recount not only the horrors, all the more horrific because of her matter-of-fact prose, but the beginning of the relationship between her and Nadine. Nelly was, as well as a member of the Resistance, a acccomplished opera singer and her passion for art, and Nadine, get her through the bleakest and most trying events. When death looms she envisions the moments in her life that were wonderful and she writes that, "I realized that joy was still possible." The granddaughter remembers visiting the two women and digs into their backstories with fascinating results. A love story grows into a meditation on how lesbians (and their gay friends) were able to live their lives in hostile times. Each new character adds a piece to the puzzle but the portrait is, except for an enduring love, alas, never complete. Except perhaps for when Nelly sings. Nelly & Nadine moves at a languid pace but pays off emotionally in double climaxes. Nelly writes that one must "give yourself permission to live" and that resonates on multiple levels. Kleenex is recommended.

Framing Agnes is a meta-documentary and a brazenly clever film. In the '50s and '60s researchers at UCLA conducted studies of people with "sexual disorders." The interviews were archived, placed in filing cabinets and forgotten until researchers discovered the treasure trove. Filmmaker Chase Joynt takes the interviews and re-enacts them but in the format of a television talk show, the place where most of us first encountered trans and other "sexual disorders." The familiar format of a talk show adds a familiarity that allows the characters to perform instead of being dissected and their sass and class is remarkable. After all, those of us with sexual disorders have had to learn to perform in order to pass. There are also interviews with the actors portraying the historical interviewees. The intersection between the past and present illuminates just how the world has changed and, more crucially, how it hasn't. 

There is an academic who interjects as a talking head but even they come to an epiphany, and tears, realizing how even fellow trans and allies objectify history and turn complex people into examples to prove a point or theory. How we even other ourselves. It is tension that Framing Agnes uses to stellar effect. A lot of trans history, politics and intellectual ruminating, is covered but the process is painless because of the format. This is not a lecture, this is entertainment. If anything Framing Agnes would have benefitted from being a multi-part series, where each topic could have been explored in more depth. The actors are magnificent, both as their assigned characters and as themselves, and the scenes of them choosing garments for their roles, carressing the fabrics and the not-so-distant past, are magical. Framing Agnes also demonstrates just how badly our perceptions have been warped by our environment: Joynt's deliberately snarky talk show host is initially more appealing than his empathetic persona in the "real" interviews. It is a hall of mirrors but each reflection reveals.

There are several other LGBTcentric films that leapt out of the catalogue. Boylesque stars Lula who at 82 is Poland's oldest drag queen in a culture that is virulently homophobic. Queer My Friends comes from South Korea where the filmmaker follows the progress of her best friend, a gay man who comes out in another toxic culture and heads to the US to pursue his dream of working in theatre. I Asked Him to Take Me Dancing places the eternal gay male dilemma in the perspective of an Orthodox Jew, how does one find someone to spend the rest of their life with when it means giving up all the other men who are out there. Father, Son and Holy War delves into how toxic masculinity and virility drugs helped fuel the war between Hindus and Muslims in India. And of course, the magnificent Scott Thompson is reason enough to attend a screening or streaming of The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks.

Other celebrity artists who intrigue are well represented with Sinead O'Connor's saga and tentative triumphs examined in Nothing Compares. The 16 years in gestation Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind presents the thoughts and memories of the prolific and astute author. F**k It Up! chronicles the Spinal Tap-esque antics of obscure hair metal monstrosities and almost-weres Towers of London in a world of excess, drugs and hairspray. Marcel Marceau is silent no more in The Art of Silence which is, shockingly, the first documentary to recount the great mime's history and influence. And the ever effervescent Jay Baruchal tries to find humour in our looming extinction as a species, in We're All Going to Die (Even Jay Baruchal). That is only a small smattering of the films that instantaneously caught my interest, each browse of the catalogue reveals more and, of course, there is no accounting for personal taste. There is undoubtedly something strange enough for your truth.