So I watched #HighMaintenance @hotdocs a documentary about large scale public artist Dani Karavan, that was very evocative. The pro-Palestinian Israeli artist's works all over the world are not well maintained, with weeds growing, water not flowing as intended, dirt unattended.>

>At the outset Dani Karavan was shocked (as I was) that the film director didn't know what Guernica is. (Seriously? Or wasn't he just not paying attention?) The artist's frustration with lack of proper appreciation is another recurrent theme of the film. #HighMaintenance @hotdocs

With the retrospective visits to various large scale public art works by Dani Karavan across national borders, a story of his current project to commemorate Jewish suppporters in Poland unfolds with its potential exploitation for political reasons. #HighMaintenance @hotdocs

Karavan asks for opinions from others, including Wim Wenders who seems to develop a warm friendship with the artist. (I didn't know of his work in Tiergarten, a pond with Holocaust sites inscribed around it and in the centre a bouquet emerges once a day. #HighMaintenance @hotdocs

Toward the end of the film #HighMaintenance @hotdocs, I learned (I should have known) that Dani Karavan designed the Walter Benjamin memorial (so beautiful, poignant, yet somehow liberating that I have been wanting to visit).

I would highly recommend #HighMaintenance @hotdocs if it comes to your town (currently viewing at the festival is limited to inside Canada). Dani Karavan's works are beautiful to watch on screen and I imagine more so to walk around/into. Aesthetically, politically, moving.

So my @hotdocs documentary film viewing continued with #NoHayCamino #ThereIsNoPath, an autobiographical film by Heddy Honingmann, who revisits places of her childhood and her films in Peru as she lives with MS and cancer. So engaging yet unassuming I want to view her other films.

I didn't plan it that way, but with #HighMaintenance on Dani Karavan and #ThereIsNoPath on Heddy Honningman @hotdocs, I'm learning Jewish history. In the latter, the traumatic past of a father led him to tormenting his daughter (ripping her treasured clips of Van Gogh and Monet).

In #NoHayCamino #ThereIsNoPath @hotdocs the director Heddy Honingmann and her driver find her childhood home (from better days with her father) yet the current resident's sister won't grant her a look of the inside. In a way it may have kept intact and evoked her mental images?

#NoHayCamino #ThereIsNoPath I remember seeing a similar scene in The Woman with the 5 Elephants, a Ukrainian German translator of Dostoevsky visiting her home in Kiev, yet the current owner didn't let her see the garden she wanted to. @hotdocs

While I was away from Twitter, I watched a few more documentary films at @hotdocs. I found a few more gems, all about artists.

The Man in the Field: The Life and Art of Jim Deneven; The Man Who Paints Water Drops (about Kim Tschang-Yeul); and Mau (about designer Bruce Mau) told compelling stories about outstanding artists. The first one especially succeeds with the only media that enables it to, film.

I watched The Man in the Field, about a land artist who is also a communal farm based locavore dining producer, after I watched Set! about a competition of table setting, and a comparison was effective for me to experience them better. #HotDocs2021 #documentaryfilm

One of the two films made me vow never to live in USA. The other made me feel like exploring all over USA and appreciate its agricultural produce in the environment where it comes from, in the circle of life with evolution and decline. #TheManintheField #JimDenevan #HotDocs2021

The Man Who Paints Water Drops was refreshing and touching. It deals with war and trauma, yet in a calming and introspective way. It also doesn't ask predictable questions about the East vs the West. I appreciated the subtlety about the storytelling. #HotDocs2021 #documentaryfilm