Hot Docs - Booing Big Business

Pre-show announcements are made at the latest Hot Doc presentation. The lights dim. The opening Hot Doc animated sequence plays. Cut to...Models twirling on a catwalk. The onscreen audience, rich and bored, perks up at a new arrival rising up out of a dark pool. Water glistens and sheens off of slick curves. The new Cadillac is here! Hurrah!

And the real-life audience erupts into a chorus of hisses and boos. Others take it up and the house goes wild with enthusiastic jeering mixed with clapping and laughter. This same ritual has happened at every Hot Doc film I've attended and I look forward to it continuing over this last weekend of the festival. It's a great way to begin a film - presenting an audible middle finger in protest of the practice of corporate commercials preceding documentaries (the subjects of which often decry the big-business monster).