The Province
Friday, June 24, 2011
The thrills of Formula One racing and the intrigue of Conan O'Brien's late night TV career are among the stories onscreen as Toronto's Hot Docs festival sends five of this year's hits to Vancouver.
Up Friday night (7 p.m.) is Love Etc., five real, diverse love stories filmed over the course of a year in New York by director Jill Andresevic.
Saturday (6: 30 p.m.) brings Project Nim, from the Oscarwinning team behind Man on Wire. Nim was the chimp in a 1970s experiment aimed at showing that an ape could learn language if raised like a human child. Director James Marsh's movie is revealing, funny and unsettling.
Later that night (9 p.m.) is Conan O'Brien Can't Stop, which follows the talk-show host on a standup comedy tour after he was dumped from The Tonight Show.
Senna (Sunday, 6: 30 p.m.) tracks the racing career of Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna, a three-time world champion, from 1984 to his death a decade later.
The Canadian documentary The Pirate Tapes (Sunday, 9 p.m.) follows a young Somali-Canadian who joins an armed pirate cell with a hidden camera, and ends up in a horrific jail in danger of execution. The documentary explores how civil war and corruption pushed once-peaceful fishermen into piracy.