Hot Docs 2008

Waiting for Hockney is a compelling look at the institutional art world through the story of Billy Pappas, a suburban Maryland artist who embarks on a 10-year pursuit to create the most detailed portrait ever drawn and to gain an audience with one of the world's most famous artists, David Hockney. After graduating from art school, Billy had become disillusioned with the scene. While working as a waiter, he meets a man who helps him devise a plan to wow the art world. Billy chooses his subject, his drawing method and sets to work in obsessive and meticulous fashion. His drawing takes almost 10 years to complete. He decides that the best man to judge it is Hockney. Will Hockney like the portrait? Will Billy burst onto the international art scene? Waiting for Hockney is an engrossing and often hilarious film that subverts our expectations of art and artists. -Shannon Abel

This heart-warming bio details the remarkable life of artist and musician Wesley Willis who, despite impossible odds, became an underground icon and hero to many before his untimely death in 2003 at age 40. Wesley, a schizophrenic, grew up in a poor area of Chicago in a broken home. He sought refuge by making incredibly detailed freehand drawings of the expressway and cityscape. As a permanent fixture at a local art supply store, Wesley began making friends. He was an imposing figure: a big, slovenly black man with wild hair and eyes, but an infectious grin. After meeting a musician, Wesley began to write, perform and tour. But fame came at a cost. On tour Wesley often forgot to look after himself and his mental illness. By the time he died, he had made 50 albums and thousands of drawings. Interviews with Wesley, friends and family, along with footage from his live performances, paint an absorbing portrait of a loveable man who found happiness in creativity. -Shannon Abel Co-presented with North by Northeast Music and Film Festival and Conference

A disturbing collage of found and archived recordings constructs a profile of renegade psychotherapist R. D. Laing's "anti-psychiatry" movement. In 1965, a community of 20 people-anti-psychiatry leaders, including Laing himself, and their former "patients"-move in together. Over the next five years, they collectively explore the definitions of madness. The film re-appraises the culture of oppressive psychiatry and multinational pharmaceutical companies.

Faced with a nation crumbling down around them, millions of Afghans have been fleeing their home country over the past 30 years. War, brutal regimes and poor quality of life have made it a necessity to move on. Many have sought refuge in Iran, most without official status or sanction in that country. While there, many Afghan men wed Iranian women, often despite deep-rooted cultural frictions. Their compelling stories are elegantly considered by award-winning filmmaker Mahvash Sheikholeslami in Where Do I Belong? As the couples struggle to be accepted, both officially and culturally, their stark interviews expose lives filled with raw and uncompromising decisions about love, country and communal acceptance. Sheikholeslami constructs the film inside a stunning photographic travelogue, filled with dramatic cinematography of rural and urban landscapes. The stories of the mixed Afghani-Iranian marriages often suggest bravery and patience; this is a visually poetic look at enduring, unlikely relationships. -Brett Hendrie

When Aren Hansen had his new $1,400 bike stolen-the replacement for a bike stolen earlier the same month- first he got mad and then he made this heartfelt and clever film featuring numerous victims, their fantasies of revenge and a secret camera set up to nab a bike thief in the act. -Lynne Fernie

"I like relationships and I like flesh" declared punk icon and one-time sex worker Kathy Acker when asked about cybersex. Called an outlaw writer by the New York Times, Acker was a contradictory figure. With her close-cropped hair, tattoos and piercings, she made SM and biting political satire part of her oeuvre. Her sexually explicit writing, which challenged assumptions of gender roles and sexuality, was banned in many countries. Barbara Caspar creatively captures Acker's life, from her wild early years in New York City to her untimely death from breast cancer in 1997. The film is filled with interviews with friends, figures from the era's punk world and young girls who speak about Acker's influence on them. There is also animation, graphic text and reenactments of her bestseller Blood and Guts in High School. Acker lived on her own terms till the very end. Caspar captures her spirit, her controversies and her ongoing influence on the riot grrrl scene. Photo credit: KATHY BREW

Documentary filmmaker David Maysles, renowned for such films as Salesman, Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter, was simply Dad to daughter Celia, who had no idea growing up that her father was a film pioneer. By picking up a camera, Celia takes after her father and journeys into the past via interviews with family, friends, former film subjects and colleagues. But what she truly longs for is to feel her father's presence, to see and hear him again, even if it's only on screen. Her quest to remember her father by way of his films is challenged, however, by Uncle Albert, who has long protected David's film catalogue and is less than eager to collaborate with his niece. Wild Blue Yonder is a first-person search for answers in images, in the hope they might bring back the dead. A thoughtful family drama that examines a legacy of filmmaking and loss, passed down generation to generation. -Angie Driscoll