Bunbury Films 8/14/20 Bunbury Films 8/14/20

Hot Docs: 'The Walrus and the Whistleblower' Wins Top Audience Award

June 6, 2020 by Etan Vlessing

Nathalie Bibeau's The Walrus and the Whistleblower, about a former trainer at Marineland in Niagara Falls, Ontario, turned whistleblower, on Sunday picked up the top Audience Award at the Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival, which was forced online this year by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The first runner-up was Elizabeth St. Philip's 9/11 Kids, which follows 16 students now in their 20s and who were in the room with President George W. Bush when he was told about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. And the second runner-up is David France's Welcome to Chechnya documentary for HBO about activists confronting Russian leader Ramzan Kadyrov's anti-gay purges.

This year's festival, from May 28 to June 6, streamed more than 140 films, including 69 virtual Q&As with the directors. The 2020 audience winners were unveiled during a virtual presentation ceremony Sunday night.

Also in the audience poll, the top mid-length documentary was Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story, by director Posy Dixon, and the top short documentary was director Aïcha Diop's Nancy's Workshop.

Hot Docs opted for a virtual market and streaming festival this year after the physical festival set to run April 30 to May 10 in Toronto was canceled as a precaution against the COVID-19 crisis.

Bunbury Films 1/24/20 Bunbury Films 1/24/20

Tuning the Brain with Music in the Montreal Gazette

Documentary examines power of music to heal the brain

January 23 by Christine Long

MONTREAL -- Award-winning director Isabelle Raynauld has spent the past five years investigating the influence music has on the brain in everyone from military veterans, to cancer patients, to premature infants.

In one segment of her latest documentary, Tuning the Brain with Music, Raynauld focuses on a group of girls on the autism spectrum who started a rock band.

Even though some of the girls do not speak, they can communicate through music.

Revue24Images : Critique Memory is our Homeland

9 octobre 2019

Sur une vieille photographie, on aperçoit des visages affaiblis dont les regards fixant l’objectif ont l’air de vouloir affirmer une présence que nul ne semble reconnaître. L’image est abimée par le temps et par l’oubli de l’espace où ce cliché a été pris : l’Afrique, refuge pour ces corps tremblant d’humanité que l’Histoire a tenté d’effacer. À la faveur de ce documentaire, Jonathan Durand retrace les pas de Polonais déportés en 1940 au moment de l’invasion de leur territoire par les Soviétiques alors alliés des Nazis.

par Samy Benammar

Poursuivre la lecture: Article complet

Bunbury Films 9/17/19 Bunbury Films 9/17/19

Memory is our Homeland in the Montreal Gazette

Montreal documentary looks at Poles exiled to Africa in World War II

Sept 13 , 2019 by Brendan Kelly

Memory Is Our Homeland, a documentary by Montreal director Jonathan Durand, tells story of Poles exiled to Africa in the 1940s.

Montreal filmmaker Jonathan Durand grew up hearing incredible stories from his Polish grandmother and other relatives about their forced exile from Poland, how they were deported first to Siberia, and then ended up spending years in refugee camps in East Africa in the 1940s. But what Durand didn’t realize at the time was that these stories were part of a secret history that you won’t likely read about in your university textbooks.

Kosher Love in the Montreal Gazette

Kosher Love-Rabbi Yisroel Bernath_Bill Stone.jpg

Love Rabbi makes marriage work in Kosher Love, a documentary about Jewish matchmaking

Feb 10 , 2017 by Bill Brownstein

Rabbi Bernath, a native of Chicago who moved here over a decade back, is quite the engaging character. He breaks down the Jewish community into three groups: the not-so-religious majority “who eat bagels and watch Seinfeld;” the more serious Orthodox; and the Hasidics “who have a retro fashion sense from the 1700s.”

Bernath didn’t actually choose the role of matchmaker, but he was pressed into service when approached by so many members in the community – from, according to Beloff, “those Reformers who love crispy bacon to the Orthodox who read psalms by candlelight.”