Hot Picks

If computers could let you live forever, would you? When our minds and memories can be digitized, self-help guru Deepak Chopra and leading robotics engineers envision virtual clones that don't need a body to survive.

Opening Night // A.rtificial I.mmortality
Live Q&A on April 29, 7:30 PM

Commissioned by Hot Docs, Citizen Minutes is a short doc collection aimed at celebrating and inspiring civic engagement. Be among the first to see the incredible stories of ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things to make their communities better places.

Citizen Minutes

Revolutionary Canadian designer Bruce Mau reveals truths that have shaped his long and expansive career, from designing sustainable platforms to social movements. His way of seeing could be just what's needed in this critical time in history.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Mau
Live Q&A on May 5, 7pm ET

From filming Jaws' near-lethal live scenes to saving a great white with her bare hands, underwater filmmaking legend Valerie Taylor faces her biggest challenge yet: fighting to conserve the world's remaining sharks.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Playing with Sharks
Live Q&A on May 2, 7:00 PM

Featuring exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, this inspiring journey takes us inside the minds and hearts of Sesame Street creators, artists, writers and educators, who together established one of the most influential and enduring children's programs in television history.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
Live Q&A on April 30, 7pm ET

A much-needed deconstruction of race and the power of beauty, this thought-provoking doc lifts up the experiences of Black women in a moment when beauty standards are undergoing a cultural shift towards embracing Black aesthetics and features.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Subjects of Desire
Live Q&A on May 6, 7pm ET

Utilizing interviews with journalists, experts, high-ranking former employees and former members, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn explores the rise and fall of one of the biggest corporate flameouts and venture capitalist bubbles in recent years—the story of WeWork, and its hippie-messianic leader Adam Neumann.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
Live Q&A on May 4, 7pm ET

Activism

When a mischievous filmmaking duo convinces a community to come together to create their own currency, they challenge an accepted economic system and dream up a debt-free future in which money works for us all.

Bank Job
Includes Q&A

Commissioned by Hot Docs, Citizen Minutes is a short doc collection aimed at celebrating and inspiring civic engagement. Be among the first to see the incredible stories of ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things to make their communities better places.

Citizen Minutes

Fighting for social justice in Chile, democracy in Hong Kong and the environment in Uganda, three young women cope with the staggering personal impact of frontline activism, weighing their own fear of failure and the price of resistance in pursuit of change.

Dear Future Children
Includes Q&A

The colonization of Sámi lands by Finland was an historic crime, and decolonization today is the only remedy. From demanding truth and reconciliation hearings to debating self-determination rights, this portrait of Sámi multi-front activism maps a blueprint of resistance.

Eatnameamet – Our Silent Struggle
Includes Q&A

This timely portrait of 21st century activism follows Commander X, an iconic and divisive figure in the "hacktivist" network who spends his days dodging authorities across North America while surfing the web and surviving the streets.

The Face of Anonymous
Includes Q&A

Following four youth embroiled in protests against a controversial extradition bill, this immersive record bears witness to Hong Kong’s collective awakening in 2019 to the larger fight against authoritarianism to protect their freedom and democratic way of life.

Faceless
Includes Q&A

Four female survivors of the 2011 terror attack in Utøya, Norway, remain true to the social democratic values for which they were targeted, transforming their trauma into strength in their fight for inclusivity and against rising right-wing extremism in parliament.

Generation Utøya
Includes Q&A

A group of pioneering nuns in 1960s Los Angeles stood up to the patriarchy in such revolutionary ways, demanding pay cheques, marching on Selma and making political pop art, they would change Catholicism and the face of faith forever.

Rebel Hearts
Includes Q&A

After 11 strangers band together to help a queer youth escape to Vancouver from life-threatening violence in Uganda, the unexpected pandemic and conflicting opinions over his best interests test the limits of their commitment and jeopardize his fresh start.

Someone Like Me
Includes Q&A

A rapper, tortured by Bashar Al-Assad, along with other exiled artists and performers who supported the Syrian uprising, explore resilience and resistance through art, dance and music, while also processing their trauma and love of homeland through creative expression.

The Story Won't Die
Includes extended Q&A

When Seville's last brothel is repurposed into a refugee reception centre, cameras move in to capture the newcomers' impressions of Spanish life. With 1970s style and satire, the migrant crisis comes into a refreshingly human focus.

Welcome to Spain
Includes Q&A

Interweaving lecture and personal anecdotes, ACLU deputy legal director Jeffery Robinson draws a stark timeline of anti-Black racism in the United States, from slavery to the modern myth of post-racial America.

Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
Includes Q&A

When track star Tommie Smith and his teammate raised black-gloved fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics, their defiant gesture would reverberate through generations of civil rights activists. Fifty years on, the full breadth of his impact—and depth of his sacrifice—is revealed as America still reckons with racial injustice.

With Drawn Arms
Includes Q&A

Travel back in time with six Chinese artists whose late-20th century creations represented the revolutionary dreams of a generation soon to be violently silenced by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

You Are the Days to Come
Includes Q&A

Addiction & Mental Health

A filmmaker with mental illness follows three defendants through a specialized mental health probation program. While sharing their rarely seen struggles, she faces her own challenges, making clear just how precarious the ties between people with mental illness, their families and society can be.

Any Given Day
Includes Q&A

In the US Midwest, plagued with opioid abuse and rising incarceration rates for women, three unforgettable mothers return home from prison to rebuild their lives after years of separation from their children.

Apart
Includes Q&A

With the heroic outsiders and dreamers at Bip Bip Bar cheering him on, Kim Cannon Arm attempts a world record by playing the 80s arcade game Gyruss for 100 hours straight in this quirky comedy about friendship.

Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest
Includes Q&A

A cheap, powerful drug emerges during a recession, igniting a moral panic fueled by racism. Acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Nelson explores the complex history of crack in the 1980s.

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
Special Screening! Includes Q&A

Free diver Kiki Bosch takes us on breathtaking journeys into sub-zero waters, from the iceberg fjords of Greenland to the frozen lakes of Finland, pushing the limits of human endurance as she heals from the trauma of sexual assault.

Descent
Includes Q&A

After nearly three years in ISIS captivity, a five-year-old Yazidi boy, abused and profoundly brainwashed, is reunited with his family—but displays only hatred for his mother and the world around him. Can he ever become the sweet child they remember?

Imad's Childhood
Includes Q&A

Since 2014, the opioid crisis has claimed hundreds of lives on the Kainai First Nation in Alberta. Inspiring and urgent, this unflinching chronicle captures a community's efforts to heal by cultivating empathy through harm reduction.

Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy
Includes Q&A

The director scours his footage and claustrophobic hotel rooms, seeking answers to the mysterious disappearance of two friends after they smoke and smash their way through bar girls and drugs in an endless bender through Bangkok and Phnom Penh.

Lost Boys
Includes Q&A

Anointed "the most beautiful boy in the world" by Death in Venice director Luchino Visconti, actor Björn Andrésen reflects on how his iconic beauty made him famous as an adolescent, catapulting him into a life of stardom and glamour, and unmade him as an adult.

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
Includes Q&A

Abandoned after the USSR’s fall, denizens of a once-vibrant fishing village in the Caspian Sea turn to poaching to survive. While some faithfully await Putin’s promises of Russia’s return to greatness, others dream of a more prosperous future beyond the confines of the island’s shores.

Ostrov – Lost Island
Includes Q&A

The death of Anglo-Somali punk icon and X-Ray Spex frontwoman Poly Styrene sends her daughter on a journey across the world and through her mother's archives to reconcile their fraught relationship and her place in music history as a key architect of the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements.

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
Includes Q&A

After a life of freewheeling adventure spent sailing all over the world, Paul Johnson, now 80 with a frail body, a litre of vodka and a broken sailboat, contemplates his life and the cost of fulfilling an uncompromising dream.

The Sailor
Includes Q&A

African Cultures & Issues

Recounting his father's dangerous life as an exile in London with a million-dollar bounty on his head, the director questions the cost of his decades-long opposition to Muammar Gaddafi and eventual return to an unrecognizable Libya on the brink of civil war.

The Colonel's Stray Dogs
Includes Q&A

A stimulant with major cultural significance, the khat leaf is also Ethiopia's most lucrative cash crop. Weaving together lives shaped by its trade, this dreamy docudrama captures the spirit of a young generation longing for a different future overseas.

Faya Dayi
Includes Q&A

West African revolutionary Omar Blondin Diop, known as the only real Marxist activist in Jean-Luc Godard's film La Chinoise, gets a vibrant tribute in this reimagining of the 1967 classic that explores the complex current relations between China and Africa.

Just a Movement
Includes Q&A

Weary refugees from Burkina Faso, Togo and Benin, in search of promising futures, stop over at the House of Migrants in Mali, where staff offer basic necessities, warm beds and legal advice for their long journeys ahead.

The Last Shelter
Includes Q&A

When 700 helpful Finnish tourists arrive in Benin to assist in a tropical disease vaccine study that could save the lives of millions of children, a unique cultural exchange reveals how humans can help and harm with the best of intentions.

People We Come Across
Includes Q&A

The death of Anglo-Somali punk icon and X-Ray Spex frontwoman Poly Styrene sends her daughter on a journey across the world and through her mother's archives to reconcile their fraught relationship and her place in music history as a key architect of the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements.

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
Includes Q&A

On a journey through the periphery of Addis Ababa, engrossing architectural and landscape images provide the backdrop to a multi-voiced narrative that reveals rapid urbanization, socioeconomic disparity and the seeds of civil war.

Rift Finfinnee
Includes Q&A

Suffering from an extended drought caused by the climate crisis despite their own tiny carbon footprint, Morocco's Oulad Boukais tribe establishes a school to ensure their children's future, and combats isolation and desertification with optimism, dignity and education.

School of Hope
Includes Q&A

After 11 strangers band together to help a queer youth escape to Vancouver from life-threatening violence in Uganda, the unexpected pandemic and conflicting opinions over his best interests test the limits of their commitment and jeopardize his fresh start.

Someone Like Me
Includes Q&A

Blending documentary with fiction and poetry, a young female guard in an overcrowded Madagascar prison daydreams of her father, a murderer who abandoned her as a child. But when a new inmate brings news of him, her daydreams turn to nightmares.

Zaho Zay
Includes Q&A

Aging & Mortality

If computers could let you live forever, would you? When our minds and memories can be digitized, self-help guru Deepak Chopra and leading robotics engineers envision virtual clones that don't need a body to survive.

Opening Night // A.rtificial I.mmortality
Live Q&A on April 29, 7:30 PM

Experience a year in the life of a self-taught Japanese ramen master, who considers his legendary noodle shop more than just a livelihood but his life, and his die-hard customers more than just regulars, but true friends.

Come Back Anytime
Includes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

A man turns the experience of watching videotapes that his terminally ill father recorded into an unforgettable contemplation of race, death and the importance of family, composed as a letter to his own children.

The Death of My Two Fathers
Includes Q&A

Dani Karavan, a cocksure Israeli artist in his 80s, sets out on a riotous journey across Europe to say farewell to his deteriorating large-scale environmental sculptures, while also contemplating a decision on the most controversial piece of his career.

High Maintenance

Inspired by Florence Nightingale's methods from 150 years ago, a small Danish retirement home deploys a controversial new treatment for dementia patients. With hugs, conversation, eye contact and cake, they shift the focus from pharmaceuticals to care.

It Is Not Over Yet
Includes Q&A

When an elderly, seemingly naïve rural painter, who enjoys singing to himself and dancing with animals, is acclaimed as Ukraine's last true folk artist, his work is exhibited in a major show in Kiev. Can fame or a corporate commission compete with the joy he finds in his land and his art?

Ivan's Land
Includes Q&A

When the filmmaker turns his lens on his elderly father, a renowned Korean artist, volumes are revealed about their relationship and his meditative silence and obsession with painting water drops, all rooted in the tragic past of the country he left behind.

The Man Who Paints Water Drops
Includes Q&A

In February 2020, filmmaker Andrea Segre was locked down in Venice, his late father's hometown. Emptied of all distractions, the city and a grieving son confront the fragilities of their foundations, finding extraordinary beauty in the powerful presence of absence.

Molecules

Facing terminal illness, legendary director Heddy Honigmann embarks on a self-reflective journey across the Netherlands and to her birthplace in Peru, weaving together visits to beloved places and people with moments from her most important films.

No Hay Camino – There Is No Path

After a life of freewheeling adventure spent sailing all over the world, Paul Johnson, now 80 with a frail body, a litre of vodka and a broken sailboat, contemplates his life and the cost of fulfilling an uncompromising dream.

The Sailor
Includes Q&A

Facing a cancer diagnosis, multidisciplinary artist Max Dean asks, "How do we fix ourselves?" Discarded animatronic figures from a decommissioned Ontario Place attraction and wild imagination drive this vivid journey of resilience and creativity in the face of illness.

Still Max
Includes Q&A

In this poetic trip around the world, the oyster acts as metaphor for life's passions and frustrations, linking stories of a New York burlesque dancer, French Michelin-starred chefs, a Swedish oyster diver, a Japanese pearl maker and a terminally ill English psychologist.

The Taste of Desire
Includes Q&A

Intimate in scope yet epic in scale, this meditative Sundance Award–winning essay invites us to ponder how our addiction to technology may end up changing the social fabric of humanity forever.

Users

American Culture & Issues

Exploring the connections between technology, vision and power, this Sundance prize winner offers an illuminating investigation of ever-increasing surveillance technologies, exposing the complexities of objectivity and the biases inherent in both human perception and the camera lens.

All Light, Everywhere
Includes Q&A

A filmmaker with mental illness follows three defendants through a specialized mental health probation program. While sharing their rarely seen struggles, she faces her own challenges, making clear just how precarious the ties between people with mental illness, their families and society can be.

Any Given Day
Includes Q&A

A former Marine works as a Lyft driver and a single mother teaches in a public school. Finding themselves broke, in debt and questioning the capitalist status quo, they turn to socialism, seeking solutions to problems larger than themselves.

The Big Scary "S" Word
Includes Q&A

A cheap, powerful drug emerges during a recession, igniting a moral panic fueled by racism. Acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Nelson explores the complex history of crack in the 1980s.

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
Special Screening! Includes Q&A

Ferocious female rockers Fanny shattered glass ceilings in the '70s, collecting fans like David Bowie before being buried in retro record bins. Fifty years later, they reunite with a new record deal and a chance to rewrite history.

FANNY: The Right to Rock
Includes Q&A

Working in a food processing plant after class and in the fields on weekends, a California high school senior dreams of graduating while bearing the burden of being the family breadwinner and threats of separation as ICE raids increase in her community.

Fruits of Labor
Includes Q&A

When two Chilean gauchos of different generations leave to pursue their cowboy dreams on an Idaho ranch, a humorous and touching tale of clashing cultures unfolds when they must adapt their expectations to the realities of North American agri-business and lifestyles.

Gaucho Americano
Includes Q&A

The resilience and optimism of Oakland High School's 2020 senior class is captured in verité footage and social media videos as they confront anxieties over test scores, growing demands for social justice and the unprecedented uncertainty of a rapidly spreading pandemic.

Homeroom
Includes Q&A

In this powerful story stretching over five decades, the former "First Lady" of the Savage Skulls gang emerges as a healer and matriarch, fiercely leading her South Bronx community through the perils of gentrification and gun violence.

La Madrina: The Savage Life of Lorine Padilla
Includes Q&A

From a Latinx LGBTQ activist to a Black Catholic school principal, six small businesswomen hit California's newly legal cannabis trade. But as aggressive regulations bogart the market, can they each keep their green American dream alight?

Lady Buds
Includes Q&A

In this graceful study of the balance between solitude and community, artist and chef Jim Denevan roams across the US, transforming landscapes into breathtaking, sustainable dining experiences framed by ephemeral installation art.

Man in the Field: The Life and Art of Jim Denevan
Includes Q&A

Through animated and live-action sequences, the failings of the criminal justice system are exposed and a more transformative approach through restorative justice and the Peacemaking Circle movement, which originated in the Yukon with First Nations Elders, is offered.

A Once and Future Peace
Includes Q&A

Civil rights attorney Larry Krasner takes injustice personally. Having sued police over 75 times for misconduct, this most unlikely candidate for Philadelphia district attorney not only wins, but upends the whole system. A groundbreaking series follows his outrageous first term.

Philly D.A.

Working multiple jobs, desperate to make ends meet for their families, two New York mothers drop off their children at a 24-hour daycare centre run by a woman that binds the neighbourhood together.

Through the Night

Utilizing interviews with journalists, experts, high-ranking former employees and former members, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn explores the rise and fall of one of the biggest corporate flameouts and venture capitalist bubbles in recent years—the story of WeWork, and its hippie-messianic leader Adam Neumann.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
Live Q&A on May 4, 7pm ET

Interweaving lecture and personal anecdotes, ACLU deputy legal director Jeffery Robinson draws a stark timeline of anti-Black racism in the United States, from slavery to the modern myth of post-racial America.

Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
Includes Q&A

When track star Tommie Smith and his teammate raised black-gloved fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics, their defiant gesture would reverberate through generations of civil rights activists. Fifty years on, the full breadth of his impact—and depth of his sacrifice—is revealed as America still reckons with racial injustice.

With Drawn Arms
Includes Q&A

Art & Design

When a mischievous filmmaking duo convinces a community to come together to create their own currency, they challenge an accepted economic system and dream up a debt-free future in which money works for us all.

Bank Job
Includes Q&A

In picturesque Provence, tourists and art lovers flock to the atelier of Post-Impressionist master Paul Cézanne. There, in a meditative space frozen in time, his methods and artistic legacy are not only seen, but felt.

Cezanne
Includes Q&A

Commissioned by Hot Docs, Citizen Minutes is a short doc collection aimed at celebrating and inspiring civic engagement. Be among the first to see the incredible stories of ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things to make their communities better places.

Citizen Minutes

Dani Karavan, a cocksure Israeli artist in his 80s, sets out on a riotous journey across Europe to say farewell to his deteriorating large-scale environmental sculptures, while also contemplating a decision on the most controversial piece of his career.

High Maintenance

When an elderly, seemingly naïve rural painter, who enjoys singing to himself and dancing with animals, is acclaimed as Ukraine's last true folk artist, his work is exhibited in a major show in Kiev. Can fame or a corporate commission compete with the joy he finds in his land and his art?

Ivan's Land
Includes Q&A

In this graceful study of the balance between solitude and community, artist and chef Jim Denevan roams across the US, transforming landscapes into breathtaking, sustainable dining experiences framed by ephemeral installation art.

Man in the Field: The Life and Art of Jim Denevan
Includes Q&A

Revolutionary Canadian designer Bruce Mau reveals truths that have shaped his long and expansive career, from designing sustainable platforms to social movements. His way of seeing could be just what's needed in this critical time in history.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Mau
Live Q&A on May 5, 7pm ET

Haunted by a family secret revealed to him as a boy, a young man jeopardizes relationships and crosses continents to investigate the mystery behind the thousands of missing paintings his grandfather created during his lifetime.

Portrayal
Includes Q&A

Competitive table setting? Yep, it's a thing, and it's fabulous. Seven cut-throat competitors feverishly prepare their entries for a prestigious county fair, serving up artistry, hilarity and serious frenemy vibes on a silver platter.

Set!
Includes Q&A

Facing a cancer diagnosis, multidisciplinary artist Max Dean asks, "How do we fix ourselves?" Discarded animatronic figures from a decommissioned Ontario Place attraction and wild imagination drive this vivid journey of resilience and creativity in the face of illness.

Still Max
Includes Q&A

Travel back in time with six Chinese artists whose late-20th century creations represented the revolutionary dreams of a generation soon to be violently silenced by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

You Are the Days to Come
Includes Q&A

Asian Cultures & Issues

Three rebellious working-class teenage girls in Bangladesh escape daily hardships and stifling family lives by riding waves on their surfboards, chasing a fleeting and thrilling sense of freedom.

Bangla Surf Girls
Includes Q&A

How do dictatorships like Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan launder their reputations from despotic to democratic? This investigative series exposes how Lady Gaga, luxury gifts and scandalous private wealth are used to wield a new "caviar diplomacy" around the world.

The Caviar Connection
Includes Q&A

Experience a year in the life of a self-taught Japanese ramen master, who considers his legendary noodle shop more than just a livelihood but his life, and his die-hard customers more than just regulars, but true friends.

Come Back Anytime
Includes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

Following four youth embroiled in protests against a controversial extradition bill, this immersive record bears witness to Hong Kong’s collective awakening in 2019 to the larger fight against authoritarianism to protect their freedom and democratic way of life.

Faceless
Includes Q&A

Nanfu Wang's (director of One Child Nation, winner of Sundance's Grand Jury Prize) searing investigation into COVID-19's origins and spread exposes not only a global crisis of misinformation, but the leadership that misled the world about a still-unfolding emergency.

In the Same Breath
Includes Q&A

West African revolutionary Omar Blondin Diop, known as the only real Marxist activist in Jean-Luc Godard's film La Chinoise, gets a vibrant tribute in this reimagining of the 1967 classic that explores the complex current relations between China and Africa.

Just a Movement
Includes Q&A

In an idyllic Philippine fishing village where catches are shared and breathtaking sunsets mark the days, the filmmaker befriends a young boy and captures memories of home during the last days of summer before he must leave for school in the city.

Last Days at Sea
Includes Q&A

The director scours his footage and claustrophobic hotel rooms, seeking answers to the mysterious disappearance of two friends after they smoke and smash their way through bar girls and drugs in an endless bender through Bangkok and Phnom Penh.

Lost Boys
Includes Q&A

When the filmmaker turns his lens on his elderly father, a renowned Korean artist, volumes are revealed about their relationship and his meditative silence and obsession with painting water drops, all rooted in the tragic past of the country he left behind.

The Man Who Paints Water Drops
Includes Q&A

When Zdenka in the Czech Republic falls in love online with Tabish in Pakistan, they marry—but five years later, Czech immigration still refuses him entry. With humour and grit, the couple must prove "real love" to a government and themselves.

A Marriage
Includes Q&A

Abandoned after the USSR’s fall, denizens of a once-vibrant fishing village in the Caspian Sea turn to poaching to survive. While some faithfully await Putin’s promises of Russia’s return to greatness, others dream of a more prosperous future beyond the confines of the island’s shores.

Ostrov – Lost Island
Includes Q&A

In this gorgeous cinematic letter from the director to her hometown of Wuhan, ordinary human activities unfold against an evolving urban landscape, sculpted by nature and rising infrastructure, composing a series of surprising and poetic set pieces.

A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces
Includes Q&A

In 2016, India's only newspaper run by Dalit women, the lowest social caste, goes digital. Armed with smartphones and sheer courage, these journalists rewrite the rules at work and at home of what it means to be powerful in Mother India.

Writing with Fire
Includes Q&A

With unprecedented access to Wuhan, China, at the peak of the pandemic lockdown, award-winning director Yung Chang looks beyond statistics and headlines to reveal the emotions and resilience at the core of our shared humanity.

Wuhan Wuhan
Includes Q&A

Travel back in time with six Chinese artists whose late-20th century creations represented the revolutionary dreams of a generation soon to be violently silenced by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

You Are the Days to Come
Includes Q&A

Australian Cultures & Issues

Against all odds and at great personal cost, three Aboriginal brothers turn a dance troupe into one of Australia's leading performing arts companies and forge a language in dance that speaks to the burden of intergenerational trauma and the joyful reclamation of culture.

Firestarter – The Story of Bangarra

After 25 years of hard partying and insane choices, Australia's "Queen of Honky Tonk" has burned every bridge in the business. Can she keep it together to record with a Nashville legend or will she crash her sad country song of a life for good?

I'm Wanita
Includes Q&A

Canadian Culture & Issues

Evocative animation brings the landscape to life in this experimental exploration of the historic Saint Lawrence River and its famous thousand islands. Fluidly superimposed images mingle with performed dialogue to navigate the boundaries of cinema.

Archipelago
Includes Q&A

Commissioned by Hot Docs, Citizen Minutes is a short doc collection aimed at celebrating and inspiring civic engagement. Be among the first to see the incredible stories of ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things to make their communities better places.

Citizen Minutes

A riveting cryptocurrency thriller unravels the story of a Canadian blockchain wizard who mysteriously died on his honeymoon in India and the fate of his investors' $200 million. Did it vanish into the digital void or does it remain locked away in password-protected accounts?

Dead Man's Switch a crypto mystery
Includes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

When Iranian forces shot down a Ukraine International Airlines passenger flight, Javad lost the love of his life. Now, picking up the pieces in Canada, where they moved only years prior, he shares memories of his late wife Elnaz and rages in the face of a grave injustice.

Dear Elnaz
Includes Q&A

After leaving an abusive husband, Sonya returns to Newfoundland's stunning but remote Fogo Island with her two sons, determined to raise them to be good men in the only place she knows how, despite having fled from it years before.

Dropstones
Includes Q&A

A Toronto filmmaker returns to his declining hometown to reconnect with his father and grandfather, the two men who have shaped his life. Beautifully shot in black and white, this tender film captures a rural town and family in flux.

Grey Roads
Includes Q&A

A diver devotes himself to cleaning up the ocean floors in Newfoundland's harbours, one tire at a time. As he edges closer to financial ruin in his effort to save the planet, his good deeds don't go unnoticed.

Hell or Clean Water
Includes Q&A

Since 2014, the opioid crisis has claimed hundreds of lives on the Kainai First Nation in Alberta. Inspiring and urgent, this unflinching chronicle captures a community's efforts to heal by cultivating empathy through harm reduction.

Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy
Includes Q&A

After a Haitian-born youth is racially profiled at an Indigenous basketball tournament, he wrestles with his shaken sense of belonging in his Indigenous adoptive family while attempting to heal from his past.

One of Ours
Includes Q&A

After 11 strangers band together to help a queer youth escape to Vancouver from life-threatening violence in Uganda, the unexpected pandemic and conflicting opinions over his best interests test the limits of their commitment and jeopardize his fresh start.

Someone Like Me
Includes Q&A

Following up on her groundbreaking and award-winning book Seven Fallen Feathers, journalist Tanya Talaga returns to Thunder Bay to see if anything has changed since the inquest into the deaths of seven First Nations high school students.

Spirit to Soar
Includes Q&A

Facing a cancer diagnosis, multidisciplinary artist Max Dean asks, "How do we fix ourselves?" Discarded animatronic figures from a decommissioned Ontario Place attraction and wild imagination drive this vivid journey of resilience and creativity in the face of illness.

Still Max
Includes Q&A

Capitalism & Big Business

When a mischievous filmmaking duo convinces a community to come together to create their own currency, they challenge an accepted economic system and dream up a debt-free future in which money works for us all.

Bank Job
Includes Q&A

A former Marine works as a Lyft driver and a single mother teaches in a public school. Finding themselves broke, in debt and questioning the capitalist status quo, they turn to socialism, seeking solutions to problems larger than themselves.

The Big Scary "S" Word
Includes Q&A

How do dictatorships like Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan launder their reputations from despotic to democratic? This investigative series exposes how Lady Gaga, luxury gifts and scandalous private wealth are used to wield a new "caviar diplomacy" around the world.

The Caviar Connection
Includes Q&A

Commissioned by Hot Docs, Citizen Minutes is a short doc collection aimed at celebrating and inspiring civic engagement. Be among the first to see the incredible stories of ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things to make their communities better places.

Citizen Minutes

A riveting cryptocurrency thriller unravels the story of a Canadian blockchain wizard who mysteriously died on his honeymoon in India and the fate of his investors' $200 million. Did it vanish into the digital void or does it remain locked away in password-protected accounts?

Dead Man's Switch a crypto mystery
Includes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

App developers lured a massive labour force by promising flexible hours with no offices or bosses—but with gig workers from Uber, Amazon, Lyft and more in front of the camera, the human cost of disruption runs deep.

The Gig Is Up
Includes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

From a Latinx LGBTQ activist to a Black Catholic school principal, six small businesswomen hit California's newly legal cannabis trade. But as aggressive regulations bogart the market, can they each keep their green American dream alight?

Lady Buds
Includes Q&A

Every summer, a peaceful Spanish beach town explodes into a hellscape of budget European holidaymakers. Veering between horror story and fairy tale, tourists and locals navigate the daily tensions of risky behaviour, palpable excitement and genuine pleasure.

Magaluf Ghost Town
Includes Q&A

In 2004, China reopened Silk Road trading routes with impoverished former Soviet states such as Tajikistan. One hard-working man discovers the unexpected costs of trading with a global economic giant.

The New Plastic Road
Includes Q&A

Alberto Salazar was a coaching legend until his recent doping ban shocked the running world. Did his "Just Do It" attitude and questionable practices push the limits of human performance and technology too far?

Nike's Big Bet
Includes Q&A

In 1910, Roger Casement, British consul in Brazil, investigated atrocities against Indigenous Amazonians, his journals capturing a harrowing picture of their enslavement and murder by the rubber industry. Through his words, their plight is traced all the way to their current struggle for self-determination.

Secrets from Putumayo
Includes Q&A

Utilizing interviews with journalists, experts, high-ranking former employees and former members, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn explores the rise and fall of one of the biggest corporate flameouts and venture capitalist bubbles in recent years—the story of WeWork, and its hippie-messianic leader Adam Neumann.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
Live Q&A on May 4, 7pm ET

Children & Youth

Three rebellious working-class teenage girls in Bangladesh escape daily hardships and stifling family lives by riding waves on their surfboards, chasing a fleeting and thrilling sense of freedom.

Bangla Surf Girls
Includes Q&A

Coming of age in rural Mexico, an introspective 11-year-old boy spends his summer raising fighting bulls and dreaming of emulating the cowboys in his family, while dreading the start of school and pining for his distant father in America.

Becoming
Includes Q&A

This observational doc captures a neighbourhood in Palestine, where courageous young girls influenced by three generations of tumultuous occupation come of age learning how to protect their family's land, rights and values.

Children
Includes Q&A

Commissioned by Hot Docs, Citizen Minutes is a short doc collection aimed at celebrating and inspiring civic engagement. Be among the first to see the incredible stories of ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things to make their communities better places.

Citizen Minutes

A tight-knit trio of Danish Goths express their darkness through macabre make-up and fashion, and channel a shared fascination with death to combat loneliness and inner demons. But when rosy romantic love blooms, will it break their bond?

Dark Blossom
Includes Q&A

After leaving an abusive husband, Sonya returns to Newfoundland's stunning but remote Fogo Island with her two sons, determined to raise them to be good men in the only place she knows how, despite having fled from it years before.

Dropstones
Includes Q&A

Following four youth embroiled in protests against a controversial extradition bill, this immersive record bears witness to Hong Kong’s collective awakening in 2019 to the larger fight against authoritarianism to protect their freedom and democratic way of life.

Faceless
Includes Q&A

A stimulant with major cultural significance, the khat leaf is also Ethiopia's most lucrative cash crop. Weaving together lives shaped by its trade, this dreamy docudrama captures the spirit of a young generation longing for a different future overseas.

Faya Dayi
Includes Q&A

Working in a food processing plant after class and in the fields on weekends, a California high school senior dreams of graduating while bearing the burden of being the family breadwinner and threats of separation as ICE raids increase in her community.

Fruits of Labor
Includes Q&A

The resilience and optimism of Oakland High School's 2020 senior class is captured in verité footage and social media videos as they confront anxieties over test scores, growing demands for social justice and the unprecedented uncertainty of a rapidly spreading pandemic.

Homeroom
Includes Q&A

After nearly three years in ISIS captivity, a five-year-old Yazidi boy, abused and profoundly brainwashed, is reunited with his family—but displays only hatred for his mother and the world around him. Can he ever become the sweet child they remember?

Imad's Childhood
Includes Q&A

In an idyllic Philippine fishing village where catches are shared and breathtaking sunsets mark the days, the filmmaker befriends a young boy and captures memories of home during the last days of summer before he must leave for school in the city.

Last Days at Sea
Includes Q&A

In this lyrical coming-of-age story, two teenage girls take refuge with their mother in a cramped room inside an Aleppo hospital through the war, its aftermath and now a pandemic. But spirited Juli has awakened to its reality as a prison and dreams only of a life beyond.

Neighbouring the Moon

After a Haitian-born youth is racially profiled at an Indigenous basketball tournament, he wrestles with his shaken sense of belonging in his Indigenous adoptive family while attempting to heal from his past.

One of Ours
Includes Q&A

How controversial can one basketball team of eight-year-olds be? With an unorthodox coach and training method, a tight-knit group of empowered Icelandic girls demand to play against boys and call time out on patriarchy.

Raise the Bar

Suffering from an extended drought caused by the climate crisis despite their own tiny carbon footprint, Morocco's Oulad Boukais tribe establishes a school to ensure their children's future, and combats isolation and desertification with optimism, dignity and education.

School of Hope
Includes Q&A

Following up on her groundbreaking and award-winning book Seven Fallen Feathers, journalist Tanya Talaga returns to Thunder Bay to see if anything has changed since the inquest into the deaths of seven First Nations high school students.

Spirit to Soar
Includes Q&A

Featuring exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, this inspiring journey takes us inside the minds and hearts of Sesame Street creators, artists, writers and educators, who together established one of the most influential and enduring children's programs in television history.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
Live Q&A on April 30, 7pm ET

Following the gender transition of her adolescent son over three years, the filmmaker crafts a beautiful and compassionate look at his deep search for identity and her own growth away from old paradigms, fears and prejudices.

Threshold
Includes Q&A

Working multiple jobs, desperate to make ends meet for their families, two New York mothers drop off their children at a 24-hour daycare centre run by a woman that binds the neighbourhood together.

Through the Night

Seven young people from across the world were innocently uploading shiny bright 2020 plans when "virus" started trending. Over a year's worth of real-time posts and massive reality checks chart their innocent optimism and surprising resilience to a global change no one saw coming.

Viral
Includes Q&A

Crime & the Justice System

Exploring the connections between technology, vision and power, this Sundance prize winner offers an illuminating investigation of ever-increasing surveillance technologies, exposing the complexities of objectivity and the biases inherent in both human perception and the camera lens.

All Light, Everywhere
Includes Q&A

A filmmaker with mental illness follows three defendants through a specialized mental health probation program. While sharing their rarely seen struggles, she faces her own challenges, making clear just how precarious the ties between people with mental illness, their families and society can be.

Any Given Day
Includes Q&A

In the US Midwest, plagued with opioid abuse and rising incarceration rates for women, three unforgettable mothers return home from prison to rebuild their lives after years of separation from their children.

Apart
Includes Q&A

For the first time, cameras embed with the German investigative unit that broke the explosive Panama Papers story, following the journalists' pursuit of the truth behind the political assassination of a Maltese reporter and yet another history-making financial scandal.

Behind the Headlines
Includes Q&A

A cheap, powerful drug emerges during a recession, igniting a moral panic fueled by racism. Acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Nelson explores the complex history of crack in the 1980s.

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
Special Screening! Includes Q&A

A riveting cryptocurrency thriller unravels the story of a Canadian blockchain wizard who mysteriously died on his honeymoon in India and the fate of his investors' $200 million. Did it vanish into the digital void or does it remain locked away in password-protected accounts?

Dead Man's Switch a crypto mystery
Includes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

At the elite level, bridge—the world's most popular card game—has become a million-dollar cut-throat business. When the best competitive player is accused of cheating, the ensuing scandal confounds experts, criminal science, celebrities and basic belief in this hilarious true-crime thriller.

Dirty Tricks
Includes Q&A

As rates of femicide and domestic abuse soar in Turkey and democratic rights for women are increasingly eroded, a lawyer and her clients bravely risk everything for their freedom by standing up to the government and putting violent men behind bars.

Dying to Divorce
Includes Q&A

Once accused and imprisoned for aggravated homicide for having a late-term miscarriage, Teodora Vásquez has become the spokesperson for all such victims of El Salvador's cruel anti-abortion laws, and a symbol of empowerment, resistance and solidarity.

Fly So Far

In this powerful story stretching over five decades, the former "First Lady" of the Savage Skulls gang emerges as a healer and matriarch, fiercely leading her South Bronx community through the perils of gentrification and gun violence.

La Madrina: The Savage Life of Lorine Padilla
Includes Q&A

Through animated and live-action sequences, the failings of the criminal justice system are exposed and a more transformative approach through restorative justice and the Peacemaking Circle movement, which originated in the Yukon with First Nations Elders, is offered.

A Once and Future Peace
Includes Q&A

Civil rights attorney Larry Krasner takes injustice personally. Having sued police over 75 times for misconduct, this most unlikely candidate for Philadelphia district attorney not only wins, but upends the whole system. A groundbreaking series follows his outrageous first term.

Philly D.A.

In 1910, Roger Casement, British consul in Brazil, investigated atrocities against Indigenous Amazonians, his journals capturing a harrowing picture of their enslavement and murder by the rubber industry. Through his words, their plight is traced all the way to their current struggle for self-determination.

Secrets from Putumayo
Includes Q&A

Following up on her groundbreaking and award-winning book Seven Fallen Feathers, journalist Tanya Talaga returns to Thunder Bay to see if anything has changed since the inquest into the deaths of seven First Nations high school students.

Spirit to Soar
Includes Q&A

When Vicenta discovers her young, disabled daughter is pregnant as a result of rape, she overcomes overwhelming odds to wage the battle of her life, despite illiteracy and extreme poverty: a flashpoint case against Argentina's restrictive abortion laws that reaches the UN.

Vicenta
Includes Q&A

Blending documentary with fiction and poetry, a young female guard in an overcrowded Madagascar prison daydreams of her father, a murderer who abandoned her as a child. But when a new inmate brings news of him, her daydreams turn to nightmares.

Zaho Zay
Includes Q&A

Disability

This experimental essay resurrects the political imagination of the iconic deaf-blind author Helen Keller, a passionate socialist and disability rights advocate whose radical views, while largely suppressed or sanitized over the years, remain remarkably pertinent today.

Her Socialist Smile

Inhabiting an in-between world where their hearing is both a gift and a curse, children of deaf parents share their struggles and joys and band together against a culture that privileges the spoken word.

Only I Can Hear
Includes Q&A

When Vicenta discovers her young, disabled daughter is pregnant as a result of rape, she overcomes overwhelming odds to wage the battle of her life, despite illiteracy and extreme poverty: a flashpoint case against Argentina's restrictive abortion laws that reaches the UN.

Vicenta
Includes Q&A

Ecology & the Environment

Evocative animation brings the landscape to life in this experimental exploration of the historic Saint Lawrence River and its famous thousand islands. Fluidly superimposed images mingle with performed dialogue to navigate the boundaries of cinema.

Archipelago
Includes Q&A

Fighting for social justice in Chile, democracy in Hong Kong and the environment in Uganda, three young women cope with the staggering personal impact of frontline activism, weighing their own fear of failure and the price of resistance in pursuit of change.

Dear Future Children
Includes Q&A

A diver devotes himself to cleaning up the ocean floors in Newfoundland's harbours, one tire at a time. As he edges closer to financial ruin in his effort to save the planet, his good deeds don't go unnoticed.

Hell or Clean Water
Includes Q&A

In an idyllic Philippine fishing village where catches are shared and breathtaking sunsets mark the days, the filmmaker befriends a young boy and captures memories of home during the last days of summer before he must leave for school in the city.

Last Days at Sea
Includes Q&A

Shaman and activist Davi Kopenawa Yanomami leads this cinematically rich documentary, weaving beautifully realized sequences of traditional stories with the ongoing struggles the Yanomami people face as they fight to preserve the Amazon.

The Last Forest
Includes Q&A

Revolutionary Canadian designer Bruce Mau reveals truths that have shaped his long and expansive career, from designing sustainable platforms to social movements. His way of seeing could be just what's needed in this critical time in history.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Mau
Live Q&A on May 5, 7pm ET

Attempting to reconstruct the lived memory of his people, Mateo Sobode Chiqueno has traversed the desolate Paraguayan Chaco for decades to record others of the Ayoreo people, who lived free in the vast forest until colonization forced them from their land and dismantled their culture.

Nothing but the Sun
Includes Q&A; Free for students and 60+ on May 8

From filming Jaws' near-lethal live scenes to saving a great white with her bare hands, underwater filmmaking legend Valerie Taylor faces her biggest challenge yet: fighting to conserve the world's remaining sharks.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Playing with Sharks
Live Q&A on May 2, 7:00 PM

Offering a fascinating glimpse of a possible future, six people sign up for a year-long NASA experiment that has them living in an isolated habitat meant to simulate what life and society would be like on Mars.

Red Heaven
Includes Q&A

Suffering from an extended drought caused by the climate crisis despite their own tiny carbon footprint, Morocco's Oulad Boukais tribe establishes a school to ensure their children's future, and combats isolation and desertification with optimism, dignity and education.

School of Hope
Includes Q&A

Why dig up 15-storey-tall, hundred-year-old trees in Georgia to replant them in a mysterious private garden on the Black Sea? This fascinating glimpse at a powerful man's staggering whim is simply too strange not to be seen.

Taming the Garden

Environmental iconoclast Stewart Brand believes re-engineering woolly mammoth DNA and "de-extinction science" could reverse climate change. Is he an oracle envisioning a brave new world or will his controversial views cement him as eco-pariah?

We Are As Gods
Includes Q&A

Education

The resilience and optimism of Oakland High School's 2020 senior class is captured in verité footage and social media videos as they confront anxieties over test scores, growing demands for social justice and the unprecedented uncertainty of a rapidly spreading pandemic.

Homeroom
Includes Q&A

Suffering from an extended drought caused by the climate crisis despite their own tiny carbon footprint, Morocco's Oulad Boukais tribe establishes a school to ensure their children's future, and combats isolation and desertification with optimism, dignity and education.

School of Hope
Includes Q&A

Featuring exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, this inspiring journey takes us inside the minds and hearts of Sesame Street creators, artists, writers and educators, who together established one of the most influential and enduring children's programs in television history.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
Live Q&A on April 30, 7pm ET

European Cultures & Issues

Danish band Lukas Graham has an uncanny ability of setting audacious goals and achieving them, but after scoring a hit with "7 Years," Grammy nominations and a world tour, success and fame may have them changing their tune.

7 Years of Lukas Graham
Includes Q&A

For the first time, cameras embed with the German investigative unit that broke the explosive Panama Papers story, following the journalists' pursuit of the truth behind the political assassination of a Maltese reporter and yet another history-making financial scandal.

Behind the Headlines
Includes Q&A

At the height of Italy's migrant crisis, a tiny Sicilian town received over a thousand asylum seekers. But when an African refugee volunteers to carry the hallowed Jesus statue in the village's annual procession, traditional Christian values must reckon with new social realities.

A Black Jesus
Includes Q&A

An average middle-aged Italian couple by day, Hermes and Betta live out their unbridled sexual fantasies as swingers by night. With an unfiltered lens, this cinematic beauty plunges you deep into their world and the most intimate spaces of sex and love.

Bloom Up – A Swinger Couple Story
Includes Q&A

In picturesque Provence, tourists and art lovers flock to the atelier of Post-Impressionist master Paul Cézanne. There, in a meditative space frozen in time, his methods and artistic legacy are not only seen, but felt.

Cezanne
Includes Q&A

A tight-knit trio of Danish Goths express their darkness through macabre make-up and fashion, and channel a shared fascination with death to combat loneliness and inner demons. But when rosy romantic love blooms, will it break their bond?

Dark Blossom
Includes Q&A

The colonization of Sámi lands by Finland was an historic crime, and decolonization today is the only remedy. From demanding truth and reconciliation hearings to debating self-determination rights, this portrait of Sámi multi-front activism maps a blueprint of resistance.

Eatnameamet – Our Silent Struggle
Includes Q&A

United by their passion for Roma music, cosmopolitan Faith and shy, sweet Branko marry on a whim—but their unlikely love story begins to crack as their clashing cultural values and lifestyles slowly tear them apart.

Faith and Branko
Includes Q&A

As a ferry shuttles tourists and locals between British-controlled Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland, cameras eavesdrop on their frank conversations about the new/old border in this delightfully politics-free Brexit critique.

Four Seasons in a Day
Includes Q&A

On the stage of Paris's legendary Opéra Bastille, 30 dancers from non-traditional genres—hip-hop, krump, break and voguing—reprise and remix Jean-Philippe Rameau's baroque masterpiece Les Indes galantes, offering a dynamic take on the landmark opera.

Gallant Indies
Includes Curious Minds discussion

Four female survivors of the 2011 terror attack in Utøya, Norway, remain true to the social democratic values for which they were targeted, transforming their trauma into strength in their fight for inclusivity and against rising right-wing extremism in parliament.

Generation Utøya
Includes Q&A

Inspired by Florence Nightingale's methods from 150 years ago, a small Danish retirement home deploys a controversial new treatment for dementia patients. With hugs, conversation, eye contact and cake, they shift the focus from pharmaceuticals to care.

It Is Not Over Yet
Includes Q&A

The director scours his footage and claustrophobic hotel rooms, seeking answers to the mysterious disappearance of two friends after they smoke and smash their way through bar girls and drugs in an endless bender through Bangkok and Phnom Penh.

Lost Boys
Includes Q&A

Fascinating witness accounts and meticulous research investigate the unfathomable relationship between a beautiful Jewish prisoner and an SS officer at Auschwitz. Thirty years later, the truth comes for them both at his 1972 war crimes trial.

Love It Was Not

Every summer, a peaceful Spanish beach town explodes into a hellscape of budget European holidaymakers. Veering between horror story and fairy tale, tourists and locals navigate the daily tensions of risky behaviour, palpable excitement and genuine pleasure.

Magaluf Ghost Town
Includes Q&A

Misha Defonseca's 1997 Holocaust memoir about escaping the Nazis as a seven-year-old girl on foot across Europe with a pack of wolves took the world by storm. But when Hollywood comes knocking, an even more audacious story and darker deceptions come to light.

Misha and the Wolves

In February 2020, filmmaker Andrea Segre was locked down in Venice, his late father's hometown. Emptied of all distractions, the city and a grieving son confront the fragilities of their foundations, finding extraordinary beauty in the powerful presence of absence.

Molecules

Recently retired European women flock to Luxor, Egypt, in search of sun, sand and love from local men interested in money and security, in a modern love story that blurs the boundaries between romantic and business affairs.

My Mohamed Is Different
Includes Q&A

Facing terminal illness, legendary director Heddy Honigmann embarks on a self-reflective journey across the Netherlands and to her birthplace in Peru, weaving together visits to beloved places and people with moments from her most important films.

No Hay Camino – There Is No Path

When 700 helpful Finnish tourists arrive in Benin to assist in a tropical disease vaccine study that could save the lives of millions of children, a unique cultural exchange reveals how humans can help and harm with the best of intentions.

People We Come Across
Includes Q&A

How controversial can one basketball team of eight-year-olds be? With an unorthodox coach and training method, a tight-knit group of empowered Icelandic girls demand to play against boys and call time out on patriarchy.

Raise the Bar

Featuring candid interviews with rock legends Robert Plant, Ozzy Osbourne and Liam Gallagher, this is the unlikely tale of how two Welsh brothers turned their dairy farm into one of the most successful recording studios of all time.

Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm
Includes Q&A

In this fascinating look inside a complicated cinema dynasty, the eldest grandson of Roberto Rossellini, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, picks up the camera for himself and explores his family history.

The Rossellinis
Includes Q&A

A bullet to the neck, fatwas and 24-hour police protection are just part of being one of Europe's first female imams. When Seyran Ates opens Germany's first liberal mosque, radical change meets modern Islam.

Seyran Ates: Sex, Revolution and Islam
Includes Q&A

Fleeing Chechnya and his homophobic brother's tyranny, a young gay MMA fighter finds himself adrift in Brussels. Struck mute by trauma, he struggles to build a new identity against the chilling backdrop of voicemails from home.

Silent Voice

A thousand musicians come together to form the world's largest rock band, and go viral in the process, all in hopes of wooing the Foo Fighters to come play in their Italian town.

We Are the Thousand
Includes Q&A

When Seville's last brothel is repurposed into a refugee reception centre, cameras move in to capture the newcomers' impressions of Spanish life. With 1970s style and satire, the migrant crisis comes into a refreshingly human focus.

Welcome to Spain
Includes Q&A

After escaping the war in Syria, a family learns to negotiate their new lives in Germany. But when the siblings begin to explore their transgender identities within their newfound freedom, their parents push back hard as they cling to strict religious and cultural ideologies.

Zuhur's Daughters
Includes Q&A

Faith & Spirituality

At the height of Italy's migrant crisis, a tiny Sicilian town received over a thousand asylum seekers. But when an African refugee volunteers to carry the hallowed Jesus statue in the village's annual procession, traditional Christian values must reckon with new social realities.

A Black Jesus
Includes Q&A

A group of pioneering nuns in 1960s Los Angeles stood up to the patriarchy in such revolutionary ways, demanding pay cheques, marching on Selma and making political pop art, they would change Catholicism and the face of faith forever.

Rebel Hearts
Includes Q&A

This provocative doc reveals the deeper stories that drove several women to uproot their lives in the West and join ISIS in Syria. Now, infamous and reviled in the media, they yearn for absolution and the homelands that bar their return.

The Return: Life After ISIS
Includes Q&A

A bullet to the neck, fatwas and 24-hour police protection are just part of being one of Europe's first female imams. When Seyran Ates opens Germany's first liberal mosque, radical change meets modern Islam.

Seyran Ates: Sex, Revolution and Islam
Includes Q&A

After escaping the war in Syria, a family learns to negotiate their new lives in Germany. But when the siblings begin to explore their transgender identities within their newfound freedom, their parents push back hard as they cling to strict religious and cultural ideologies.

Zuhur's Daughters
Includes Q&A

Families & Family Stories

In the US Midwest, plagued with opioid abuse and rising incarceration rates for women, three unforgettable mothers return home from prison to rebuild their lives after years of separation from their children.

Apart
Includes Q&A

Adopted as a baby by a Quillasinga Nation family, Afro-Colombian Camilo grows up facing racism and ostracization by his Indigenous community, propelling him on a spiritual journey to discover his origins and the truth about his mother.

Between Fire and Water
Includes Q&A

This observational doc captures a neighbourhood in Palestine, where courageous young girls influenced by three generations of tumultuous occupation come of age learning how to protect their family's land, rights and values.

Children
Includes Q&A

Commissioned by Hot Docs, Citizen Minutes is a short doc collection aimed at celebrating and inspiring civic engagement. Be among the first to see the incredible stories of ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things to make their communities better places.

Citizen Minutes

The impacts of transracial Indigenous adoption are revealed in the moving story of a young Indigenous mother seeking connection with her Lummi community, heritage and biological mother, who, as a child, was also an adoptee.

Daughter of a Lost Bird
Includes Q&A

After leaving an abusive husband, Sonya returns to Newfoundland's stunning but remote Fogo Island with her two sons, determined to raise them to be good men in the only place she knows how, despite having fled from it years before.

Dropstones
Includes Q&A

Against all odds and at great personal cost, three Aboriginal brothers turn a dance troupe into one of Australia's leading performing arts companies and forge a language in dance that speaks to the burden of intergenerational trauma and the joyful reclamation of culture.

Firestarter – The Story of Bangarra

Working in a food processing plant after class and in the fields on weekends, a California high school senior dreams of graduating while bearing the burden of being the family breadwinner and threats of separation as ICE raids increase in her community.

Fruits of Labor
Includes Q&A

After nearly three years in ISIS captivity, a five-year-old Yazidi boy, abused and profoundly brainwashed, is reunited with his family—but displays only hatred for his mother and the world around him. Can he ever become the sweet child they remember?

Imad's Childhood
Includes Q&A

Seeking a fresh start from an abusive husband and increasingly difficult way of life, Ivanna, a young Nenets mother, quits the harsh Russian Arctic tundra and traditions of her nomadic people for the city, where she struggles to gain control of her life and future.

Life of Ivanna
Includes Q&A

In this lyrical coming-of-age story, two teenage girls take refuge with their mother in a cramped room inside an Aleppo hospital through the war, its aftermath and now a pandemic. But spirited Juli has awakened to its reality as a prison and dreams only of a life beyond.

Neighbouring the Moon

Seeking the truth behind his late mother's two years in FARC-EP captivity, the director and his brother pore over her journals to map out an extraordinarily perilous journey through Colombia's jungles and mountains, retracing her path to confront her captors.

On the Other Side
Includes Q&A

After a Haitian-born youth is racially profiled at an Indigenous basketball tournament, he wrestles with his shaken sense of belonging in his Indigenous adoptive family while attempting to heal from his past.

One of Ours
Includes Q&A

Inhabiting an in-between world where their hearing is both a gift and a curse, children of deaf parents share their struggles and joys and band together against a culture that privileges the spoken word.

Only I Can Hear
Includes Q&A

Haunted by a family secret revealed to him as a boy, a young man jeopardizes relationships and crosses continents to investigate the mystery behind the thousands of missing paintings his grandfather created during his lifetime.

Portrayal
Includes Q&A

Working multiple jobs, desperate to make ends meet for their families, two New York mothers drop off their children at a 24-hour daycare centre run by a woman that binds the neighbourhood together.

Through the Night

When Vicenta discovers her young, disabled daughter is pregnant as a result of rape, she overcomes overwhelming odds to wage the battle of her life, despite illiteracy and extreme poverty: a flashpoint case against Argentina's restrictive abortion laws that reaches the UN.

Vicenta
Includes Q&A

Blending documentary with fiction and poetry, a young female guard in an overcrowded Madagascar prison daydreams of her father, a murderer who abandoned her as a child. But when a new inmate brings news of him, her daydreams turn to nightmares.

Zaho Zay
Includes Q&A

After escaping the war in Syria, a family learns to negotiate their new lives in Germany. But when the siblings begin to explore their transgender identities within their newfound freedom, their parents push back hard as they cling to strict religious and cultural ideologies.

Zuhur's Daughters
Includes Q&A

Films & Filmmakers

When his older boyfriend loses interest in him, a filmmaker relocates to Chicago and uses dating apps to cast new lovers in an amorphous project about romantic attraction, compatibility and attachment that his mother hates.

Acts of Love
Includes Q&A

West African revolutionary Omar Blondin Diop, known as the only real Marxist activist in Jean-Luc Godard's film La Chinoise, gets a vibrant tribute in this reimagining of the 1967 classic that explores the complex current relations between China and Africa.

Just a Movement
Includes Q&A

The director scours his footage and claustrophobic hotel rooms, seeking answers to the mysterious disappearance of two friends after they smoke and smash their way through bar girls and drugs in an endless bender through Bangkok and Phnom Penh.

Lost Boys
Includes Q&A

Anointed "the most beautiful boy in the world" by Death in Venice director Luchino Visconti, actor Björn Andrésen reflects on how his iconic beauty made him famous as an adolescent, catapulting him into a life of stardom and glamour, and unmade him as an adult.

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
Includes Q&A

Facing terminal illness, legendary director Heddy Honigmann embarks on a self-reflective journey across the Netherlands and to her birthplace in Peru, weaving together visits to beloved places and people with moments from her most important films.

No Hay Camino – There Is No Path

From filming Jaws' near-lethal live scenes to saving a great white with her bare hands, underwater filmmaking legend Valerie Taylor faces her biggest challenge yet: fighting to conserve the world's remaining sharks.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Playing with Sharks
Live Q&A on May 2, 7:00 PM

In this fascinating look inside a complicated cinema dynasty, the eldest grandson of Roberto Rossellini, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, picks up the camera for himself and explores his family history.

The Rossellinis
Includes Q&A

Food & Food Culture

Experience a year in the life of a self-taught Japanese ramen master, who considers his legendary noodle shop more than just a livelihood but his life, and his die-hard customers more than just regulars, but true friends.

Come Back Anytime
Includes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

In this graceful study of the balance between solitude and community, artist and chef Jim Denevan roams across the US, transforming landscapes into breathtaking, sustainable dining experiences framed by ephemeral installation art.

Man in the Field: The Life and Art of Jim Denevan
Includes Q&A

When the filmmaker turns his lens on his elderly father, a renowned Korean artist, volumes are revealed about their relationship and his meditative silence and obsession with painting water drops, all rooted in the tragic past of the country he left behind.

The Man Who Paints Water Drops
Includes Q&A

In this poetic trip around the world, the oyster acts as metaphor for life's passions and frustrations, linking stories of a New York burlesque dancer, French Michelin-starred chefs, a Swedish oyster diver, a Japanese pearl maker and a terminally ill English psychologist.

The Taste of Desire
Includes Q&A

Gender & Sexuality

An average middle-aged Italian couple by day, Hermes and Betta live out their unbridled sexual fantasies as swingers by night. With an unfiltered lens, this cinematic beauty plunges you deep into their world and the most intimate spaces of sex and love.

Bloom Up – A Swinger Couple Story
Includes Q&A

How controversial can one basketball team of eight-year-olds be? With an unorthodox coach and training method, a tight-knit group of empowered Icelandic girls demand to play against boys and call time out on patriarchy.

Raise the Bar

A bullet to the neck, fatwas and 24-hour police protection are just part of being one of Europe's first female imams. When Seyran Ates opens Germany's first liberal mosque, radical change meets modern Islam.

Seyran Ates: Sex, Revolution and Islam
Includes Q&A

An intrepid social researcher goes door-to-door in Tbilisi, popping controversial questions on topics such as sexuality, minority rights and nationalism on unsuspecting residents. As surprising conversations are sparked, she weighs out the hopes and fears of her fellow citizens.

Sunny
Includes Q&A

Following the gender transition of her adolescent son over three years, the filmmaker crafts a beautiful and compassionate look at his deep search for identity and her own growth away from old paradigms, fears and prejudices.

Threshold
Includes Q&A

After escaping the war in Syria, a family learns to negotiate their new lives in Germany. But when the siblings begin to explore their transgender identities within their newfound freedom, their parents push back hard as they cling to strict religious and cultural ideologies.

Zuhur's Daughters
Includes Q&A

Health & the Pandemic

Nanfu Wang's (director of One Child Nation, winner of Sundance's Grand Jury Prize) searing investigation into COVID-19's origins and spread exposes not only a global crisis of misinformation, but the leadership that misled the world about a still-unfolding emergency.

In the Same Breath
Includes Q&A

Inspired by Florence Nightingale's methods from 150 years ago, a small Danish retirement home deploys a controversial new treatment for dementia patients. With hugs, conversation, eye contact and cake, they shift the focus from pharmaceuticals to care.

It Is Not Over Yet
Includes Q&A

In February 2020, filmmaker Andrea Segre was locked down in Venice, his late father's hometown. Emptied of all distractions, the city and a grieving son confront the fragilities of their foundations, finding extraordinary beauty in the powerful presence of absence.

Molecules

When 700 helpful Finnish tourists arrive in Benin to assist in a tropical disease vaccine study that could save the lives of millions of children, a unique cultural exchange reveals how humans can help and harm with the best of intentions.

People We Come Across
Includes Q&A

As Brazil's COVID-19 death toll soars, President Bolsonaro unleashes a relentless media campaign of misinformation, undermining the efforts of journalists desperate to inform a nation during the darkest months of the pandemic.

Sieged: The Press vs. Denialism
Includes Q&A

Facing a cancer diagnosis, multidisciplinary artist Max Dean asks, "How do we fix ourselves?" Discarded animatronic figures from a decommissioned Ontario Place attraction and wild imagination drive this vivid journey of resilience and creativity in the face of illness.

Still Max
Includes Q&A

Seven young people from across the world were innocently uploading shiny bright 2020 plans when "virus" started trending. Over a year's worth of real-time posts and massive reality checks chart their innocent optimism and surprising resilience to a global change no one saw coming.

Viral
Includes Q&A

With unprecedented access to Wuhan, China, at the peak of the pandemic lockdown, award-winning director Yung Chang looks beyond statistics and headlines to reveal the emotions and resilience at the core of our shared humanity.

Wuhan Wuhan
Includes Q&A

Indigenous Cultures & Issues

Adopted as a baby by a Quillasinga Nation family, Afro-Colombian Camilo grows up facing racism and ostracization by his Indigenous community, propelling him on a spiritual journey to discover his origins and the truth about his mother.

Between Fire and Water
Includes Q&A

The impacts of transracial Indigenous adoption are revealed in the moving story of a young Indigenous mother seeking connection with her Lummi community, heritage and biological mother, who, as a child, was also an adoptee.

Daughter of a Lost Bird
Includes Q&A

The colonization of Sámi lands by Finland was an historic crime, and decolonization today is the only remedy. From demanding truth and reconciliation hearings to debating self-determination rights, this portrait of Sámi multi-front activism maps a blueprint of resistance.

Eatnameamet – Our Silent Struggle
Includes Q&A

Against all odds and at great personal cost, three Aboriginal brothers turn a dance troupe into one of Australia's leading performing arts companies and forge a language in dance that speaks to the burden of intergenerational trauma and the joyful reclamation of culture.

Firestarter – The Story of Bangarra

Since 2014, the opioid crisis has claimed hundreds of lives on the Kainai First Nation in Alberta. Inspiring and urgent, this unflinching chronicle captures a community's efforts to heal by cultivating empathy through harm reduction.

Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy
Includes Q&A

Shaman and activist Davi Kopenawa Yanomami leads this cinematically rich documentary, weaving beautifully realized sequences of traditional stories with the ongoing struggles the Yanomami people face as they fight to preserve the Amazon.

The Last Forest
Includes Q&A

Weary refugees from Burkina Faso, Togo and Benin, in search of promising futures, stop over at the House of Migrants in Mali, where staff offer basic necessities, warm beds and legal advice for their long journeys ahead.

The Last Shelter
Includes Q&A

Attempting to reconstruct the lived memory of his people, Mateo Sobode Chiqueno has traversed the desolate Paraguayan Chaco for decades to record others of the Ayoreo people, who lived free in the vast forest until colonization forced them from their land and dismantled their culture.

Nothing but the Sun
Includes Q&A; Free for students and 60+ on May 8

Through animated and live-action sequences, the failings of the criminal justice system are exposed and a more transformative approach through restorative justice and the Peacemaking Circle movement, which originated in the Yukon with First Nations Elders, is offered.

A Once and Future Peace
Includes Q&A

After a Haitian-born youth is racially profiled at an Indigenous basketball tournament, he wrestles with his shaken sense of belonging in his Indigenous adoptive family while attempting to heal from his past.

One of Ours
Includes Q&A

Four young directors—Indigenous Shipibo filmmakers living in Lima, Peru, and Syrian filmmakers living as refugees in Jordan—share sisterhood, daily survival, displacement and first motherhood through their video letters.

Only the Ocean Between Us
Includes Q&A

In 1910, Roger Casement, British consul in Brazil, investigated atrocities against Indigenous Amazonians, his journals capturing a harrowing picture of their enslavement and murder by the rubber industry. Through his words, their plight is traced all the way to their current struggle for self-determination.

Secrets from Putumayo
Includes Q&A

Following up on her groundbreaking and award-winning book Seven Fallen Feathers, journalist Tanya Talaga returns to Thunder Bay to see if anything has changed since the inquest into the deaths of seven First Nations high school students.

Spirit to Soar
Includes Q&A

When healer and human rights activist María de Jesús Patricio becomes the first Indigenous woman to run for president in Mexico, her revolutionary platform advocating unity and a new approach to progress becomes mired in structural racism.

The Spokeswoman
Includes Q&A

Jewish Interest

The Jewish National Fund's Blue Boxes were a global fundraiser to purchase land in Israel. Weaving a co-founder's diary entries with his descendants' memories, Blue Box investigates the myths that constructed a national icon.

Blue Box
Includes Q&A

Dani Karavan, a cocksure Israeli artist in his 80s, sets out on a riotous journey across Europe to say farewell to his deteriorating large-scale environmental sculptures, while also contemplating a decision on the most controversial piece of his career.

High Maintenance

Fascinating witness accounts and meticulous research investigate the unfathomable relationship between a beautiful Jewish prisoner and an SS officer at Auschwitz. Thirty years later, the truth comes for them both at his 1972 war crimes trial.

Love It Was Not

Misha Defonseca's 1997 Holocaust memoir about escaping the Nazis as a seven-year-old girl on foot across Europe with a pack of wolves took the world by storm. But when Hollywood comes knocking, an even more audacious story and darker deceptions come to light.

Misha and the Wolves

In 1975, Jason Sherman received a tree for his bar mitzvah, planted in Israel in his name. Forty years later, he decides to look for that tree and along the way discovers many uncomfortable truths stemming from his gift.

My Tree
Includes Q&A

Latin American Cultures & Issues

Caught between failed government promises and an occupation by armed militias, coca growers in Colombia confront displacement and mortal threats as they expose the relentless war in their countryside and shatter illusions of a successful peace process.

Bajo Fuego (Under Siege)
Includes Q&A

Coming of age in rural Mexico, an introspective 11-year-old boy spends his summer raising fighting bulls and dreaming of emulating the cowboys in his family, while dreading the start of school and pining for his distant father in America.

Becoming
Includes Q&A

Adopted as a baby by a Quillasinga Nation family, Afro-Colombian Camilo grows up facing racism and ostracization by his Indigenous community, propelling him on a spiritual journey to discover his origins and the truth about his mother.

Between Fire and Water
Includes Q&A

Once accused and imprisoned for aggravated homicide for having a late-term miscarriage, Teodora Vásquez has become the spokesperson for all such victims of El Salvador's cruel anti-abortion laws, and a symbol of empowerment, resistance and solidarity.

Fly So Far

When two Chilean gauchos of different generations leave to pursue their cowboy dreams on an Idaho ranch, a humorous and touching tale of clashing cultures unfolds when they must adapt their expectations to the realities of North American agri-business and lifestyles.

Gaucho Americano
Includes Q&A

Shaman and activist Davi Kopenawa Yanomami leads this cinematically rich documentary, weaving beautifully realized sequences of traditional stories with the ongoing struggles the Yanomami people face as they fight to preserve the Amazon.

The Last Forest
Includes Q&A

Attempting to reconstruct the lived memory of his people, Mateo Sobode Chiqueno has traversed the desolate Paraguayan Chaco for decades to record others of the Ayoreo people, who lived free in the vast forest until colonization forced them from their land and dismantled their culture.

Nothing but the Sun
Includes Q&A; Free for students and 60+ on May 8

Seeking the truth behind his late mother's two years in FARC-EP captivity, the director and his brother pore over her journals to map out an extraordinarily perilous journey through Colombia's jungles and mountains, retracing her path to confront her captors.

On the Other Side
Includes Q&A

Four young directors—Indigenous Shipibo filmmakers living in Lima, Peru, and Syrian filmmakers living as refugees in Jordan—share sisterhood, daily survival, displacement and first motherhood through their video letters.

Only the Ocean Between Us
Includes Q&A

When Obama abruptly ends the?"wet feet, dry feet" policy aimed at expediting residency for Cuban nationals, hundreds of Cubans, who risked their lives to get to the US, are now left homeless in a migratory limbo in Panama.

Option Zero

Their relationship forbidden while in ranks of the FARC-EP, two Colombian rebels have a chance at a fresh start for their young love after the peace accords. But new daily demands, estranged families and fears for their safety burden their burgeoning life together.

Rebel Love
Includes Q&A

In 1910, Roger Casement, British consul in Brazil, investigated atrocities against Indigenous Amazonians, his journals capturing a harrowing picture of their enslavement and murder by the rubber industry. Through his words, their plight is traced all the way to their current struggle for self-determination.

Secrets from Putumayo
Includes Q&A

As Brazil's COVID-19 death toll soars, President Bolsonaro unleashes a relentless media campaign of misinformation, undermining the efforts of journalists desperate to inform a nation during the darkest months of the pandemic.

Sieged: The Press vs. Denialism
Includes Q&A

This gripping political mystery unravels how a courageous 1970s journalist dubbed "The Mole" risked his life to infiltrate Guatemala's government and uncover the truths behind one of the most violent and repressive periods in the country's history.

The Silence of the Mole
Includes Q&A

As a child, Oneida sang traditional chants to guide the dead to the realm of souls. Now, after over two decades of brutal conflict along Colombia's Pacific coast, her songs become a plea for peace in this hypnotic tale.

Songs that Flood the River
Includes Q&A

When healer and human rights activist María de Jesús Patricio becomes the first Indigenous woman to run for president in Mexico, her revolutionary platform advocating unity and a new approach to progress becomes mired in structural racism.

The Spokeswoman
Includes Q&A

When Vicenta discovers her young, disabled daughter is pregnant as a result of rape, she overcomes overwhelming odds to wage the battle of her life, despite illiteracy and extreme poverty: a flashpoint case against Argentina's restrictive abortion laws that reaches the UN.

Vicenta
Includes Q&A

In Port-au-Prince, various citizens are shuttled through a city in crisis. Maneuvering around demonstrations and barricades, they speak candidly about the grim realities of colonialism, international aid and 11 years of unkept promises after the earthquake.

zo reken
Includes Q&A

LGBT Culture & Issues

When his older boyfriend loses interest in him, a filmmaker relocates to Chicago and uses dating apps to cast new lovers in an amorphous project about romantic attraction, compatibility and attachment that his mother hates.

Acts of Love
Includes Q&A

Commissioned by Hot Docs, Citizen Minutes is a short doc collection aimed at celebrating and inspiring civic engagement. Be among the first to see the incredible stories of ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things to make their communities better places.

Citizen Minutes

Anointed "the most beautiful boy in the world" by Death in Venice director Luchino Visconti, actor Björn Andrésen reflects on how his iconic beauty made him famous as an adolescent, catapulting him into a life of stardom and glamour, and unmade him as an adult.

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
Includes Q&A

Fleeing Chechnya and his homophobic brother's tyranny, a young gay MMA fighter finds himself adrift in Brussels. Struck mute by trauma, he struggles to build a new identity against the chilling backdrop of voicemails from home.

Silent Voice

After 11 strangers band together to help a queer youth escape to Vancouver from life-threatening violence in Uganda, the unexpected pandemic and conflicting opinions over his best interests test the limits of their commitment and jeopardize his fresh start.

Someone Like Me
Includes Q&A

Following the gender transition of her adolescent son over three years, the filmmaker crafts a beautiful and compassionate look at his deep search for identity and her own growth away from old paradigms, fears and prejudices.

Threshold
Includes Q&A

After escaping the war in Syria, a family learns to negotiate their new lives in Germany. But when the siblings begin to explore their transgender identities within their newfound freedom, their parents push back hard as they cling to strict religious and cultural ideologies.

Zuhur's Daughters
Includes Q&A

Love & Relationships

When his older boyfriend loses interest in him, a filmmaker relocates to Chicago and uses dating apps to cast new lovers in an amorphous project about romantic attraction, compatibility and attachment that his mother hates.

Acts of Love
Includes Q&A

An affair, a secret, a relationship on the verge of melting down—a simple box of cards posing questions on love sends three Polish couples on a deeply personal journey that unravels both tender and difficult truths.

Between Us
Includes Q&A

An average middle-aged Italian couple by day, Hermes and Betta live out their unbridled sexual fantasies as swingers by night. With an unfiltered lens, this cinematic beauty plunges you deep into their world and the most intimate spaces of sex and love.

Bloom Up – A Swinger Couple Story
Includes Q&A

A tight-knit trio of Danish Goths express their darkness through macabre make-up and fashion, and channel a shared fascination with death to combat loneliness and inner demons. But when rosy romantic love blooms, will it break their bond?

Dark Blossom
Includes Q&A

When Iranian forces shot down a Ukraine International Airlines passenger flight, Javad lost the love of his life. Now, picking up the pieces in Canada, where they moved only years prior, he shares memories of his late wife Elnaz and rages in the face of a grave injustice.

Dear Elnaz
Includes Q&A

As rates of femicide and domestic abuse soar in Turkey and democratic rights for women are increasingly eroded, a lawyer and her clients bravely risk everything for their freedom by standing up to the government and putting violent men behind bars.

Dying to Divorce
Includes Q&A

United by their passion for Roma music, cosmopolitan Faith and shy, sweet Branko marry on a whim—but their unlikely love story begins to crack as their clashing cultural values and lifestyles slowly tear them apart.

Faith and Branko
Includes Q&A

When Zdenka in the Czech Republic falls in love online with Tabish in Pakistan, they marry—but five years later, Czech immigration still refuses him entry. With humour and grit, the couple must prove "real love" to a government and themselves.

A Marriage
Includes Q&A

Recently retired European women flock to Luxor, Egypt, in search of sun, sand and love from local men interested in money and security, in a modern love story that blurs the boundaries between romantic and business affairs.

My Mohamed Is Different
Includes Q&A

Seeking the truth behind his late mother's two years in FARC-EP captivity, the director and his brother pore over her journals to map out an extraordinarily perilous journey through Colombia's jungles and mountains, retracing her path to confront her captors.

On the Other Side
Includes Q&A

Their relationship forbidden while in ranks of the FARC-EP, two Colombian rebels have a chance at a fresh start for their young love after the peace accords. But new daily demands, estranged families and fears for their safety burden their burgeoning life together.

Rebel Love
Includes Q&A

Media & Journalism

For the first time, cameras embed with the German investigative unit that broke the explosive Panama Papers story, following the journalists' pursuit of the truth behind the political assassination of a Maltese reporter and yet another history-making financial scandal.

Behind the Headlines
Includes Q&A

How do dictatorships like Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan launder their reputations from despotic to democratic? This investigative series exposes how Lady Gaga, luxury gifts and scandalous private wealth are used to wield a new "caviar diplomacy" around the world.

The Caviar Connection
Includes Q&A

Nanfu Wang's (director of One Child Nation, winner of Sundance's Grand Jury Prize) searing investigation into COVID-19's origins and spread exposes not only a global crisis of misinformation, but the leadership that misled the world about a still-unfolding emergency.

In the Same Breath
Includes Q&A

As Brazil's COVID-19 death toll soars, President Bolsonaro unleashes a relentless media campaign of misinformation, undermining the efforts of journalists desperate to inform a nation during the darkest months of the pandemic.

Sieged: The Press vs. Denialism
Includes Q&A

This gripping political mystery unravels how a courageous 1970s journalist dubbed "The Mole" risked his life to infiltrate Guatemala's government and uncover the truths behind one of the most violent and repressive periods in the country's history.

The Silence of the Mole
Includes Q&A

Following up on her groundbreaking and award-winning book Seven Fallen Feathers, journalist Tanya Talaga returns to Thunder Bay to see if anything has changed since the inquest into the deaths of seven First Nations high school students.

Spirit to Soar
Includes Q&A

Featuring exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, this inspiring journey takes us inside the minds and hearts of Sesame Street creators, artists, writers and educators, who together established one of the most influential and enduring children's programs in television history.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
Live Q&A on April 30, 7pm ET

In 2016, India's only newspaper run by Dalit women, the lowest social caste, goes digital. Armed with smartphones and sheer courage, these journalists rewrite the rules at work and at home of what it means to be powerful in Mother India.

Writing with Fire
Includes Q&A

To understand her father's death, director Maria Carolina Telles creates a portrait of the award-winning war photographer André Liohn—a man whose?struggles to survive grief drive him away from his children and into some of the world's most notorious conflict zones.

You Are Not a Soldier
Includes Q&A

Middle Eastern Cultures & Issues

Fresh from the village, two new hires at an all-inclusive resort on the Turkish Riviera are confronted with the absurd excesses of tourism. Their eagerness to engage quickly turns to indifference—and eventually self-interest—after one too many guest complaints and foam parties.

All-In
Includes Q&A

The Jewish National Fund's Blue Boxes were a global fundraiser to purchase land in Israel. Weaving a co-founder's diary entries with his descendants' memories, Blue Box investigates the myths that constructed a national icon.

Blue Box
Includes Q&A

This observational doc captures a neighbourhood in Palestine, where courageous young girls influenced by three generations of tumultuous occupation come of age learning how to protect their family's land, rights and values.

Children
Includes Q&A

When Iranian forces shot down a Ukraine International Airlines passenger flight, Javad lost the love of his life. Now, picking up the pieces in Canada, where they moved only years prior, he shares memories of his late wife Elnaz and rages in the face of a grave injustice.

Dear Elnaz
Includes Q&A

As rates of femicide and domestic abuse soar in Turkey and democratic rights for women are increasingly eroded, a lawyer and her clients bravely risk everything for their freedom by standing up to the government and putting violent men behind bars.

Dying to Divorce
Includes Q&A

Shot over nine years, this harrowing doc exposes the plight of Kurdish kulbars, who smuggle back-breaking loads into Iran each day, braving extreme terrain and temperatures and the looming threat of violence from border guards, all to support their families.

Holy Bread

After nearly three years in ISIS captivity, a five-year-old Yazidi boy, abused and profoundly brainwashed, is reunited with his family—but displays only hatred for his mother and the world around him. Can he ever become the sweet child they remember?

Imad's Childhood
Includes Q&A

When Zdenka in the Czech Republic falls in love online with Tabish in Pakistan, they marry—but five years later, Czech immigration still refuses him entry. With humour and grit, the couple must prove "real love" to a government and themselves.

A Marriage
Includes Q&A

Recently retired European women flock to Luxor, Egypt, in search of sun, sand and love from local men interested in money and security, in a modern love story that blurs the boundaries between romantic and business affairs.

My Mohamed Is Different
Includes Q&A

In 1975, Jason Sherman received a tree for his bar mitzvah, planted in Israel in his name. Forty years later, he decides to look for that tree and along the way discovers many uncomfortable truths stemming from his gift.

My Tree
Includes Q&A

In this lyrical coming-of-age story, two teenage girls take refuge with their mother in a cramped room inside an Aleppo hospital through the war, its aftermath and now a pandemic. But spirited Juli has awakened to its reality as a prison and dreams only of a life beyond.

Neighbouring the Moon

Four young directors—Indigenous Shipibo filmmakers living in Lima, Peru, and Syrian filmmakers living as refugees in Jordan—share sisterhood, daily survival, displacement and first motherhood through their video letters.

Only the Ocean Between Us
Includes Q&A

This provocative doc reveals the deeper stories that drove several women to uproot their lives in the West and join ISIS in Syria. Now, infamous and reviled in the media, they yearn for absolution and the homelands that bar their return.

The Return: Life After ISIS
Includes Q&A

A rapper, tortured by Bashar Al-Assad, along with other exiled artists and performers who supported the Syrian uprising, explore resilience and resistance through art, dance and music, while also processing their trauma and love of homeland through creative expression.

The Story Won't Die
Includes extended Q&A

After escaping the war in Syria, a family learns to negotiate their new lives in Germany. But when the siblings begin to explore their transgender identities within their newfound freedom, their parents push back hard as they cling to strict religious and cultural ideologies.

Zuhur's Daughters
Includes Q&A

Migration & Immigration

At the height of Italy's migrant crisis, a tiny Sicilian town received over a thousand asylum seekers. But when an African refugee volunteers to carry the hallowed Jesus statue in the village's annual procession, traditional Christian values must reckon with new social realities.

A Black Jesus
Includes Q&A

A stimulant with major cultural significance, the khat leaf is also Ethiopia's most lucrative cash crop. Weaving together lives shaped by its trade, this dreamy docudrama captures the spirit of a young generation longing for a different future overseas.

Faya Dayi
Includes Q&A

As a ferry shuttles tourists and locals between British-controlled Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland, cameras eavesdrop on their frank conversations about the new/old border in this delightfully politics-free Brexit critique.

Four Seasons in a Day
Includes Q&A

Working in a food processing plant after class and in the fields on weekends, a California high school senior dreams of graduating while bearing the burden of being the family breadwinner and threats of separation as ICE raids increase in her community.

Fruits of Labor
Includes Q&A

Weary refugees from Burkina Faso, Togo and Benin, in search of promising futures, stop over at the House of Migrants in Mali, where staff offer basic necessities, warm beds and legal advice for their long journeys ahead.

The Last Shelter
Includes Q&A

Four young directors—Indigenous Shipibo filmmakers living in Lima, Peru, and Syrian filmmakers living as refugees in Jordan—share sisterhood, daily survival, displacement and first motherhood through their video letters.

Only the Ocean Between Us
Includes Q&A

When Obama abruptly ends the?"wet feet, dry feet" policy aimed at expediting residency for Cuban nationals, hundreds of Cubans, who risked their lives to get to the US, are now left homeless in a migratory limbo in Panama.

Option Zero

Fleeing Chechnya and his homophobic brother's tyranny, a young gay MMA fighter finds himself adrift in Brussels. Struck mute by trauma, he struggles to build a new identity against the chilling backdrop of voicemails from home.

Silent Voice

After 11 strangers band together to help a queer youth escape to Vancouver from life-threatening violence in Uganda, the unexpected pandemic and conflicting opinions over his best interests test the limits of their commitment and jeopardize his fresh start.

Someone Like Me
Includes Q&A

When Seville's last brothel is repurposed into a refugee reception centre, cameras move in to capture the newcomers' impressions of Spanish life. With 1970s style and satire, the migrant crisis comes into a refreshingly human focus.

Welcome to Spain
Includes Q&A

After escaping the war in Syria, a family learns to negotiate their new lives in Germany. But when the siblings begin to explore their transgender identities within their newfound freedom, their parents push back hard as they cling to strict religious and cultural ideologies.

Zuhur's Daughters
Includes Q&A

Musicians & Performers

Danish band Lukas Graham has an uncanny ability of setting audacious goals and achieving them, but after scoring a hit with "7 Years," Grammy nominations and a world tour, success and fame may have them changing their tune.

7 Years of Lukas Graham
Includes Q&A

During Belarus's presidential elections, three actors from a Minsk underground theatre are swept up in street protests that demand free speech and new leadership—until the movement is crushed, they're arrested and the country teeters on the brink of civil war.

Courage

United by their passion for Roma music, cosmopolitan Faith and shy, sweet Branko marry on a whim—but their unlikely love story begins to crack as their clashing cultural values and lifestyles slowly tear them apart.

Faith and Branko
Includes Q&A

Ferocious female rockers Fanny shattered glass ceilings in the '70s, collecting fans like David Bowie before being buried in retro record bins. Fifty years later, they reunite with a new record deal and a chance to rewrite history.

FANNY: The Right to Rock
Includes Q&A

Against all odds and at great personal cost, three Aboriginal brothers turn a dance troupe into one of Australia's leading performing arts companies and forge a language in dance that speaks to the burden of intergenerational trauma and the joyful reclamation of culture.

Firestarter – The Story of Bangarra

On the stage of Paris's legendary Opéra Bastille, 30 dancers from non-traditional genres—hip-hop, krump, break and voguing—reprise and remix Jean-Philippe Rameau's baroque masterpiece Les Indes galantes, offering a dynamic take on the landmark opera.

Gallant Indies
Includes Curious Minds discussion

Hysterical is a backstage pass into the lives of the hilarious, boundary-breaking women shattering stand-up comedy's glass ceiling. Featuring Margaret Cho, Fortune Feimster, Marina Franklin, Nikki Glaser, Jessica Kirson, Iliza Shlesinger, Sherri Shepherd and more. Premiering on FX Canada this summer.

Hysterical
Includes Q&A

After 25 years of hard partying and insane choices, Australia's "Queen of Honky Tonk" has burned every bridge in the business. Can she keep it together to record with a Nashville legend or will she crash her sad country song of a life for good?

I'm Wanita
Includes Q&A

Anointed "the most beautiful boy in the world" by Death in Venice director Luchino Visconti, actor Björn Andrésen reflects on how his iconic beauty made him famous as an adolescent, catapulting him into a life of stardom and glamour, and unmade him as an adult.

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
Includes Q&A

The death of Anglo-Somali punk icon and X-Ray Spex frontwoman Poly Styrene sends her daughter on a journey across the world and through her mother's archives to reconcile their fraught relationship and her place in music history as a key architect of the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements.

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
Includes Q&A

Featuring candid interviews with rock legends Robert Plant, Ozzy Osbourne and Liam Gallagher, this is the unlikely tale of how two Welsh brothers turned their dairy farm into one of the most successful recording studios of all time.

Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm
Includes Q&A

Acclaimed filmmaker Edgar Wright’s charming love letter to innovation, music and two rebel artists takes us on a mood-elevating musical odyssey guaranteed to delight the faithful and create a whole new fanbase for this uniquely talented duo.

The Sparks Brothers

A rapper, tortured by Bashar Al-Assad, along with other exiled artists and performers who supported the Syrian uprising, explore resilience and resistance through art, dance and music, while also processing their trauma and love of homeland through creative expression.

The Story Won't Die
Includes extended Q&A

In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary—part music film, part historical record—created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture and fashion.

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Includes A Conversation with Questlove

GRAMMY®-winning producer and artist Mark Ronson is joined by a who's who of hitmakers, including Paul McCartney, Dave Grohl, Questlove, King Princess, Adrock and Mike D from the Beastie Boys, and Charli XCX, to examine the tools and techniques that revolutionized music.

Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson

A thousand musicians come together to form the world's largest rock band, and go viral in the process, all in hopes of wooing the Foo Fighters to come play in their Italian town.

We Are the Thousand
Includes Q&A

Personal Histories

Recounting his father's dangerous life as an exile in London with a million-dollar bounty on his head, the director questions the cost of his decades-long opposition to Muammar Gaddafi and eventual return to an unrecognizable Libya on the brink of civil war.

The Colonel's Stray Dogs
Includes Q&A

A man turns the experience of watching videotapes that his terminally ill father recorded into an unforgettable contemplation of race, death and the importance of family, composed as a letter to his own children.

The Death of My Two Fathers
Includes Q&A

A Toronto filmmaker returns to his declining hometown to reconnect with his father and grandfather, the two men who have shaped his life. Beautifully shot in black and white, this tender film captures a rural town and family in flux.

Grey Roads
Includes Q&A

In an idyllic Philippine fishing village where catches are shared and breathtaking sunsets mark the days, the filmmaker befriends a young boy and captures memories of home during the last days of summer before he must leave for school in the city.

Last Days at Sea
Includes Q&A

When the filmmaker turns his lens on his elderly father, a renowned Korean artist, volumes are revealed about their relationship and his meditative silence and obsession with painting water drops, all rooted in the tragic past of the country he left behind.

The Man Who Paints Water Drops
Includes Q&A

In February 2020, filmmaker Andrea Segre was locked down in Venice, his late father's hometown. Emptied of all distractions, the city and a grieving son confront the fragilities of their foundations, finding extraordinary beauty in the powerful presence of absence.

Molecules

In 1975, Jason Sherman received a tree for his bar mitzvah, planted in Israel in his name. Forty years later, he decides to look for that tree and along the way discovers many uncomfortable truths stemming from his gift.

My Tree
Includes Q&A

Facing terminal illness, legendary director Heddy Honigmann embarks on a self-reflective journey across the Netherlands and to her birthplace in Peru, weaving together visits to beloved places and people with moments from her most important films.

No Hay Camino – There Is No Path

Seeking the truth behind his late mother's two years in FARC-EP captivity, the director and his brother pore over her journals to map out an extraordinarily perilous journey through Colombia's jungles and mountains, retracing her path to confront her captors.

On the Other Side
Includes Q&A

Four young directors—Indigenous Shipibo filmmakers living in Lima, Peru, and Syrian filmmakers living as refugees in Jordan—share sisterhood, daily survival, displacement and first motherhood through their video letters.

Only the Ocean Between Us
Includes Q&A

The death of Anglo-Somali punk icon and X-Ray Spex frontwoman Poly Styrene sends her daughter on a journey across the world and through her mother's archives to reconcile their fraught relationship and her place in music history as a key architect of the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements.

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
Includes Q&A

In this gorgeous cinematic letter from the director to her hometown of Wuhan, ordinary human activities unfold against an evolving urban landscape, sculpted by nature and rising infrastructure, composing a series of surprising and poetic set pieces.

A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces
Includes Q&A

In this fascinating look inside a complicated cinema dynasty, the eldest grandson of Roberto Rossellini, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, picks up the camera for himself and explores his family history.

The Rossellinis
Includes Q&A

Following the gender transition of her adolescent son over three years, the filmmaker crafts a beautiful and compassionate look at his deep search for identity and her own growth away from old paradigms, fears and prejudices.

Threshold
Includes Q&A

To understand her father's death, director Maria Carolina Telles creates a portrait of the award-winning war photographer André Liohn—a man whose?struggles to survive grief drive him away from his children and into some of the world's most notorious conflict zones.

You Are Not a Soldier
Includes Q&A

Politics & Political Intrigue

For the first time, cameras embed with the German investigative unit that broke the explosive Panama Papers story, following the journalists' pursuit of the truth behind the political assassination of a Maltese reporter and yet another history-making financial scandal.

Behind the Headlines
Includes Q&A

How do dictatorships like Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan launder their reputations from despotic to democratic? This investigative series exposes how Lady Gaga, luxury gifts and scandalous private wealth are used to wield a new "caviar diplomacy" around the world.

The Caviar Connection
Includes Q&A

Commissioned by Hot Docs, Citizen Minutes is a short doc collection aimed at celebrating and inspiring civic engagement. Be among the first to see the incredible stories of ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things to make their communities better places.

Citizen Minutes

Recounting his father's dangerous life as an exile in London with a million-dollar bounty on his head, the director questions the cost of his decades-long opposition to Muammar Gaddafi and eventual return to an unrecognizable Libya on the brink of civil war.

The Colonel's Stray Dogs
Includes Q&A

During Belarus's presidential elections, three actors from a Minsk underground theatre are swept up in street protests that demand free speech and new leadership—until the movement is crushed, they're arrested and the country teeters on the brink of civil war.

Courage

A cheap, powerful drug emerges during a recession, igniting a moral panic fueled by racism. Acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Nelson explores the complex history of crack in the 1980s.

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
Special Screening! Includes Q&A

Fighting for social justice in Chile, democracy in Hong Kong and the environment in Uganda, three young women cope with the staggering personal impact of frontline activism, weighing their own fear of failure and the price of resistance in pursuit of change.

Dear Future Children
Includes Q&A

As rates of femicide and domestic abuse soar in Turkey and democratic rights for women are increasingly eroded, a lawyer and her clients bravely risk everything for their freedom by standing up to the government and putting violent men behind bars.

Dying to Divorce
Includes Q&A

Following four youth embroiled in protests against a controversial extradition bill, this immersive record bears witness to Hong Kong’s collective awakening in 2019 to the larger fight against authoritarianism to protect their freedom and democratic way of life.

Faceless
Includes Q&A

As a ferry shuttles tourists and locals between British-controlled Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland, cameras eavesdrop on their frank conversations about the new/old border in this delightfully politics-free Brexit critique.

Four Seasons in a Day
Includes Q&A

Four female survivors of the 2011 terror attack in Utøya, Norway, remain true to the social democratic values for which they were targeted, transforming their trauma into strength in their fight for inclusivity and against rising right-wing extremism in parliament.

Generation Utøya
Includes Q&A

This experimental essay resurrects the political imagination of the iconic deaf-blind author Helen Keller, a passionate socialist and disability rights advocate whose radical views, while largely suppressed or sanitized over the years, remain remarkably pertinent today.

Her Socialist Smile

Shot over nine years, this harrowing doc exposes the plight of Kurdish kulbars, who smuggle back-breaking loads into Iran each day, braving extreme terrain and temperatures and the looming threat of violence from border guards, all to support their families.

Holy Bread

Nanfu Wang's (director of One Child Nation, winner of Sundance's Grand Jury Prize) searing investigation into COVID-19's origins and spread exposes not only a global crisis of misinformation, but the leadership that misled the world about a still-unfolding emergency.

In the Same Breath
Includes Q&A

West African revolutionary Omar Blondin Diop, known as the only real Marxist activist in Jean-Luc Godard's film La Chinoise, gets a vibrant tribute in this reimagining of the 1967 classic that explores the complex current relations between China and Africa.

Just a Movement
Includes Q&A

Civil rights attorney Larry Krasner takes injustice personally. Having sued police over 75 times for misconduct, this most unlikely candidate for Philadelphia district attorney not only wins, but upends the whole system. A groundbreaking series follows his outrageous first term.

Philly D.A.

As Brazil's COVID-19 death toll soars, President Bolsonaro unleashes a relentless media campaign of misinformation, undermining the efforts of journalists desperate to inform a nation during the darkest months of the pandemic.

Sieged: The Press vs. Denialism
Includes Q&A

This gripping political mystery unravels how a courageous 1970s journalist dubbed "The Mole" risked his life to infiltrate Guatemala's government and uncover the truths behind one of the most violent and repressive periods in the country's history.

The Silence of the Mole
Includes Q&A

When healer and human rights activist María de Jesús Patricio becomes the first Indigenous woman to run for president in Mexico, her revolutionary platform advocating unity and a new approach to progress becomes mired in structural racism.

The Spokeswoman
Includes Q&A

A rapper, tortured by Bashar Al-Assad, along with other exiled artists and performers who supported the Syrian uprising, explore resilience and resistance through art, dance and music, while also processing their trauma and love of homeland through creative expression.

The Story Won't Die
Includes extended Q&A

An intrepid social researcher goes door-to-door in Tbilisi, popping controversial questions on topics such as sexuality, minority rights and nationalism on unsuspecting residents. As surprising conversations are sparked, she weighs out the hopes and fears of her fellow citizens.

Sunny
Includes Q&A

Travel back in time with six Chinese artists whose late-20th century creations represented the revolutionary dreams of a generation soon to be violently silenced by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

You Are the Days to Come
Includes Q&A

In Port-au-Prince, various citizens are shuttled through a city in crisis. Maneuvering around demonstrations and barricades, they speak candidly about the grim realities of colonialism, international aid and 11 years of unkept promises after the earthquake.

zo reken
Includes Q&A

Popular Culture

Danish band Lukas Graham has an uncanny ability of setting audacious goals and achieving them, but after scoring a hit with "7 Years," Grammy nominations and a world tour, success and fame may have them changing their tune.

7 Years of Lukas Graham
Includes Q&A

With the heroic outsiders and dreamers at Bip Bip Bar cheering him on, Kim Cannon Arm attempts a world record by playing the 80s arcade game Gyruss for 100 hours straight in this quirky comedy about friendship.

Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest
Includes Q&A

At the elite level, bridge—the world's most popular card game—has become a million-dollar cut-throat business. When the best competitive player is accused of cheating, the ensuing scandal confounds experts, criminal science, celebrities and basic belief in this hilarious true-crime thriller.

Dirty Tricks
Includes Q&A

Ferocious female rockers Fanny shattered glass ceilings in the '70s, collecting fans like David Bowie before being buried in retro record bins. Fifty years later, they reunite with a new record deal and a chance to rewrite history.

FANNY: The Right to Rock
Includes Q&A

Misha Defonseca's 1997 Holocaust memoir about escaping the Nazis as a seven-year-old girl on foot across Europe with a pack of wolves took the world by storm. But when Hollywood comes knocking, an even more audacious story and darker deceptions come to light.

Misha and the Wolves

Alberto Salazar was a coaching legend until his recent doping ban shocked the running world. Did his "Just Do It" attitude and questionable practices push the limits of human performance and technology too far?

Nike's Big Bet
Includes Q&A

The death of Anglo-Somali punk icon and X-Ray Spex frontwoman Poly Styrene sends her daughter on a journey across the world and through her mother's archives to reconcile their fraught relationship and her place in music history as a key architect of the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements.

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
Includes Q&A

Featuring candid interviews with rock legends Robert Plant, Ozzy Osbourne and Liam Gallagher, this is the unlikely tale of how two Welsh brothers turned their dairy farm into one of the most successful recording studios of all time.

Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm
Includes Q&A

Acclaimed filmmaker Edgar Wright’s charming love letter to innovation, music and two rebel artists takes us on a mood-elevating musical odyssey guaranteed to delight the faithful and create a whole new fanbase for this uniquely talented duo.

The Sparks Brothers

Featuring exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, this inspiring journey takes us inside the minds and hearts of Sesame Street creators, artists, writers and educators, who together established one of the most influential and enduring children's programs in television history.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
Live Q&A on April 30, 7pm ET

A much-needed deconstruction of race and the power of beauty, this thought-provoking doc lifts up the experiences of Black women in a moment when beauty standards are undergoing a cultural shift towards embracing Black aesthetics and features.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Subjects of Desire
Live Q&A on May 6, 7pm ET

In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary—part music film, part historical record—created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture and fashion.

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Includes A Conversation with Questlove

GRAMMY®-winning producer and artist Mark Ronson is joined by a who's who of hitmakers, including Paul McCartney, Dave Grohl, Questlove, King Princess, Adrock and Mike D from the Beastie Boys, and Charli XCX, to examine the tools and techniques that revolutionized music.

Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson

A thousand musicians come together to form the world's largest rock band, and go viral in the process, all in hopes of wooing the Foo Fighters to come play in their Italian town.

We Are the Thousand
Includes Q&A

Race & Racism

Adopted as a baby by a Quillasinga Nation family, Afro-Colombian Camilo grows up facing racism and ostracization by his Indigenous community, propelling him on a spiritual journey to discover his origins and the truth about his mother.

Between Fire and Water
Includes Q&A

At the height of Italy's migrant crisis, a tiny Sicilian town received over a thousand asylum seekers. But when an African refugee volunteers to carry the hallowed Jesus statue in the village's annual procession, traditional Christian values must reckon with new social realities.

A Black Jesus
Includes Q&A

Commissioned by Hot Docs, Citizen Minutes is a short doc collection aimed at celebrating and inspiring civic engagement. Be among the first to see the incredible stories of ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things to make their communities better places.

Citizen Minutes

A cheap, powerful drug emerges during a recession, igniting a moral panic fueled by racism. Acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Nelson explores the complex history of crack in the 1980s.

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
Special Screening! Includes Q&A

The impacts of transracial Indigenous adoption are revealed in the moving story of a young Indigenous mother seeking connection with her Lummi community, heritage and biological mother, who, as a child, was also an adoptee.

Daughter of a Lost Bird
Includes Q&A

A man turns the experience of watching videotapes that his terminally ill father recorded into an unforgettable contemplation of race, death and the importance of family, composed as a letter to his own children.

The Death of My Two Fathers
Includes Q&A

After a Haitian-born youth is racially profiled at an Indigenous basketball tournament, he wrestles with his shaken sense of belonging in his Indigenous adoptive family while attempting to heal from his past.

One of Ours
Includes Q&A

Civil rights attorney Larry Krasner takes injustice personally. Having sued police over 75 times for misconduct, this most unlikely candidate for Philadelphia district attorney not only wins, but upends the whole system. A groundbreaking series follows his outrageous first term.

Philly D.A.

Following up on her groundbreaking and award-winning book Seven Fallen Feathers, journalist Tanya Talaga returns to Thunder Bay to see if anything has changed since the inquest into the deaths of seven First Nations high school students.

Spirit to Soar
Includes Q&A

A much-needed deconstruction of race and the power of beauty, this thought-provoking doc lifts up the experiences of Black women in a moment when beauty standards are undergoing a cultural shift towards embracing Black aesthetics and features.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Subjects of Desire
Live Q&A on May 6, 7pm ET

In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary—part music film, part historical record—created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture and fashion.

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Includes A Conversation with Questlove

An intrepid social researcher goes door-to-door in Tbilisi, popping controversial questions on topics such as sexuality, minority rights and nationalism on unsuspecting residents. As surprising conversations are sparked, she weighs out the hopes and fears of her fellow citizens.

Sunny
Includes Q&A

Interweaving lecture and personal anecdotes, ACLU deputy legal director Jeffery Robinson draws a stark timeline of anti-Black racism in the United States, from slavery to the modern myth of post-racial America.

Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
Includes Q&A

When track star Tommie Smith and his teammate raised black-gloved fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics, their defiant gesture would reverberate through generations of civil rights activists. Fifty years on, the full breadth of his impact—and depth of his sacrifice—is revealed as America still reckons with racial injustice.

With Drawn Arms
Includes Q&A

Rural Life

Caught between failed government promises and an occupation by armed militias, coca growers in Colombia confront displacement and mortal threats as they expose the relentless war in their countryside and shatter illusions of a successful peace process.

Bajo Fuego (Under Siege)
Includes Q&A

Coming of age in rural Mexico, an introspective 11-year-old boy spends his summer raising fighting bulls and dreaming of emulating the cowboys in his family, while dreading the start of school and pining for his distant father in America.

Becoming
Includes Q&A

After leaving an abusive husband, Sonya returns to Newfoundland's stunning but remote Fogo Island with her two sons, determined to raise them to be good men in the only place she knows how, despite having fled from it years before.

Dropstones
Includes Q&A

When two Chilean gauchos of different generations leave to pursue their cowboy dreams on an Idaho ranch, a humorous and touching tale of clashing cultures unfolds when they must adapt their expectations to the realities of North American agri-business and lifestyles.

Gaucho Americano
Includes Q&A

A Toronto filmmaker returns to his declining hometown to reconnect with his father and grandfather, the two men who have shaped his life. Beautifully shot in black and white, this tender film captures a rural town and family in flux.

Grey Roads
Includes Q&A

Shot over nine years, this harrowing doc exposes the plight of Kurdish kulbars, who smuggle back-breaking loads into Iran each day, braving extreme terrain and temperatures and the looming threat of violence from border guards, all to support their families.

Holy Bread

In an idyllic Philippine fishing village where catches are shared and breathtaking sunsets mark the days, the filmmaker befriends a young boy and captures memories of home during the last days of summer before he must leave for school in the city.

Last Days at Sea
Includes Q&A

Seeking a fresh start from an abusive husband and increasingly difficult way of life, Ivanna, a young Nenets mother, quits the harsh Russian Arctic tundra and traditions of her nomadic people for the city, where she struggles to gain control of her life and future.

Life of Ivanna
Includes Q&A

Abandoned after the USSR’s fall, denizens of a once-vibrant fishing village in the Caspian Sea turn to poaching to survive. While some faithfully await Putin’s promises of Russia’s return to greatness, others dream of a more prosperous future beyond the confines of the island’s shores.

Ostrov – Lost Island
Includes Q&A

Suffering from an extended drought caused by the climate crisis despite their own tiny carbon footprint, Morocco's Oulad Boukais tribe establishes a school to ensure their children's future, and combats isolation and desertification with optimism, dignity and education.

School of Hope
Includes Q&A

Why dig up 15-storey-tall, hundred-year-old trees in Georgia to replant them in a mysterious private garden on the Black Sea? This fascinating glimpse at a powerful man's staggering whim is simply too strange not to be seen.

Taming the Garden

Russian & Eastern European Culture & Issues

An affair, a secret, a relationship on the verge of melting down—a simple box of cards posing questions on love sends three Polish couples on a deeply personal journey that unravels both tender and difficult truths.

Between Us
Includes Q&A

During Belarus's presidential elections, three actors from a Minsk underground theatre are swept up in street protests that demand free speech and new leadership—until the movement is crushed, they're arrested and the country teeters on the brink of civil war.

Courage

When an elderly, seemingly naïve rural painter, who enjoys singing to himself and dancing with animals, is acclaimed as Ukraine's last true folk artist, his work is exhibited in a major show in Kiev. Can fame or a corporate commission compete with the joy he finds in his land and his art?

Ivan's Land
Includes Q&A

Seeking a fresh start from an abusive husband and increasingly difficult way of life, Ivanna, a young Nenets mother, quits the harsh Russian Arctic tundra and traditions of her nomadic people for the city, where she struggles to gain control of her life and future.

Life of Ivanna
Includes Q&A

When Zdenka in the Czech Republic falls in love online with Tabish in Pakistan, they marry—but five years later, Czech immigration still refuses him entry. With humour and grit, the couple must prove "real love" to a government and themselves.

A Marriage
Includes Q&A

Abandoned after the USSR’s fall, denizens of a once-vibrant fishing village in the Caspian Sea turn to poaching to survive. While some faithfully await Putin’s promises of Russia’s return to greatness, others dream of a more prosperous future beyond the confines of the island’s shores.

Ostrov – Lost Island
Includes Q&A

An intrepid social researcher goes door-to-door in Tbilisi, popping controversial questions on topics such as sexuality, minority rights and nationalism on unsuspecting residents. As surprising conversations are sparked, she weighs out the hopes and fears of her fellow citizens.

Sunny
Includes Q&A

Why dig up 15-storey-tall, hundred-year-old trees in Georgia to replant them in a mysterious private garden on the Black Sea? This fascinating glimpse at a powerful man's staggering whim is simply too strange not to be seen.

Taming the Garden

Science & Technology

If computers could let you live forever, would you? When our minds and memories can be digitized, self-help guru Deepak Chopra and leading robotics engineers envision virtual clones that don't need a body to survive.

Opening Night // A.rtificial I.mmortality
Live Q&A on April 29, 7:30 PM

Exploring the connections between technology, vision and power, this Sundance prize winner offers an illuminating investigation of ever-increasing surveillance technologies, exposing the complexities of objectivity and the biases inherent in both human perception and the camera lens.

All Light, Everywhere
Includes Q&A

With the heroic outsiders and dreamers at Bip Bip Bar cheering him on, Kim Cannon Arm attempts a world record by playing the 80s arcade game Gyruss for 100 hours straight in this quirky comedy about friendship.

Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest
Includes Q&A

A riveting cryptocurrency thriller unravels the story of a Canadian blockchain wizard who mysteriously died on his honeymoon in India and the fate of his investors' $200 million. Did it vanish into the digital void or does it remain locked away in password-protected accounts?

Dead Man's Switch a crypto mystery
Includes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

This timely portrait of 21st century activism follows Commander X, an iconic and divisive figure in the "hacktivist" network who spends his days dodging authorities across North America while surfing the web and surviving the streets.

The Face of Anonymous
Includes Q&A

App developers lured a massive labour force by promising flexible hours with no offices or bosses—but with gig workers from Uber, Amazon, Lyft and more in front of the camera, the human cost of disruption runs deep.

The Gig Is Up
Includes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

When 700 helpful Finnish tourists arrive in Benin to assist in a tropical disease vaccine study that could save the lives of millions of children, a unique cultural exchange reveals how humans can help and harm with the best of intentions.

People We Come Across
Includes Q&A

Offering a fascinating glimpse of a possible future, six people sign up for a year-long NASA experiment that has them living in an isolated habitat meant to simulate what life and society would be like on Mars.

Red Heaven
Includes Q&A

Intimate in scope yet epic in scale, this meditative Sundance Award–winning essay invites us to ponder how our addiction to technology may end up changing the social fabric of humanity forever.

Users

Environmental iconoclast Stewart Brand believes re-engineering woolly mammoth DNA and "de-extinction science" could reverse climate change. Is he an oracle envisioning a brave new world or will his controversial views cement him as eco-pariah?

We Are As Gods
Includes Q&A

Sports & Recreation

Fresh from the village, two new hires at an all-inclusive resort on the Turkish Riviera are confronted with the absurd excesses of tourism. Their eagerness to engage quickly turns to indifference—and eventually self-interest—after one too many guest complaints and foam parties.

All-In
Includes Q&A

Three rebellious working-class teenage girls in Bangladesh escape daily hardships and stifling family lives by riding waves on their surfboards, chasing a fleeting and thrilling sense of freedom.

Bangla Surf Girls
Includes Q&A

With the heroic outsiders and dreamers at Bip Bip Bar cheering him on, Kim Cannon Arm attempts a world record by playing the 80s arcade game Gyruss for 100 hours straight in this quirky comedy about friendship.

Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest
Includes Q&A

Free diver Kiki Bosch takes us on breathtaking journeys into sub-zero waters, from the iceberg fjords of Greenland to the frozen lakes of Finland, pushing the limits of human endurance as she heals from the trauma of sexual assault.

Descent
Includes Q&A

At the elite level, bridge—the world's most popular card game—has become a million-dollar cut-throat business. When the best competitive player is accused of cheating, the ensuing scandal confounds experts, criminal science, celebrities and basic belief in this hilarious true-crime thriller.

Dirty Tricks
Includes Q&A

A diver devotes himself to cleaning up the ocean floors in Newfoundland's harbours, one tire at a time. As he edges closer to financial ruin in his effort to save the planet, his good deeds don't go unnoticed.

Hell or Clean Water
Includes Q&A

Every summer, a peaceful Spanish beach town explodes into a hellscape of budget European holidaymakers. Veering between horror story and fairy tale, tourists and locals navigate the daily tensions of risky behaviour, palpable excitement and genuine pleasure.

Magaluf Ghost Town
Includes Q&A

Alberto Salazar was a coaching legend until his recent doping ban shocked the running world. Did his "Just Do It" attitude and questionable practices push the limits of human performance and technology too far?

Nike's Big Bet
Includes Q&A

From filming Jaws' near-lethal live scenes to saving a great white with her bare hands, underwater filmmaking legend Valerie Taylor faces her biggest challenge yet: fighting to conserve the world's remaining sharks.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Playing with Sharks
Live Q&A on May 2, 7:00 PM

How controversial can one basketball team of eight-year-olds be? With an unorthodox coach and training method, a tight-knit group of empowered Icelandic girls demand to play against boys and call time out on patriarchy.

Raise the Bar

Competitive table setting? Yep, it's a thing, and it's fabulous. Seven cut-throat competitors feverishly prepare their entries for a prestigious county fair, serving up artistry, hilarity and serious frenemy vibes on a silver platter.

Set!
Includes Q&A

When track star Tommie Smith and his teammate raised black-gloved fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics, their defiant gesture would reverberate through generations of civil rights activists. Fifty years on, the full breadth of his impact—and depth of his sacrifice—is revealed as America still reckons with racial injustice.

With Drawn Arms
Includes Q&A

War & Conflict

Caught between failed government promises and an occupation by armed militias, coca growers in Colombia confront displacement and mortal threats as they expose the relentless war in their countryside and shatter illusions of a successful peace process.

Bajo Fuego (Under Siege)
Includes Q&A

This observational doc captures a neighbourhood in Palestine, where courageous young girls influenced by three generations of tumultuous occupation come of age learning how to protect their family's land, rights and values.

Children
Includes Q&A

Recounting his father's dangerous life as an exile in London with a million-dollar bounty on his head, the director questions the cost of his decades-long opposition to Muammar Gaddafi and eventual return to an unrecognizable Libya on the brink of civil war.

The Colonel's Stray Dogs
Includes Q&A

During Belarus's presidential elections, three actors from a Minsk underground theatre are swept up in street protests that demand free speech and new leadership—until the movement is crushed, they're arrested and the country teeters on the brink of civil war.

Courage

When Iranian forces shot down a Ukraine International Airlines passenger flight, Javad lost the love of his life. Now, picking up the pieces in Canada, where they moved only years prior, he shares memories of his late wife Elnaz and rages in the face of a grave injustice.

Dear Elnaz
Includes Q&A

After nearly three years in ISIS captivity, a five-year-old Yazidi boy, abused and profoundly brainwashed, is reunited with his family—but displays only hatred for his mother and the world around him. Can he ever become the sweet child they remember?

Imad's Childhood
Includes Q&A

Fascinating witness accounts and meticulous research investigate the unfathomable relationship between a beautiful Jewish prisoner and an SS officer at Auschwitz. Thirty years later, the truth comes for them both at his 1972 war crimes trial.

Love It Was Not

Misha Defonseca's 1997 Holocaust memoir about escaping the Nazis as a seven-year-old girl on foot across Europe with a pack of wolves took the world by storm. But when Hollywood comes knocking, an even more audacious story and darker deceptions come to light.

Misha and the Wolves

In this lyrical coming-of-age story, two teenage girls take refuge with their mother in a cramped room inside an Aleppo hospital through the war, its aftermath and now a pandemic. But spirited Juli has awakened to its reality as a prison and dreams only of a life beyond.

Neighbouring the Moon

Seeking the truth behind his late mother's two years in FARC-EP captivity, the director and his brother pore over her journals to map out an extraordinarily perilous journey through Colombia's jungles and mountains, retracing her path to confront her captors.

On the Other Side
Includes Q&A

Their relationship forbidden while in ranks of the FARC-EP, two Colombian rebels have a chance at a fresh start for their young love after the peace accords. But new daily demands, estranged families and fears for their safety burden their burgeoning life together.

Rebel Love
Includes Q&A

This provocative doc reveals the deeper stories that drove several women to uproot their lives in the West and join ISIS in Syria. Now, infamous and reviled in the media, they yearn for absolution and the homelands that bar their return.

The Return: Life After ISIS
Includes Q&A

As a child, Oneida sang traditional chants to guide the dead to the realm of souls. Now, after over two decades of brutal conflict along Colombia's Pacific coast, her songs become a plea for peace in this hypnotic tale.

Songs that Flood the River
Includes Q&A

To understand her father's death, director Maria Carolina Telles creates a portrait of the award-winning war photographer André Liohn—a man whose?struggles to survive grief drive him away from his children and into some of the world's most notorious conflict zones.

You Are Not a Soldier
Includes Q&A

Women & Women's Stories

In the US Midwest, plagued with opioid abuse and rising incarceration rates for women, three unforgettable mothers return home from prison to rebuild their lives after years of separation from their children.

Apart
Includes Q&A

The impacts of transracial Indigenous adoption are revealed in the moving story of a young Indigenous mother seeking connection with her Lummi community, heritage and biological mother, who, as a child, was also an adoptee.

Daughter of a Lost Bird
Includes Q&A

Fighting for social justice in Chile, democracy in Hong Kong and the environment in Uganda, three young women cope with the staggering personal impact of frontline activism, weighing their own fear of failure and the price of resistance in pursuit of change.

Dear Future Children
Includes Q&A

Free diver Kiki Bosch takes us on breathtaking journeys into sub-zero waters, from the iceberg fjords of Greenland to the frozen lakes of Finland, pushing the limits of human endurance as she heals from the trauma of sexual assault.

Descent
Includes Q&A

After leaving an abusive husband, Sonya returns to Newfoundland's stunning but remote Fogo Island with her two sons, determined to raise them to be good men in the only place she knows how, despite having fled from it years before.

Dropstones
Includes Q&A

As rates of femicide and domestic abuse soar in Turkey and democratic rights for women are increasingly eroded, a lawyer and her clients bravely risk everything for their freedom by standing up to the government and putting violent men behind bars.

Dying to Divorce
Includes Q&A

Ferocious female rockers Fanny shattered glass ceilings in the '70s, collecting fans like David Bowie before being buried in retro record bins. Fifty years later, they reunite with a new record deal and a chance to rewrite history.

FANNY: The Right to Rock
Includes Q&A

Once accused and imprisoned for aggravated homicide for having a late-term miscarriage, Teodora Vásquez has become the spokesperson for all such victims of El Salvador's cruel anti-abortion laws, and a symbol of empowerment, resistance and solidarity.

Fly So Far

Four female survivors of the 2011 terror attack in Utøya, Norway, remain true to the social democratic values for which they were targeted, transforming their trauma into strength in their fight for inclusivity and against rising right-wing extremism in parliament.

Generation Utøya
Includes Q&A

Hysterical is a backstage pass into the lives of the hilarious, boundary-breaking women shattering stand-up comedy's glass ceiling. Featuring Margaret Cho, Fortune Feimster, Marina Franklin, Nikki Glaser, Jessica Kirson, Iliza Shlesinger, Sherri Shepherd and more. Premiering on FX Canada this summer.

Hysterical
Includes Q&A

After 25 years of hard partying and insane choices, Australia's "Queen of Honky Tonk" has burned every bridge in the business. Can she keep it together to record with a Nashville legend or will she crash her sad country song of a life for good?

I'm Wanita
Includes Q&A

In this powerful story stretching over five decades, the former "First Lady" of the Savage Skulls gang emerges as a healer and matriarch, fiercely leading her South Bronx community through the perils of gentrification and gun violence.

La Madrina: The Savage Life of Lorine Padilla
Includes Q&A

From a Latinx LGBTQ activist to a Black Catholic school principal, six small businesswomen hit California's newly legal cannabis trade. But as aggressive regulations bogart the market, can they each keep their green American dream alight?

Lady Buds
Includes Q&A

Seeking a fresh start from an abusive husband and increasingly difficult way of life, Ivanna, a young Nenets mother, quits the harsh Russian Arctic tundra and traditions of her nomadic people for the city, where she struggles to gain control of her life and future.

Life of Ivanna
Includes Q&A

Recently retired European women flock to Luxor, Egypt, in search of sun, sand and love from local men interested in money and security, in a modern love story that blurs the boundaries between romantic and business affairs.

My Mohamed Is Different
Includes Q&A

In this lyrical coming-of-age story, two teenage girls take refuge with their mother in a cramped room inside an Aleppo hospital through the war, its aftermath and now a pandemic. But spirited Juli has awakened to its reality as a prison and dreams only of a life beyond.

Neighbouring the Moon

Four young directors—Indigenous Shipibo filmmakers living in Lima, Peru, and Syrian filmmakers living as refugees in Jordan—share sisterhood, daily survival, displacement and first motherhood through their video letters.

Only the Ocean Between Us
Includes Q&A

From filming Jaws' near-lethal live scenes to saving a great white with her bare hands, underwater filmmaking legend Valerie Taylor faces her biggest challenge yet: fighting to conserve the world's remaining sharks.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Playing with Sharks
Live Q&A on May 2, 7:00 PM

The death of Anglo-Somali punk icon and X-Ray Spex frontwoman Poly Styrene sends her daughter on a journey across the world and through her mother's archives to reconcile their fraught relationship and her place in music history as a key architect of the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements.

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
Includes Q&A

A group of pioneering nuns in 1960s Los Angeles stood up to the patriarchy in such revolutionary ways, demanding pay cheques, marching on Selma and making political pop art, they would change Catholicism and the face of faith forever.

Rebel Hearts
Includes Q&A

This provocative doc reveals the deeper stories that drove several women to uproot their lives in the West and join ISIS in Syria. Now, infamous and reviled in the media, they yearn for absolution and the homelands that bar their return.

The Return: Life After ISIS
Includes Q&A

Migrant domestic workers from Africa and Southeast Asia hired under the Kafala system are targeted and exploited with broad impunity by employers and agents in Lebanon, in this chilling consideration of modern-day slavery.

Room Without a View
Includes Q&A

A bullet to the neck, fatwas and 24-hour police protection are just part of being one of Europe's first female imams. When Seyran Ates opens Germany's first liberal mosque, radical change meets modern Islam.

Seyran Ates: Sex, Revolution and Islam
Includes Q&A

When healer and human rights activist María de Jesús Patricio becomes the first Indigenous woman to run for president in Mexico, her revolutionary platform advocating unity and a new approach to progress becomes mired in structural racism.

The Spokeswoman
Includes Q&A

A much-needed deconstruction of race and the power of beauty, this thought-provoking doc lifts up the experiences of Black women in a moment when beauty standards are undergoing a cultural shift towards embracing Black aesthetics and features.

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Subjects of Desire
Live Q&A on May 6, 7pm ET

Working multiple jobs, desperate to make ends meet for their families, two New York mothers drop off their children at a 24-hour daycare centre run by a woman that binds the neighbourhood together.

Through the Night

When Vicenta discovers her young, disabled daughter is pregnant as a result of rape, she overcomes overwhelming odds to wage the battle of her life, despite illiteracy and extreme poverty: a flashpoint case against Argentina's restrictive abortion laws that reaches the UN.

Vicenta
Includes Q&A

In 2016, India's only newspaper run by Dalit women, the lowest social caste, goes digital. Armed with smartphones and sheer courage, these journalists rewrite the rules at work and at home of what it means to be powerful in Mother India.

Writing with Fire
Includes Q&A

Blending documentary with fiction and poetry, a young female guard in an overcrowded Madagascar prison daydreams of her father, a murderer who abandoned her as a child. But when a new inmate brings news of him, her daydreams turn to nightmares.

Zaho Zay
Includes Q&A

Other

A selection of short documentaries from our Artscapes program that explore creative minds, artistic pursuits and inventive filmmaking.

Artscapes Shorts Program

A mix of stories meditating on death, tradition and community care show us the countless ways we continue to survive, thrive and find joy in everyday acts of self-affirmation.

Canadian Spectrum Shorts: Bodies Release

Reflecting on the inherent wisdom of our bodies, our families and our environment, these stories reveal how moments of profound growth happen when we honour the people and places that existed before us.

Canadian Spectrum Shorts: Stories of Growth and Learning

On Friday, May 7, we presented 11 awards and $67,000 to Canadian and international filmmakers at our annual awards presentation.

Hot Docs 2021 Awards Presentation

A selection of short films from our Markers program that push the boundaries of the documentary form.

Markers Shorts Program

Women’s work has always been ignored, underpaid and taken for granted. Domestic workers, farmers, artists, hairdressers, reindeer herders and strippers remind us that their labour is essential and that as taxpayers, voters and bosses, appreciation of their efforts may come by force.

Persister Shorts Program 1: Workforce

From our Persister program, this selection of short documentaries features stories of women speaking up and being heard.

Persister Shorts 2

Join us for an incredible conversation between filmmakers from this year’s Persister film program and Oxfam Canada who operate as part of a global organization working to end the injustice of poverty and inequality, with a focus on women's rights.

Persisters: Women Speaking Up and Being Heard
Streaming May 1 at 7:00 PM

On the Festival’s final night, join us to celebrate our Canadian filmmakers and to announce the winners of this year’s Rogers Audience Award for the best Canadian documentaries. The top five films, as determined by audience poll, will split the $50,000 cash prize, courtesy of the Rogers Group of Funds.

Rogers Audience Award Announcement
Livestreaming May 9 at 7pm ET

From our Systems Down program, this is a selection of short documentaries about challenging the status quo.

Systems Down Shorts Program

A selection of short films that spy, surveil and see things most miss. Whether it's a song on social media, a wolf caught on CCTV or an organism dancing under a microscope, the truth only expands with magnification.

World Showcase Shorts: Look Don't Touch

Kids learn life lessons on the playground and in the classroom, through their friends and first-time experiences, in this quartet of cinematic initiations. Love and acceptance, remote learning and leaving the nest are all firsts that shape who we become and how we see the world.

World Showcase Shorts: The School of Life

Opening Night // A.rtificial I.mmortalityLive Q&A on April 29, 7:30 PM

Citizen Minutes

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // MauLive Q&A on May 5, 7pm ET

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Playing with SharksLive Q&A on May 2, 7:00 PM

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame StreetLive Q&A on April 30, 7pm ET

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Subjects of DesireLive Q&A on May 6, 7pm ET

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion UnicornLive Q&A on May 4, 7pm ET

Bank JobIncludes Q&A

Citizen Minutes

Dear Future ChildrenIncludes Q&A

Eatnameamet – Our Silent StruggleIncludes Q&A

The Face of AnonymousIncludes Q&A

FacelessIncludes Q&A

Generation UtøyaIncludes Q&A

Rebel HeartsIncludes Q&A

Someone Like MeIncludes Q&A

The Story Won't DieIncludes extended Q&A

Welcome to SpainIncludes Q&A

Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in AmericaIncludes Q&A

With Drawn ArmsIncludes Q&A

You Are the Days to ComeIncludes Q&A

Any Given DayIncludes Q&A

ApartIncludes Q&A

Cannon Arm and the Arcade QuestIncludes Q&A

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & ConspiracySpecial Screening! Includes Q&A

DescentIncludes Q&A

Imad's ChildhoodIncludes Q&A

Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of EmpathyIncludes Q&A

Lost BoysIncludes Q&A

The Most Beautiful Boy in the WorldIncludes Q&A

Ostrov – Lost IslandIncludes Q&A

Poly Styrene: I Am a ClichéIncludes Q&A

The SailorIncludes Q&A

The Colonel's Stray DogsIncludes Q&A

Faya DayiIncludes Q&A

Just a MovementIncludes Q&A

The Last ShelterIncludes Q&A

People We Come AcrossIncludes Q&A

Poly Styrene: I Am a ClichéIncludes Q&A

Rift FinfinneeIncludes Q&A

School of HopeIncludes Q&A

Someone Like MeIncludes Q&A

Zaho ZayIncludes Q&A

Opening Night // A.rtificial I.mmortalityLive Q&A on April 29, 7:30 PM

Come Back AnytimeIncludes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

The Death of My Two FathersIncludes Q&A

High Maintenance

It Is Not Over YetIncludes Q&A

Ivan's LandIncludes Q&A

The Man Who Paints Water DropsIncludes Q&A

Molecules

No Hay Camino – There Is No Path

The SailorIncludes Q&A

Still MaxIncludes Q&A

The Taste of DesireIncludes Q&A

Users

All Light, EverywhereIncludes Q&A

Any Given DayIncludes Q&A

The Big Scary "S" WordIncludes Q&A

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & ConspiracySpecial Screening! Includes Q&A

FANNY: The Right to RockIncludes Q&A

Fruits of LaborIncludes Q&A

Gaucho AmericanoIncludes Q&A

HomeroomIncludes Q&A

La Madrina: The Savage Life of Lorine PadillaIncludes Q&A

Lady BudsIncludes Q&A

Man in the Field: The Life and Art of Jim DenevanIncludes Q&A

A Once and Future PeaceIncludes Q&A

Philly D.A.

Through the Night

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion UnicornLive Q&A on May 4, 7pm ET

Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in AmericaIncludes Q&A

With Drawn ArmsIncludes Q&A

Bank JobIncludes Q&A

CezanneIncludes Q&A

Citizen Minutes

High Maintenance

Ivan's LandIncludes Q&A

Man in the Field: The Life and Art of Jim DenevanIncludes Q&A

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // MauLive Q&A on May 5, 7pm ET

Opening Night // A.rtificial I.mmortality
Live Q&A on April 29, 7:30 PM

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Mau
Live Q&A on May 5, 7pm ET

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Playing with Sharks
Live Q&A on May 2, 7:00 PM

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
Live Q&A on April 30, 7pm ET

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Subjects of Desire
Live Q&A on May 6, 7pm ET

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
Live Q&A on May 4, 7pm ET

Bank Job
Includes Q&A

Dear Future Children
Includes Q&A

Eatnameamet – Our Silent Struggle
Includes Q&A

The Face of Anonymous
Includes Q&A

Faceless
Includes Q&A

Generation Utøya
Includes Q&A

Rebel Hearts
Includes Q&A

Someone Like Me
Includes Q&A

The Story Won't Die
Includes extended Q&A

Welcome to Spain
Includes Q&A

Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
Includes Q&A

With Drawn Arms
Includes Q&A

You Are the Days to Come
Includes Q&A

Any Given Day
Includes Q&A

Apart
Includes Q&A

Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest
Includes Q&A

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
Special Screening! Includes Q&A

Descent
Includes Q&A

Imad's Childhood
Includes Q&A

Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy
Includes Q&A

Lost Boys
Includes Q&A

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
Includes Q&A

Ostrov – Lost Island
Includes Q&A

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
Includes Q&A

The Sailor
Includes Q&A

The Colonel's Stray Dogs
Includes Q&A

Faya Dayi
Includes Q&A

Just a Movement
Includes Q&A

The Last Shelter
Includes Q&A

People We Come Across
Includes Q&A

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
Includes Q&A

Rift Finfinnee
Includes Q&A

School of Hope
Includes Q&A

Someone Like Me
Includes Q&A

Zaho Zay
Includes Q&A

Opening Night // A.rtificial I.mmortality
Live Q&A on April 29, 7:30 PM

Come Back Anytime
Includes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

The Death of My Two Fathers
Includes Q&A

It Is Not Over Yet
Includes Q&A

Ivan's Land
Includes Q&A

The Man Who Paints Water Drops
Includes Q&A

The Sailor
Includes Q&A

Still Max
Includes Q&A

The Taste of Desire
Includes Q&A

All Light, Everywhere
Includes Q&A

Any Given Day
Includes Q&A

The Big Scary "S" Word
Includes Q&A

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
Special Screening! Includes Q&A

FANNY: The Right to Rock
Includes Q&A

Fruits of Labor
Includes Q&A

Gaucho Americano
Includes Q&A

Homeroom
Includes Q&A

La Madrina: The Savage Life of Lorine Padilla
Includes Q&A

Lady Buds
Includes Q&A

Man in the Field: The Life and Art of Jim Denevan
Includes Q&A

A Once and Future Peace
Includes Q&A

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
Live Q&A on May 4, 7pm ET

Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
Includes Q&A

With Drawn Arms
Includes Q&A

Bank Job
Includes Q&A

Cezanne
Includes Q&A

Ivan's Land
Includes Q&A

Man in the Field: The Life and Art of Jim Denevan
Includes Q&A

Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management // Mau
Live Q&A on May 5, 7pm ET

Portrayal
Includes Q&A

Set!
Includes Q&A

Still Max
Includes Q&A

You Are the Days to Come
Includes Q&A

Bangla Surf Girls
Includes Q&A

The Caviar Connection
Includes Q&A

Come Back Anytime
Includes Q&A + Curious Minds discussion

Faceless
Includes Q&A

In the Same Breath
Includes Q&A

Just a Movement
Includes Q&A