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Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Spring is here, and so is Toronto’s Spring film festival season. And its crowning glory is Hot Docs the world’s biggest International Documentary Film Festival. It’s a month away — it runs from April 25 to May 5 — but now’s a good time to start booking tickets. As usual there are over 100 docs from more than 60 countries, with many international premieres. And, as always, students and seniors (over 60) can go to daytime screenings for free.

They just released the whole festival slate, so here are a few docs that I haven’t seen yet, but look interesting to me. Black Box Diaries is about a young Japanese journalist who was raped, and is taking her case to court in a demand for justice. Grand Theft Hamlet shows some UK actors attempting to mount a production of Shakespeare entirely within the notorious game Grand Theft Auto. Norwegian Democrazy is about extreme street level politics in that country, and Stray Bodies takes a similar look at how people handle bodily restrictions within their own countries can be resisted by crossing  national borders within the EU. Pelikan Blue is an animated film about what young Hungarians did to leave the country when the Iron Curtain fell. There are also video diaries: The Here Now Project about how climate change effects people around the world; and XiXi, an intimate look at the innermost thoughts and beliefs of a Chinese improvisation artist living in Europe. Curl Power is a funny and tender examination of five teenage girls over three years on a curling team. And for those interested in musical celebs, there are features about Toronto’s own Peaches, called Teaches of Peaches, and Disco’s Revenge about the legendary musical producer Nile Rogers. 

Like I said, Hotdocs is a full month away, but now’s the time to start thinking about it.

This week, though, I’m looking at two movies, one for children and one for definitely for grownups. There’s a girl looking for a wild beast in the jungle, and a man in an El Paso jail trying to explain why he’s the only one to survive a mass killing. 

Autumn and the Black Jaguar

Dir: Gilles de Maistre

Autumn Edison (Lumi Pollack) is a young girl in middle school in New York City. She grew up in a rainforest somewhere in Latin America with her environmentalist parents. Her Dad is from the North, her Mom a member of the local indigenous nation. So Autumn treats the jungle as her backyard. As a small child she befriended a baby black jaguar who was left parentless when poachers shot the mother jaguar. So they grew up together. Developers and animal traffickers, led by the evil Poacher, Doria Dargan (Kelly Hope Taylor) wanted to evict her people from their land. They also hunted rare species to sell on the black market. But when Autumn’s mother is killed, her Dad takes her back to North America, where it’s safe. Seven years later, she’s almost a teen, but still hates it up there. No one seems to care about our animal friends or the environment. Especially her biology teacher Anja (Emily Bett Rickards). She wants the class to dissect frogs — can you believe it? — and Autumn refuses to participate in such cruelty. She stages a one-person protest. So she’s suspended from school, and not the first time. Stuck at home, she finds a letter from her uncle in the rain forest,  a veritable cry for help. Our lives are teetering on the brink, he writes. They want to build a dam, flooding where we have lived for millennia. And they’re after Hope, the beloved black jaguar! 

Autumn takes this as a beacon, calling her back to her ancestral home. She lies to her father that everything’s fine, and secretly rushes off to the airport. What she doesn’t realize is her teacher — notable for her fear of germs, insecurity and agoraphobia —  is somehow following her; she’s afraid Autumn is in danger, and wants to bring her back home. She’s risking her worst phobias to rescue the little girl. But they both end up in the rainforest, alone, with Autumn the one who is confident and at home.  Will she find Hope the Jaguar? Will Hope still recognize her? And can they somehow stop the destruction of her culture, and the kidnapping of the last black jaguar?

Autumn and the Black Jaguar is a heart-warming kids’ movie. By kids, I mean little kids. As a grown-up, I found the dialogue klunky at best and cringy at worst, as if written by Chat GBT and edited by Google Translate. The teacher talks like a cartoon character. comically overreacting to everything she sees (as in most kids’ TV shows). But there are also some very cool adventures, like when they climb a tall tree and walk around on top of the forest’s canopy. I think little kids will really like this.

Watching the movie, I was impressed by the CGI version of a Jaguar playing with Autumn — it looked real. Could it be a CGI head superimposed on a friendly dog’s body? But after I did a bit of research, I found out the actress, Lumi Pollack, spent 10 months learning to bond with two actual jaguars. That wild cat is real!  Impressive. Which moved it up quite a few notches on my mental score card.

Satanic Hispanics

Dir: Alejandro Brugués, Mike Mendez, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Eduardo Sánchez, Demián Rugna

It’s El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Juarez, Chihuahua. The police discover dozens of dead bodies in an old, abandoned building, with only one man still alive, unarmed, and handcuffed to a metal table. So they arrest him. He calls himself the Traveler (Efren Ramirez) and says he was born here — meaning in the US —  and speaks at least 5 languages. But he’s undocumented, with no papers to prove his existence. Still, he pleads for the police to let him go. If they don’t, in 90 minutes they’ll all end up dead, just like the others they found. You see, he says he’s being followed by the Saint of Death, a terrifying, mystical being who wants to kill him. That’s why he’s the traveller: he always has to keep a step ahead of the Saint, to avoid massive bloodshed like this one. 

But the cops don’t believe him — they accuse him of drug trafficking. They bring out his cache of strange paraphernalia and ask for an explanation. So, like Scheherazade, he embarks on a series of stories that tell where each item comes from. One of his strangest stories is called Tambien Lo Vi. It’s about a mathematical genius named Gustavo (Demián Salomón) a Rubik’s cube champ who somehow transfers his mental algorithms into light patterns projected on a wall using the light from his cel phone. He flaps his arms wildly flashing… that seems to bridge the gap between the living and the dead.

Other stories deal with a voracious vampire having a night on the town on Halloween — the only time of year when he can dress as a blood sucker in public —  and a very bizarre take of a man fighting off a demon using a prodigious weapon known as the Hammer of Zanzibar that I cannot describe on daytime radio. But back to the main plot: can The Traveller finish his stories before the evil entity arrives to kill us all?

Satanic Hispanics is a compilation horror movie told by 5 directors and countless writers, producers, cast and crew. Each story is told as discrete, complete short film, within the whole movie, but with all sharing a similar look. The directors themselves are originally from Argentina, the US, Mexico and Cuba, with dialogue shifting from English to Spanish to pre-Columbian languages. Being a horror movie, there’s lots of gratuitous violence, blood and guts, some shocks and chills, and some horrible-looking evil entities.

Does it work? Oh yes! Not every segment is perfect, but altogether they tell us some very original and scary stories.

Autumn and the Black Jaguar opens this weekend in Toronto: check your local listings; Satanic Hispanics is currently streaming on Shudder.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.