The performance artist Marina Abramović comes across as positively otherworldly. She looms on the stage, tall and imposing like a pagan priestess. She moans and writhes, chanting in a sonorous, Slavic-accented alto. She flogs her naked body and carves pentagrams into her abdomen. She stands passively, surrounded by sharp objects and a gun (with one bullet) and challenges her audience to harm her. In her most recent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she sat for eight hours a day, staring both blankly and piercingly at an endless parade of curious patrons. In all of her pieces, she exhibits supernatural stamina, a wilful disregard for social norms and a chilling solemnity. The new documentary The Artist Is Present, currently playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, dismantles that carefully guarded public persona—in it, Abramović is disarmingly human.

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