Eight titles mark the first selections announced for this year’s Hot Docs. Toronto’s big documentary festival will include the world premiere of The Nest from directors Chase Joynt and Julietta Singh. The doc headlines the selections announced today for Hot Docs’ Special Presentations programme.
The Nest examines layers of history housed within Singh’s childhood home, which her aging mother ran for many years as a bed and breakfast. Singh’s intersects her exploration of her family’s memories with Métis history, Deaf history, and Japanese-Canadian history as she considers the paths that walked through the house’s halls before her. The Nest marks Singh’s feature directorial debut and draws upon Joynt’s considerations of recorded history in docs like Framing Agnes and No Ordinary Man. The NFB doc is produced by Alicia Smith and Justine Pimlott.
Also screening at Hot Docs on the Canadian front is Saints and Warriors, about the All Native Basketball Tournament and the younger generation of athletes confronting what it means to play for the home team. The doc directed by Patrick Shannon and produced by Michael Grand comes to the festival fresh off a premiere at Big Sky,
Hot Docs will also screen several acclaimed films from Sundance. The Special Presentations titles include Coexistence, My Ass!, directed and produced by Amber Fares and produced by Rachel Leah Jones and Valérie Montmartin. The film follows comic Noam Shuster Eliassi as she confronts Palestinian-Israeli relations through her unapologetic political humour. Coexistence, My Ass! won a special prize for freedom of expression at Sundance.
Also coming to town with a special Sundance prize in hand is Life After, directed by Reid Davenport and produced by Colleen Cassingham. The provocative film should spark lots of conversation with the Toronto crowd as Davenport considers the case of Elizabeth Bouvia, who made headlines in 1983 by advocating for the right to die. As Davenport and Cassingham look for clues about what happened to Bouvia following her unsuccessful campaign, his search leads to several cases, including the controversial developments for Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada.
Meanwhile, the festival will screen two films with distinct portraits of Deaf advocates and the fight for disability rights in Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore and Deaf President Now!. The former offers a biography of the Oscar winning star of Children of a Lesser God and CODA and her fight for accessibility in media. The latter tells the story of Deaf students at Gallaudet University who rose up and said that the student body would no longer be represented by a Deaf president. Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore is directed by Shoshannah Stern and produced by Robyn Kopp, Justine Nagan, Bonni Cohen, and Stern. Deaf President Now! comes from directors Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim, who produced the film with Amanda Rohlke, Jonathan King, and Michael Harte.
Finally, Hot Docs brings back two more filmmakers familiar to the festival. After scoring an Oscar nomination for 2019’s The Edge of Democracy, Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa returns to Hot Docs with the Netflix doc Apocalypse in the Tropics, another snapshot of contemporary politics in her country as she turns her lens to televangelist Silas Malafaia and the connections between religious fundamentalism and the far-right movement. Meanwhile, after the intense On the President’s Orders, director/producer James Jones comes back to Toronto with Antidote. His latest work considers what it takes to end up on Putin’s black list and considers perspectives of journalists and activists speaking the truth at great risk. The docs premiered at the 2024 Venice and Tribeca Film Festivals, respectively, and will have their Canadian debuts at Hot Docs.
Additional titles for Hot Docs will be announced leading up to the festival’s main press conference on March 25. This year’s festival runs April 24 to May 4.
