The 25th Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival 2015 - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Stirring Noam Gonick Documentary on the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics - TO RUSSIA WITH LOVE ****

Let Gorgeous Johnny Weir guide you through the highs, lows, hatred, love, heartache and triumphs of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Totalitarian Russia.

To Russia With Love (2015)
Dir. Noam Gonick

Review By Greg Klymkiw

To Russia With Love (recently honoured as a nominee in the prestigious GLAAD Media Awards in New York) is a gripping feature documentary which casts an indelible eye upon both LGBT participation in sports and the repressive dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. In fact, it's not surprising at all that filmmaker Noam Gonick would be the one to fashion of one of the best, if not, frankly, the best of all documentaries dealing with human rights issues affecting the LGBT community in Russia during the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. First and foremost, Gonick is one of the more stellar leading lights of the Prairie-Post-Modernist Wave of cinema in Winnipeg; one that includes the likes of John Paizs, Guy Maddin, Deco Dawson and Matthew Rankin.

He brings his unique outsider perspective to anything he puts his mitts on; especially such seminal (as it were) works as 1919 (the brilliant re-imagining of the famed Winnipeg General Strike with a fantasia upon the late-lamented Wong's Steam Bath and Bill Sciak's legendary barber shop in Winnipeg's Chinatown), his intensely diverse feature films Hey Happy! and Stryker, plus his astonishing post-modern documentary Hirsch on the late, great pioneer of regional theatre as well as the saviour of the Stratford Theatre Festival and CBC Drama.

What's thrilling about Gonick's helmsmanship in this new film is just how skilfully he juggles several vital narrative threads revolving around Sochi and how he deftly creates several sub-arcs within the overall arc of the film's compelling narrative (and vitally important political, social and cultural issues). This is not mere "journalism" documentary, but genuine storytelling with a voice (one which he shares so much with his more "out-there" works as well as his more "straight"-up television work and his brilliant doc on Guy Maddin, Waiting For Twilight).

The film follows several Canadian LGBT athletes during the buildup, then participation and finally, the aftermath of the 2014 Sochi Olympics. He weaves these stories (which include insights into the openness and acceptance of the athletes' families) with three central narratives.

RUSSIA's LGBT community under ATTACK!

Perhaps the central non-fiction tale involves the stunningly beautiful and handsome former Olympic skater Johnny Weir who will be covering the proceedings for broadcast television. Weir in not only charming, funny and erudite, but he's delectably flamboyant and a lifelong Russophile (which makes the country's "legal" castigation of the LGBT community especially painful for him).

Weir uses his position as a behind-the-scenes activist and spokesperson whilst brilliantly adhering to the Olympic Committee's moronic demands that all Sochi participants (athletes, broadcasters, administrators, etc.) maintain complete silence about "political" issues. Christ, since when have the Olympics not been political (as Gonick superbly touches upon)?

Weir's narrative melds with two important story strands; one involving an all-LGBT sporting competition to occur in Sochi just after the Olympics and the other, perhaps the most moving of all the stories, Vladislav Slavskiya, a teenage gay man who lives in Sochi and who has experienced the most horrendous verbal, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of homophobic students and teachers in his high school and longs for an opportunity to find a place in the world where he can be proud and accepted for whom and what he is. (There's even an unbelievably moving development which occurs during his plight with the famously-out Billie Jean King.)

Overall, Gonick wrenches us this way and that, as all great filmmakers should. He makes superb use of the many ups, downs, happiness and melancholy that the entire Sochi experience is infused with to deliver a film that's entertaining, informative and finally, must-see viewing for all audiences, gay or straight, all over the free (and not-so-free) world.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4 Stars

To Russia With Love is playing at the Inside Out 2015 Toronto LGBT Film Festival. For further info, please visit the festival's website by clicking HERE.

Full Disclosure: During the early 90s in Winnipeg, my film production office shared the same floor as the artist apartment in the old Plug-Inn Gallery space above U.N. Luggage. Noam Gonick lived there for a time and we'd often catch occasional (mostly attired) glimpses of each other. I only shared Noam's bed when I was visiting as it was the most comfortable place to sit. I also never shared a bubble bath with him as filmmaker Deco Dawson (above left) clearly did. Noam has, however, fed me brisket, for which I am eternally grateful.

CONTINENTAL - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Klymkiw HOT DOCS 2013 HOT PICKS

Continental (2013) ****
Dir. Malcolm Ingram
Starring: Steve Ostrow, Sarah Dash, Holly Woodlawn, Edmund White, Frankie Knuckles

Review By Greg Klymkiw

You're a businessman. You're looking for a business. Something new. Something exciting. Something challenging. Something needed. Really needed. Now, if you're a great Big Apple businessman like Steve Ostrow was in 1968, you identify the hole and you fill it.

The hole Ostrow identified was deep, dank and dirty. It not only required filling, but demanded to be packed good and hard.

Ostrow was not only a great businessman, he was a flamboyant, forward-thinking visionary - an artist, if you will - so much so, that his true passion was not necessarily the free and open marketplace, but opera. More specifically, Ostrow was a gifted singer and he desperately wanted to project his gorgeous voice on an international stage - to sing in the great opera houses of the world. This, sadly, just wasn't in the cards. He was a husband, a father and he had mouths to feed and bills to pay. In those days - in fact, in most days - a mensch, a real mensch did not shirk away from his responsibilities.

At this time, the free and open marketplace was not quite free and open for his grand idea - especially not for the prospective clientele since their place in the world was not a matter of choice, but hardwired into their very being. In spite of this, homosexuality was illegal and a whole generation of men were ostracized, vilified and hunted down like common criminals for just being who they were - gay.

Many of these men were in the closet. Coming out at that time meant risking everything, so they stayed burrowed in their secret society and surreptitiously sought places off the well-trodden paths to exercise their God-Given right to be who they really were. This forced them into clandestine bars and clubs, but the risk here was even too great, so instead they sought anonymity and sexual solace in steambaths.

Ostrow changed everything. He wanted to run a steambath that wasn't some horrific, unkempt and dingy hovel - he wanted a clean class act for gay men to frolic in.

And so he bore - at least up to that point in his life, his true masterpiece - the Cadillac of gay steambaths, the immortal Continental. Here his clientele were treated as human beings, with respect. Ostrow gave them a class act to pursue their sexual expression. Once he erected his glistening Crown Jewel of steambaths, he didn't rest on his laurels and merely count his shekels - Steve Ostrow always kept several steps forward of the game and his game.

In so doing, The Continental Baths became more than a mere bathhouse - Ostrow created one of the major landmarks in Gay Rights and one of the hottest, most cutting edge launch pads for a myriad of performing artists. Yes, live entertainment, ladies and gentleman. If the action got too steamy in the baths and you sought more, shall we say, restful heat, you could wrap a towel over your genitals, retire to the performing space and watch the likes of Bette Midler (backed up on piano by Barry Manilow, no less).

For a steam bath, the Continental was red-hot and COOL - double your pleasure and double your fun!

It's a great story made even greater by Malcolm Ingram's first-rate feature documentary Continental.

This is one terrific picture. Ingram pulls out all the stops to tell a story that's brash, bold, funny, inspiring and ultimately deeply moving. He does so in such a way that the movie is full of surprises (many happy ones) and always, much like Ostrow's life, a rollercoaster - with all the requisite ups and downs. (Mostly "ups" - "downs" are downers, but they're necessary for those "ups" to be higher and harder.)

Ingram has always been a take-no-prisoners filmmaker and someone I've admired from the beginning of his career. He wanted to make movies - in Canada. Did he initially go knocking on the doors of government agencies. No. He knew his brand of filmmaking would have doors slammed upon it. He made his first film, the insanely odball Drawing Flies which made a virtue of its no-dough status - ON FILM YOU WHINING FILM BRATS!!! ON FILM!!! He made it initially with chicken scratchings and then, with a huge helping hand from Kevin Smith and his View Askew productions, Ingram delivered the picture which, in my humble opinion, has some of the funniest, weirdest writing in Canadian cinema - and that, my friends, is saying something. Smith, of course, was the original graduate of the If-You-Want-To-Make-a-Movie-Quit-Fucking-Whining-About-It-And-Just-Make-The-Fucking-Thing School. Ingram comes from the same stock and by any means necessary, he kept making movies including the all-star cast youth comedy Tail Lights Fade in which he partnered with Canadian Über Producer Christine Haebler and then he went to ground zero and cobbled together enough dough to make two of the best and seminal gay-themed docs of the new century - Small Town Gay Bar and (my personal favourite) Bear Nation.

Well, he's blown all of them away. With Continental, Ingram has hit the stratosphere and delivered Ostrow's tale with clarity, a wonderful sense of celebration and good old fashioned solid filmmaking. He delivers a sense of time, place and history and by the end of the film, he generates a work that is chock-full of elation and yes, one that is genuinely, deeply and profoundly moving.

Ingram aimed for the stratosphere with this one and damned if he doesn't blast right through the celestial fucker.

"Continental" is playing at the Hot Docs 2013 Film Festival. For showtimes and ticket info, visit the Hot Docs website HERE.