Hot Docs Documentary Festival Back and Ready to Rumble
by Liz Braun
Despite a rocky year of funding and staffing turmoil, the Hot Docs Film Festival returns for its 32nd year, running April 24 to May 4.
The world-renowned fest opens with Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance, from Canadian director Noam Gonick — a history and celebration of the activists, milestones and acts of pride that created Canada’s 2SLGBTQ+ movement.
At a recent Hot Docs press conference, Parade producer Justine Pimlott said it was important to share the history, “So we all know whose shoulders we stand on,” and spoke of the current anti-gay/anti-trans sentiment on the rise in the United States.
The film could not be timelier.
A still from the documentary Shamed.
Parade is one of six National Film Board docs in the festival, including five world premieres; there are 26 Canadian features in the 2025 line-up. Go Canada!
This year’s Hot Docs will show 113 feature documentaries chosen from the 2,262 submissions from 47 countries. The fest boasts 49 world and international premieres.
That’s all good news for a festival that was on life support this time last year. There was an exodus of staff in 2024; then Marie Nelson bailed after only a year as Hot Docs’ boss.
Interim executive director Janice Dawe kept Hot Docs on course for the last year and she will hand the reins to the new executive director, TIFF vet Diana Sanchez, for the 2025 festival.
Dawe opened the press conference saying, “I think there were questions whether we’d be here today — and we are.”
This year’s line-up of films is excellent.
The Canadian Spectrum Competition has 10 features showcasing the work of Canadian directors. Highlights include Ghosts Of The Sea, in which director Virginia Tangvald investigates her brother’s death at sea and uncovers dark family secrets. Casas Muertas (Rosana Matecki) follows the resilience of three generations of Venezuelans, bound by uncertainty in a country-wide economic crisis.
Shamed (Matt Gallagher) is about online “creeper hunter” who ambushes potential sexual predators. Agatha's Almanac (Amalie Atkins) is a portrait of simple seasonal living that follows a fiercely independent 90-year-old woman living alone on her Manitoba farm. And Endless Cookie (Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver) follows half-brothers — one Indigenous, one white.
The Special Presentations program boasts one of those NFB world premieres in The Nest, from co-directors Chase Joynt and Julietta Singh. Singh returns to her childhood home for an exploration of memory, identity and intergenerational storytelling.
Other highlights of the program include Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore (Shoshannah Stern), with pioneering deaf performer Matlin speaking candidly about her life and career; Life After (Reid Davenport), concerning the troubling implications of assisted suicide laws for disabled people; and Isabel Castro’s Selena y Los Dinos, on the life and legacy of the “Queen of Tejano Music” Selena Quintanilla.
Elsewhere, there’s Saints and Warriors (Patrick Shannon) which highlights the All Native Basketball Tournament in British Columbia; Coexistence, My Ass! (Amber Fares), covering comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi’s one-woman show that takes on the Israel/Palestine conflict; James Jones’ Antidote, a doc-thriller about those resisting Putin’s terrifying regime and The Dating Game (Violet Du Feng), a look at the aftermath of China’s one-child policy, as three men enrol in a controversial dating boot camp.
Films about the world’s most pressing problems will be featured in a new program called Tipping Point, which includes the world premiere of Night Watches Us (Stefan Verna). The film blends music, dance and spoken word to chronicle a family’s grief and need for justice after a young Black father, struggling with a mental health crisis, is shot dead by Montreal police.
Besides the global stories featured in the International Spectrum and World Showcase programs, Hot Docs includes the ever-popular Nightvision program, for things that go bump in the night, the Persister program, which highlights stories of women speaking up and being heard, four programs of short films, The Artscape program, which celebrates artists and music and Made In Exile, a program to highlight stories of displacement, memory and perseverance.
And the Big Ideas series returns for the 12th year, giving audiences a chance to hear from filmmakers and other special guests, among them director Shoshannah Stern and actress Marlee Matlin (Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore) and director Maxim Derevianko (Ai Weiwei’s Turandot).
For tickets, full film schedule and information visit hotdocs.ca