By John Corrado

★★★½ (out of 4)

The 2023 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 27th to May 7th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.

Danish filmmaker Christian Einshøj digs into his family history in his symbolic, deeply personal documentary The Mountains. Einshøj draws upon a vast personal archive of old photographs and hours of home videos to document how the tragic death of his baby brother over two decades earlier left a hole in his family, with the unspoken about grief continuing to ricochet out over the years.

This obsessive documenting started when his father Søren bought a camcorder and began to record his family, a task that fell to Christian when he was gifted his own video camera as a child. The camera served as a way for them to capture fleeting memories, and also bridge the emotional distance between each other. This footage, ranging from intimate family celebrations over the years to the videos that his father took on his increasingly frequent business trips, provides the backbone of Einshøj‘s film.

The footage is held together by Einshøj’s compelling voiceover, offering poetic narration to accompany the images as he heads back to his childhood home in Norway for the first time in years, and reflects on a childhood marked by grief and depression. Christian’s camera captures these reunions, with him using the project as a way for him to reconnect with the other men in his family, including his father and two younger brothers, who have always been reluctant to show their emotions as openly as him.

It’s the assembly of the film that makes it so engaging, with Einshøj allowing it to unfold as a bit of a family mystery as more information is revealed and he pieces together moments from their collective past. The film also centres around an Arctic Circle road trip that becomes a sort of symbolic mission for the brothers as adults, complete with costumes of their favourite superheroes from childhood. Because so much of their childhood was documented, he is able to show the passage of time over several decades in a profound way.

If The Mountains could be summarized as a journey exploring masculinity and mental health, it’s also a powerful testament to film being used not only as a way to preserve the past, but also as a way to break down emotional barriers and reconnect in the present. The result is a moving, beautifully assembled documentary that reaches a piercing emotional honesty in its best moments. This is documentary filmmaking as personal catharsis.

Screenings: Thursday, April 27th, 6:00 PM at TIFF Bell Lightbox 4; Sunday, April 30th, 12:00 PM at Scotiabank Theatre 5. Tickets can be purchased here, and the film will also be streaming online across Canada from May 5th to 9th.