DOC PICKS: Tom Hall at Back Row Manifesto

0 Comments POSTED: August 19, 2008 16:35 | By: Thom Powers
Dungeon Masters, The.jpgNow that the full line-up of TIFF documentaries has been announced  over the next few weeks leading up to the festival, I'll be posting doc picks in the festival from esteemed doc watchers, just as Doc Blog did last year. First up is Tom Hall, the Director of Programming at the Sarasota Film Festival. When not in Florida, Tom lives in Brooklyn, NY and is a member of the indieWIRE blogging community with his blog The Back Row Manifesto. He writes:

Toronto is a special place for me; as a child, I spent a week in the city every April with my parents. I so look forward to coming back each year for the Festival, to re-connect with the city and mark the changes that have taken place in the intervening year. At this year's festival, I plan on building my viewing schedule around the documentaries, as so many of them look to be the cream of the festival's crop. Here are three that I won't be missing:

Of Time and the City by Terence Davies
A "lovesong and a eulogy" to the city of Liverpool, England, Terence Davies' Of Time and the City looks like a gorgeous meditation on the decline of this once-vital industrial epicenter. As a supporter of Liverpool Football Club myself, and hailing from Flint, MI (for me, the American parallel to rusting ship yards of Liverpool), I have a  lot of interest in seeing how Davies' expresses the soul of a place I have long idealized and never seen with my own eyes.

Witch Hunt by Dana Nachman, Don Hardy
Following, in my mind anyway, on the thematic heels of Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Dana Nachman and Don Hardy's Witch Hunt reads like the other side of the coin minted by Capturing The Friedmans. A look at how a prosecutor in Bakersfield, CA used the mid-80's hysteria surrounding the sexual abuse of children as an opportunity to send several innocent parents to prison, Witch Hunt addresses an issue that is a near-obsession for me; The tension between the machinations of the American justice system and the truth.

Dungeon Masters by Keven McAlester (pictured above right)
As a child, I "tried" to play Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends who preferred creating, drawing and talking about their characters to actually reading and obeying the actual (and insanely complicated) rules of the game. In reality, D&D was way over my 8 year-old head, but I have been always been interested in the cult of role playing games and the lives of those whose obsession with alternative realities replace real life. In the digital age of a multi-billion dollar video game industry, it will be fun to see some good ol' "analog" role playing games and the drama that unfolds.


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