'Set!' Director Scott Gawlik Knew The World Needed More Competitive Table Setting | Hot Docs 2021

The 2021 Hot Docs Festival will be available for audiences across Canada to stream April 29 to May 9. Hot Docs is the largest documentary focused film festival in North America and the line-up this year is absolutely incredible.

Check out my full coverage of Hot Docs 2021!

Set! (2021) does what documentaries do best: introduce audiences to a lesser known subject and open up that world to the uninitiated. Competitive table setting is not something most viewers will be aware of and it's about time we were -- it's full of dramatics, precision, and judgment. The latter being what director/editor/producer Scott Gawlik took notice of one serendipitous day at the county fair.

"I just went to have some fun -- drink some beers, play some games that are rigged, and I just stumbled on the table setting competition," recalls Gawlik. "What was interesting about it was there’s a gazillion competitions, but it’s the only competition that has the judges' notes available for everyone else to see. So you walk around and you look at the judges' notes and they’re brutal, like 'how dare you put that spoon here,' and all that sort of stuff."

As Gawlik went from table to table, his feelings grew about each setting: "I never had an opinion about table setting ever. I would have had paper plates if it would prevent me from cleaning the dishes growing up. And all of a sudden I had opinions!" Scott chuckles. "'That table is better than this table'. Why I felt that way I had no idea. And I was looking around the room and I was realised that everyone else was doing the exact same thing. So I was like, 'okay, this is definitely something that people don’t know they’re interested in but they are.'"

Audience reactions and reviews have proven Gawlik right. And it's not the creativity of the table settings that's driving people's opinions -- it's the stories behind the contestants.

From the Michael Jordan of table setting (Gawlik's words), Bonnie Overman to world travelling, Janet Lew, who uses various ornaments from her travels for her tables. And let's not forget Marie and Christel Schoenfelder, the mother-daughter team who have been on-again, off-again tablescaping partners. Scott brought together a great rag tag group of competitors who showcase competitive table setting perfectly.

Set! is a wonderful meditation on passion. Caring about something to a degree that most others just won't understand. Passion can often be mistaken for self-importance but for those of us in the know, we can see ourselves in the film. Whether it's ritualistically using sensory deprivation tanks for creative inspiration or measuring a place setting to a fraction of an inch, people who harbour a deep passion for something -- anything -- relate to this seemingly obsessive behaviour.

There's also a greater story of your passion being your life raft, beautifully captured in Tim Wyckoff's story.

When we first meet Tim, he's in a bit of a funk. He's unemployed, struggling to pay his bills, and relying on government assistance. It's not just the financial pressures weighing him down, his search for a job is soul crushing (which anyone who has been unemployed for even a minute can wholeheartedly empathize with) and threatens to knock the wind out of his sails.

But where we see Tim come alive is when he's sourcing materials for his table and painstakingly painting the different pieces for his setting. Tim uses the competition as a way of expressing some of the frustrations in his life. He entered the 'International Travel' category and took inspiration from the Dr. Seuss classic "Oh, the Places You'll Go!".

"There’s a lot of parallels [between] that book and that time in Tim’s life," Scott explains. "On the outside it’s colourful, crazy images, and it’s really fun. But if you read between the lines, there’s a lot of really deep important themes and it talks about your struggle in life, obstacles you’ll overcome and all these sorts of things. And I felt that that book was such a great choice for him and such a fantastic parallel with what was going on with his life in that time."

A quick look on Twitter and Letterboxd will find a lot of support for Tim and his creation and a lot of that is probably due to his back story (we're all suckers for the underdog aren't we?). Everyone's had their down moments or phases in life and we can only hope to be so lucky as to find something to raise us up like creativity has for Tim.

Another competitor, Crystal Young, was also going through a difficult time in her life. She was working through her grief following the passing of some family and friends, and at first she wasn't sure about taking part in Set!.

"[Crystal] won best of show the previous year. Her father passed away and some other people that were close to her," Gawlik tells me. "I totally respected that". After speaking with Gawlik though and getting to know him better and understanding the film more, Young agreed to take part but on the condition that her father's passing wasn't mentioned.

But Young ended up speaking about her father and her grief on camera due to a miscommunication. Jon Salmon, director of photography and producer of Set!, was completely unaware of Crystal and Scott's previous conversations. When Gawlik was in post-production and saw all the footage of Crystal, he found it incredibly moving and difficult not to include: "It was motivating -- setting the table for her was her way of dealing with some of this pain in her life."

Thankfully, Crystal was really happy with how the film turned out. "She watched the movie and thanked me for putting [her father's passing] in," Scott says relieved. Crystal even thanked Gawlik for honouring her father and for doing so in a tasteful and meaningful way.

Crystal's passion was a step in resolving her grief. As we see her making pieces and putting her setting together, it's clear Young's father's presence permeated throughout her creative process. It's yet another example in Set! of how a seemingly frivolous hobby can be a catalyst for much more.

And then of course there's Hilarie Moore, the resident bad girl of tablescaping. She's brash and could easily be painted as the villain of the competition, but in fact, she's just a person who takes her art seriously.

We see Hilarie go for a float in a sensory deprivation tank and we hear stories about how she piled up garbage on her table at a previous competition to make a statement about ocean pollution. A strong message that wasn't exactly received well from her cohorts (rotting garbage doesn't exactly scream class, but that was the point). Gawlik saw beyond shock antics and it was Hilarie that gave him a deeper appreciation for table setting.

"[Hilarie] looks at her tables as pieces of art. She’s the one that goes into hyperbaric chambers [and] let’s the tables come to her -- none of this is fabricated," reveals Scott. "She makes a statement on her table. She puts blood and bullets and taxidermy. And it will offend people. But in her mind offending people is a good thing because it's evoking an emotion and [as] she says in the film: 'Love it or hate it, but have a reaction to it'. And that stuck with me a lot. She is making art. And I never considered table setting making art until I met her. I get it now, it’s art. Why would it not be art?"

Hilarie's actions could lead many to eye roll and throw accusations of self-importance, but her mindset is admirable. Art is a creative statement that can be made in all sorts of ways, table settings included.

Set! could have very easily tilted towards the world of reality television -- there are certainly enough dramatics to make a new guilty pleasure series -- but what makes it such a fun film with a beautiful narrative about quirky people with quirky hobbies ultimately rests on Gawlik's open-mind and willingness to understand this community.

As it would turn out, Gawlik didn't need to stretch that far to relate to the obsessive nature of his subjects. "I'm just as passionate as these people, just in different things!" laughs Scott. "So I get it. I speak the language."

Chatting with Gawlik about the process behind developing the documentary idea and actually shooting it, it's clear that Scott's passion is filmmaking. Here's a 6-ish minute clip from my interview with Scott talking about filming the documentary as a film rather than as a reality show -- any budding filmmakers out there (or people like me who are just interested in the method) will love this:

Set! is streaming at Hot Docs until May 9th.

Thank you so much to GAT PR and Scott Gawlik for his time!

Set! is Gawlik's first documentary feature that's been years in the making. The amount of work filmmakers put into developing and actually shooting a film isn't lost on him, and he gets philosophical about the effort it took to get to this stage in his career.

"Anything you want to do in life, if you’re just thinking about it, just go for it, why not? Why not! And you might fail, but so what? The next time you’ll be a little bit better, and a little bit better. That was [a] lesson I took from making this," reflects Gawlik. "It’s a lot of work [and there are] similar parallels to table settings. Anybody can put down a couple forks and a couple knives on a napkin -- actually not on a napkin, you have to pick up the napkin and put it on your lap first."