Tuesday 12 April 2011

Doc Soup Roundtable

Doc Soup, that bastion of delight for Toronto documentary lovers wrapped up for the season last week. The Hot Docs festival is starting soon where I will overdose on documentaries from around the world. I love it. I am a documentary nerd, and luckily I have a lot of doc nerds in my circle.

A couple of years ago my documentary friends and I started a tradition of meeting for a Hot Docs round table to discuss our favourite and least favourite films from the festival. It is a lively and heated gathering over pints of beer and yummy fare at The Victory Cafe. Two of my girlfriends are consistently at opposite ends of spectrum. If one loved a movie, the other is guaranteed to have hated it. It is always amusing to see the two of them spar and scrap it out. I am always fascinated by the varied responses to the same movies, what moves one can completely irritate the other. That is part of the magic of documentaries. Truth is always stranger than fiction and a true story always seems to elicit a strong response, even from a mediocre movie.

This year we decided that we needed a Doc Soup round table as a precursor to the Hot Docs round table, mainly because it gives us an excuse for more beer and noshes.

It was a delightful evening. It is even more delightful that I can look forward to the festival and another round table after that.

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