Hot Docs 2018 Reviews: The Oslo Diaries, More Human Than Human, Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground

May 02, 2018- Permalink

The Oslo Diaries

The Oslo Diaries, from directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, looks at the tense negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians that led to the 1993 Oslo Accord. The meetings between the two sides in Norway were top secret and the level of distrust between the negotiators was high. With all the secrecy, Loushy and Sivan don’t have footage from those meetings, but between contemporary videos and recent interviews with the principals (including Shimon Peres’ final interview) the filmmakers are able to put together a picture of that moment in time.

The negotiations continued and the men involved began to see the common humanity between them. Perhaps there was a way to end the conflict between the two peoples. When they finally came up with an agreement and their work was seen in the daylight, extremist forces on both sides began their campaign to see that it didn’t succeed. The road to the signing of the accord had potholes. The road to the accord’s implementation had land mines. One of then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s biggest opponents was Benjamin Netanyahu and after Rabin’s 1995 assassination his political star only rose. Twenty-five years later and Netanyahu is the current prime minister and the work of the negotiators is no closer to being implemented. It’s a sad resolution to be reminded that peace is harder to wage than war.

Directors Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting explore artificial intelligence in the doc More Human Than Human. The film looks at various stories involving AI while the film’s through line is Pallotta’s work with a team building a robot documentarian that will not only interview Pallotta but frame the shots as well. One story involves an autistic boy whose use of Siri helps his mother get a reprieve from a barrage of daily questions. Another shows a woman who keeps her dead fiance “alive” by interacting with a collection of his text messages and photos that she collected and compiled into a program. A psychologist realizes that the woman he’s been chatting with on a dating site is actually a chatbot and even his educated mind was fooled, while Pallotta’s pals Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke drop by to see if a robot is ready to replace Scorsese.

Though it’s not a gem of a doc and flits quickly from thought to thought, More Human Than Human does leave us with an important question. As we hand more decisions over to AI, what stops that AI from deciding that we might be the biggest threat?

I had a chance to screen Chuck Smith’s Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground prior to the festival. It opens tonight at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema and is a fascinating look at a woman who was a huge connector between people in the early Sixties arts scene in New York and an artist in her own right.

Rubin was teen when she hit the scene and worked with experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas. She was everywhere, working with many, influencing many and shooting her own graphic art film, Christmas on Earth. She met Andy Warhol, introduced him to Lou Reed, got Bob Dylan interested in Jewish mysticism and inspired Alan Ginsberg, who began a relationship with her after seeing the controversial Christmas on Earth. She organized arts events. She was the ultimate muse and connector. Then, just as suddenly as she entered the scene, she left, stepping out of a car as she was passing a Jewish orphanage. She married an Orthodox Jewish man, soon divorced him and married another, moving to live in a religious community in France, where she died giving birth to her fifth child at age 35.

The people being interviewed don’t seem to have any insights into Rubin’s sudden exit, her mental illness and drug use perhaps seen as a catalyst for her art as opposed to an explanation for events in her life. While we may not get all the answers from this doc, it does give us a glimpse into a brief but vibrant period of an important arts scene.

For more information on the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and for tickets and showtimes visit hotdocs.ca.