Hot Docs 2018 Reviews: Won’t You Be My Neighbor and Roll Red Roll

May 06, 2018- Permalink

Won’t You Be My Neighbor

It’s my last day of the 2018 Hot Docs Festival and I’m starting it off with Morgan Neville’s Fred Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor. Fred Rogers was a Presbyterian minister who found his true calling working in children’s television. His TV wasn’t full of flashy graphics and loud music tied in with commercial merchandise. Instead he quietly spoke to the children, but never spoke down to them. While other shows helped with letters and numbers, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood helped with their emotional intelligence. The Vietnam war was going on, so the puppets in his imaginary kingdom dealt with territorial aggression. The civil rights movement was happening, so he illustrated racial harmony by taking the then bold TV move of sharing a foot bath with the neighborhood’s black police officer. When Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, he quietly talked to the children about the news and how it could be affecting their parents. From bullying to disabilities, Mister Rogers never shied away from a topic, yet he never treated them with anything but respect.

We see Fred Rogers warm the heart of a crusty Nixon-era Republican committee chairman who in turn gives public television the funding it needs. We hear how he apologized to a co-worker when he initially reacted badly to the co-worker’s homosexuality. Neville lets the stories and the clips play out in the same rhythm of Mister Rogers’ show.

Perhaps it was a mix of nostalgia and the stark contrast to today’s cynical, vicious, mean-spirited news cycle, but I wasn’t the only member of the audience to be wiping away the occasional tear. Definitely worth seeing.

My final film of the festival is Roll Red Roll, from director Nancy Schwartzman. It sheds a disturbing light onto the 2012 rape case that put Steubenville, Ohio in international headlines, when a girl was raped by high school football players. After a football game, “Jane Doe” accompanied friends to several post game parties. Intoxicated, she was later raped and only found out about the incident when she was shown a photo that had been circulated online. Initial investigation into the case was difficult by the toxicity of rape culture and sports worship. Many in the town blamed the girl’s intoxication and circled the wagons around the star players. The coach didn’t want to make his stars, Ma’lik Richmond and Trent Mays, look guilty and hurt their futures. The disgusting trope of “boys will be boys” was heard.

The film tracks two important figures, detective J.P. Rigaud, who had to form a case with scant physical evidence but many text messages, and crime blogger Alexandria Goddard, who meticulously cataloged the team members and their social media posts to form a timeline of the evening. The texts and tweets are gut-wrenching but one of the most sickening bits of evidence comes in the form of a 12 minute YouTube video which shows Steubenville baseball player Michael Nodianos, discussing the texts and tweets he saw and laughingly describing the events. His complete lack of empathy makes him the perfect representation of how the story was playing out in the town.

Powerful and moving, Roll Red Roll is a gut-wrenching look at our culture and priorities.

That’s it for me and Hot Docs 2018. It’s an excellent festival and it has activities and screenings throughout the year. Don’t forget to visit “hotdocs.ca”:https://hotdocs.ca for more details.