Good for the Heart and Soul, Good for Business: The Cultural Politics of Documentary at the Hot Docs Film Festival
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation looks at the ways in which the Toronto-based Hot Docs documentary film festival is undergoing a process of transforming documentary cinema and culture from the margins to the mainstream through a process of the commercialization of documentary.In particular three interlocking forces are examined, including populism, consumerism and liberalism.By privileging commercial interests and strategies over local community, advocacy and political activist considerations, Hot Docs is developing into a very successful and vital cultural institution and event, both nationally and globally.This thesis investigates the consequences of the festival's commercial strategy with two aspects in mind-the mode of its consumption, and the management of contestation and dissent-and argues that radical perspectives, local advocacy and political participation are being eroded for the sake of a large, accessible and attractive festival image and performance.Yasmin Jiwani, Tim Schwabb, Charles Acland and Liz Miller (as well as others mentioned already) kept me, during my long undergraduate years and MA, oriented toward community, justice, imagination and communication.A big thank-you to Kathy Wazana, Marc Glassman, Barri Cohen and Geoff Bowie for graciously supplying me with Hot Docs goodies including original programs from the nineties and page-turning minutes from the original CIFC meetings.Of course I'm also grateful to all the others I interviewed, including Hot Docs management and staff, especially Chris McDonald, Brett Hendrie and Sean Farnel -all of whom made themselves accessible and never complained about my drawn out
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".