Hot Docs 2018 Reviews: Alt-Right: Age of Rage, Crime + Punishment and Active Measures

May 04, 2018- Permalink

Alt-Right: Age of Rage

Today was a heavy day of documentaries, ranging from white nationalists and the alt-right, race-driven police arrest quotas, to the money and mob links in the Trump campaign.

Alt-Right: Age of Rage, from director Adam Bhala Lough, opens with archival footage of a Nazi rally from the 1930s. Except that the rally wasn’t in Hitler’s Germany but rather in New York City’s Madison Square Gardens. Fast forward to Charlottesville, Virginia, where the Unite the Right rally during Trump’s first year gives racist tools like Richard Spencer a chance to spew their hate. They may appear to be idiotic caricatures of basement-dwelling Nazis, marching with garden party tiki torches and practicing security detail stances in their Office Depot khakis, but their internet-fueled white supremacy march lead to the tragic death of Heather Heyer. Heyer died when a alt-right sympathizer drove his vehicle into a crowd of counter-protesters. The footage of that event here is much more grisly on the big screen than what we saw repeated on cable news.

Spencer, who appears to be the offspring of a Twitter troll and Tucker Carlson, is supported by the equally toxic views of Jared Taylor, who self-publishes books on hate and holds weekend seminars for like-minded supporters who hate but don’t have time for rallies. These two are confronted by Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of the One People’s Project, who has made it his life’s mission to shine a light and out these racist cockroaches, alerting the media and employers to the hatred in their midst. The alt-right try to paint him and Antifa as the bad guys in this situation, which of course leads Donald Trump to put the anti-Nazi protesters on the same level as the actual white supremacists. We also get to hear from Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups in America.

As Trump makes his comments, the doc leaves us wondering whether he’s as completely toxic as Spencer or just a shallow political opportunist throwing red meat to a hateful group to achieve his goals.

Crime + Punishment, from Stephen Maing, follows the story of the NYPD 12, a group of minority police officer who blew the whistle on discriminatory arrest quotas and faced internal retaliation. The doc is made all the more gripping by hidden microphone recordings of police superiors threatening the whistle-blowers and the warning to be careful because, ominously, “things happen.”

The practice of having quotas for arrests and summonses, which disproportionately hit minority communities, was outlawed in 2010. Many of these charges were later dropped, but they had the impact of putting people into the system who shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The NYPD 12, Black and Latino officers, knew firsthand the outlawed practice was still ongoing. They were pressured by their superiors, given bad shifts, and told promotions would be withheld if they did not meet a revenue-generating quota of police interactions within poorer communities. These officers often felt a calling to enter the force and now they were being faced with corruption within the very profession they were proud to be members of. The doc also traces a private eye who is seeking to prove the quota system still exists and exonerate his client, whose false arrest could follow him for the rest of his life, affecting school and employment. Crime + Punishment is one of those chilling tales that shakes the public’s view of an organization that they are meant to trust.

I ended the day with Active Measures, director Jack Bryan’s look at Russia’s efforts to undermine democracy in the United States and beyond. Russia’s economy isn’t much of a powerhouse these days and in order to punch above its weight, it uses low-cost but effective means to destabilize its neighbours and adversaries using misinformation campaigns on the internet, staged protests, etc. Bryan interviews everyone from Hillary Clinton and John McCain to former ambassadors, CIA agents and security consultants to expose how Putin and his oligarch and crime friends channel money into these efforts.

Active Measures details Russia’s involvement in campaigns in Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia. Some of these cases involve a familiar name, Paul Manafort, who worked on behalf of pro-Russian forces and this leads us to the guy the Kremlin viewed as a “useful idiot”: Donald Trump. The doc outlines how they began suggesting he run as early as 1999. It details how he was the perfect person to go after, as he needed money and was susceptible to flattery. Most importantly, Trump was involved in real estate, the perfect business to launder money through. The doc details how many of the units in Trump Tower and his properties in Miami were owned by either Russian oligarchs or mob and even mentions that when the Secret Service moved into Trump Tower they had to coordinate with the FBI that were keeping tabs on so many of Trump’s tenants. Even his cabinet are shown to have had done deals or favours for people that could be traced back to Putin. You’ll leave the theatre overwhelmed with the amount of detail presented.

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