Thoughout The Interrupters, the streets of Chicago are repeatedly called a “war zone.” While this is a phrase repeated by wide-eyed, blonde Fox reporters, it is first heard at a street rally for a thirteen year old boy, shot 22 times on his own front porch. The scene does have the chaotic, panicked feel of a war zone: tension is thick, tempers are short, and most of the surrounding houses are boarded up. The rally comes to an abrupt when another homicide is reported a few blocks over. Perhaps ...

In 1962, three Quebec filmmakers collaborated on St-Henri, le cinq Septembre, a project documenting working class life in the Montreal neighbourhood of St. Henri. The film’s goal is to relate: “la simplicité de cette population sans complexes, ni très riche, ni absolument pauvre, qui a commencé à décroître alors que Saint-Henri n'est plus le royaume des tanneries qu'il était jadis.” It is considered a classic example of cinéma vérité. It would be unfair to call Shannon Walsh’s St-Henri, the 26th of August either an update or a simple homage: while its roots are clear, it is a story all its own. The St-Henri of August 26, 2010 is this time captured by sixteen Quebec filmmakers who weave together vignettes of ever day life that create an incredible sense of place: boys desperately hunting for worms, an old couple strolling the Lachine Canal, a woman who walks the sewers to experience genuine “tunnel vision.”

In the late 1980s, filmmaker Michael Galinsky took a roadtrip across the U.S., stopping at dozens of malls to photograph those shopping, eating, and loitering within. Twenty years later, the photos have reappeared, and Galinsky will be presenting Malls Across America, 1989 at the Drake this week.

Hot Docs 2011 began last night, and runs until May 8. In the next week Spacing will be posting reviews of some urbanist-relevant films. In the meantime, here are some films we've got our eye on (and an observation: lots 0f people from the rush line usually get in; don't be afraid to line up!):

Once again Spacing is pleased to be a part of Toronto Public Library’s Keep Toronto Reading program. This April the library hopes the whole city will join in reading Judy Fong Bates's Midnight at the Dragon Cafe, the story of a young Chinese-Canadian growing up in small-town Ontario in the late 50s and early 60s. Throughout the month, Spacing Toronto will present a series of posts exploring the book and its relationship to our city. Where is Irvine, Ontario? Su-Jen’s descriptions of the quiet small town, with its hardware store, bakery, and five and dime along main street make it sound like it could be anywhere: “the streets were never busy, not even on Saturdays….even though most of the buildings were made of red brick, the feeling was grey.” What distinguishes Irvine is its tanning factory, a place that employees much of the town, and that leaves a heavy scent in the air. Pock Mark Lee, delivery man and family friend, jokes that he knows he’s getting to Irvine from the smell, “so thick it seemed almost to coat the inside of your mouth.”

Once again Spacing is pleased to be a part of Toronto Public Library’s Keep Toronto Reading program. This April the library hopes the whole city will join in reading Judy Fong Bates's Midnight at the Dragon Cafe, the story of a young Chinese-Canadian growing up in small-town Ontario in the late 50s and early 60s. Throughout the month, Spacing Toronto will present a series of posts exploring the book and its relationship to our city. The Chou family loves to visit Toronto; they are the only Asians in Irvine, Ontario, and feel at home along the busy streets of Chinatown, where they can visit relatives and speak their own language. In the early 1960s, Su-Jen’s family begins to travel to and from Toronto more often. There are several reasons for the increased frequency of these trips. The dark secrecy that drives the plot of Midnight at the Dragon Café is truly what drives the family an hour west: the arrival of Su-Jen’s tense, angry older brother, her mother’s misery, her father’s increasing loneliness. Toronto is a means of escape. But the more literal reason the family begins to make the journey is interesting in its own right: in the early 1960s, the Highway 401 finally passed through Irvine:

Once again Spacing is pleased to be a part of Toronto Public Library’s Keep Toronto Reading program. This April the library hopes the whole city will join in reading Judy Fong Bates's Midnight at the Dragon Cafe, the story of a young Chinese-Canadian growing up in small-town Ontario in the late 50s and early 60s. Throughout the month, Spacing Toronto will present a series of posts exploring the book and its relationship to our city. With so much of Midnight at the Dragon Café taking place in the kitchen and around the tables of the Chou family’s restaurant, it’s hard to read Bates’s debut novel without getting hungry. Su-Jen’s mother, desperately homesick for Hong Kong, throws herself into cooking, the preparation of elaborate means  “the only thing that [gives] her real pleasure” in Canada. While the family dines on such mouthwatering dishes as “sliced white chicken, beef hot-pot with dried bean curd…plump glistening scallops fried with greens and mushrooms, a whole fish steamed with ginger and scallions,” their restaurant serves mostly greasy spoon favourites, and what the family jokingly refer to as “fool the lo-fon food”; American Chinese food preferred by the white residents of Irvine, Ontario.

Every April, Toronto Public Library hosts the Keep Toronto Reading Festival. At the centre of the month long celebration of literacy is the One Book program, in which a single work of fiction or collection of poetry is chosen as a focal point for myriad activities and discussions — a city-wide book club of sorts, with a lot more ways to participate. Part of the fun of One Book is that the chosen volume always has ...

In Our House we are introduced to Dan, fresh out of jail and newly sober. Homeless and no longer in touch with his family,  Dan is taken in by Derek, a dreadlocked Brooklyn radical who spent his eighteenth year travelling across the U.S., sleeping on the streets in order to get to know the country’s poor. Derek, along with his friends JP and Neil, lives in a Williamsburgh perhaps less familiar to the audience: they are squatters running, with the blessings of the building’s owner, something close to an assisted living ...

Population density inevitably increases turmoil. Although the size of  a municipality is often directly linked to the amount of regulation and mechanization that goes on within it, places that are crowded, that are full of people (and animals, and equipment), will always more quickly fall into chaos. The trope of overcrowded Asia appears everywhere on film: a crossing in Shinjuku, Tokyo, a hodgepodge of bicycles, vehicles and animals in Manila, slum-like apartment blocks in Hong Kong. And while it is hard to conceive of any particular place containing a billion people, footage of China is certainly the go-to image for “place that is overcrowded”. The scenes are, most typically, that of a thousand faces on a corner, surrounded by a thousand street scenes. But what is such chaos made up of?