The following review is written by our friend and fellow documentary lover Joe from Mechanical Forest Sound, check out his blog for Hot Doc reviews, exceptional live recording and probably a helluva lot more thought out writings

Mads Brügger, who brought the fabulous North Korea undercover exposé The Red Chapel to Hot Docs in 2009, returns with another work burrowing deeper into his “performative journalism” approach. Looking into the shadowy world of blood diamonds and dubious diplomats, Brügger takes us down a rabbit hole where half-truths thrive, even as danger lurks.

Finding the means to acquire some fairly dubious Liberian credentials, Brügger sets up shop in the hardly-more-functional Central African Republic, where a charge d’affairs dispensing envelopes of cash is quickly welcomed into ever-higher circles of power. Hundreds of diplomats have already been carrying out diamonds without being scrutinized by customs; why not him? There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors, and certainly more insinuation than proof, but the glimpses that we get here of the seedy underbelly of business and government reveal deep corruption.

Brügger, in character as a cynical asshole, is rather entertaining, and there’s no shortage of laughs here. There’s also a lot of questions left unanswered — like what percentage of this film’s budget was spent on bribes? Hopefully Brügger will be in attendance for what should be one of the festival’s most fascinating Q&A sessions.

Hot Docs site
Screens: Fri, Apr 27, 4:00 PM @ Isabel Bader Theatre; Fri, May 4, 4:45 PM @ TIFF Lightbox 2; Sat, May 5, 9:00 PM @ The Regent)

The following review is written by our friend and fellow documentary lover Joe from Mechanical Forest Sound, check out his blog for Hot Doc reviews, exceptional live recording and probably a helluva lot more thought out writings

“Mother Nature, let the herd be ever well.” It’s no surprise that the Chukchi people’s prayers might be reindeer-centric — in the blank, treeless tundra of northeastern Siberia, there’s not a lot else to sustain life. Taking a largely hands-off observational approach, this film takes us into the world of an extended family of reindeer herders, eking out a living in the unforgiving arctic. It’s certainly not all grim — the adorably ewok-like children have lots of time for play before falling into the busy life of their parents.

Cajoling, shouting and bringing in wayward individualists looking for some alone time, patriarch Vukvukai doesn’t always come off as a likeable guy. He watches and treats his extended family just like his herd — as something needing to be ordered around and watched constantly. Vukvukai is our focal point, but by dwelling on him, we don’t get any other sharply-drawn characters, which is one of the film’s biggest flaws.

And it’s interesting, of course, to consider what the film does and doesn’t show us — just as there are no guns and no predators in sight threatening the herd, besides a tractor and a plane passing by overhead, there are very few signs of modernity, which makes me curious as to whether the director was trying to present a sort of airbrushed anthropological view of the Chukchi. The whimsical chapter titles feed into that a bit as well.

It’s only at the end, when Vukvukai is fretting over the children being herded into a helicopter to be taken away to school that we feel any tension between modern Russian and ancient Chukchi ways. (And here in Canada, the sight of the words “residential school” tends to send a chill down the spine.)

That this isn’t the most interesting documentary I’ve seen about nomadic herders probably says more about my film-watching habits than about this doc’s intrinsic value. There’s some nice — if intensely snow-bright — scenery to behold, and I don’t mind the languid, observational pace. Those with short attention spans might want to give this a miss, however.

Hot Docs Link
Screens: Sun, Apr 29, 6:00 PM @ TIFF Lightbox 4; Tue, May 1, 1:00 PM @ TIFF Bell Lightbox 4