I called my producer saying, This could be a flat-out catfish, Lang, a Toronto-based documentarian, recalled in a recent interview. He’s always been homeless, he has no identity, he’s never had a passport, never paid taxes. Literally, he is ‘anonymous’ …. It would be not implausible for somebody to read about these things and make up a personal narrative.
And so, Lang began sifting through Doyon s connections in hopes of separating fact from fiction.
The winding tale is captured in the TVO Original film The Face of Anonymous, which makes its world premiere Thursday at a virtual edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.
Christopher Doyon, known online as Anonymous hacktivist Commander X, is the subject of The Face of Anonymous, which premieres at the Hot Docs film festival on Thursday. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Storyline Entertainment MANDATORY CREDIT
TORONTO – When Gary Lang first met the subject of his “hacktivist” documentary in person, he couldn’t shake the suspicion he might’ve been duped by the guy known as Commander X.
Christopher Doyon didn’t look like the sort of guy who helped lead an online revolution as part of the hacker group Anonymous. He was a scraggly-bearded nomad with a tendency to veer off on passionate tangents about politics.
It is a new way of life for us with the pandemic. The past year has been a nightmare for all of us. However, in the word of entertainment, we have been thrown some bonuses. A case in point is the 18th annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival Canada, led by new festival chairs and McGill alumni) Nick de Pencier and Montreal-born Jennifer Baichwal
For the first time since its inception, the entire festival will be available to stream for free across all of Canada, taking place from Feb 18 to 22.
Beginning with the opening night film A La Calle, a ground-level look at ordinary Venezuelans fighting for democracy, the festival is followed by four more documentaries from Kenya, Sweden, Iran/Turkey, and Peru, showcasing human rights issues relating to environmental activism, protest marches, LGBTQ rights, and the plight of refugees.