It might be an unseasonably cool spring, but Toronto aims to warm audiences with another round of Hot Docs. The documentary festival kicks off Thursday and while this year’s event looks a little different compared to recent years, one sees a festival getting back to its core roots. For example, whereas some years opened with docs about international stars or stories, Hot Docs 2026 begins by saluting hometown hero Carole Pope with Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions.
“We’re so excited about Antidiva,” says festival lead programmer, Gabor Pertic. “Filmmaker Michelle Mama is awesome. Carole Pope will be there for the opening screening. The film has ties to the El Mocambo [where the opening night party will be], so it’s a very Toronto film, and that’s what we wanted to showcase.”
Local ties aside, Antidiva reflects a line-up in which anyone from any corner of Toronto’s diverse population can see their stories reflected. There might not be as many marquee names on either side of the camera (although Hot Docs has some of those with rocker Kenny Loggins, journalist Amy Goodman, and filmmakers like Sara Dosa, Kim Nguyen, and Barry Avrich on the schedule). However, Hot Docs 2026 promises a year of discovery. Audiences can find celebrity bios and true crime tales on the streamers instead.
For Pertic, who stepped into the lead programmer role in August 2025, he hopes his first year at the helm carries the same energy he’s been bringing to the festival since joining the team in 2009. “I was helping out with intro and Q&As in the programming team, but also doing submissions and literally picking up DVDs in the mail,” he remembers. “I would have to bring them up to our office and then get excited to watch them later that night. And in the many years that have passed, the fact that I get to be here and be in this position is so exciting.”
Pertic says it wasn’t easy to pick this year’s line-up of 115 films from the pool of 2800 submissions that Hot Docs received. Back in 2023, the festival screened 214 docs from 2848 submissions, so the number of selections remains roughly half of what Hot Docs offered in recent years, although the number of options holds steady.
Pertic admits that the bar is higher, but Hot Docs diligently considers how to balance higher-level premieres with local debuts of festival circuit favourites. “It has been a very lengthy conversation over the last few months about all of those things,” says Pertic. “Obviously in our [International Spectrum] Competition program, we have to do world and international premieres because it is Oscar-qualifying. But in terms of the overall program, we want to show as many works that we could from different countries, different regions, different genres, as best that we could. It was a very lengthy process to try and condense that down, but we hopefully did a good job.”
Highlights from the festival circuit include the acclaimed migration saga A Fox Under a Pink Moon, directed by Mehrdad Oskouei and Soraya Akhalaghi. The film, which Pertic calls “really beautiful,” features footage shot entirely by Akhalaghi as the young Afghan artist attempts to flee Iran for Austria. The doc won two prizes at Full Frame over the weekend including the Grand Jury Prize after premiering to strong word at IDFA last fall. Also winning at Full Frame was Sundance favourite American Doctor, Poh Si Teng’s portrait of aid workers contributing to the humanitarian effort in Gaza.
This year’s line-up seems to wear its politics on its sleeves more overtly than the Hot Docs that “doesn’t do politics” of previous years. Numerous films at the festival hope to engage audiences with the migration crisis, life in Palestine, LGBTQ+ rights, the war in Syria, environmental concerns, and other headline-making topics.
“Inherently, the way that we deal with documentary is going to be political, of course,” explains Pertic. “What I love about working in documentary is there’s the programmers, there’s the critics, there’s also the filmmakers who are going to stand on stage and talk to our audiences, and they’re ready. I love those conversations, and these filmmakers are ready to talk. We weren’t necessarily making some agenda. It’s just that this is what’s happening in the world, so let’s have a conversation about it.”
Meanwhile, Pertic says that Hot Docs delivers a crowd-pleaser in It’s Dorothy! Jeffrey McHale’s joyous exploration of The Wizard of Oz through the eyes of many performers who’ve wandered down the Yellow Brick Road. The doc evolves into a deeper study of onscreen representation and Hollywood’s dream factory. “It’s definitely one film that our audiences are going to really like,” says Pertic. Meanwhile, Sundance award winners Birds of War and To Hold a Mountain also deliver sure-fire hits with their stories of star-crossed lovers in wartime and a family defending its homeland, respectively. Even the crowd-pleasers punch with some weight.
When it comes to world premieres, Pertic says The Tower that Built a City, directed by Mark Myers, will do Toronto proud. “It’s 50 years of the CN Tower, people are very excited, and it’s a great Toronto film,” says Pertic. “It’s such a hometown story.”
Pertic also taps Vegapolis, about young friends hanging out and confronting the future in a skating rink, as a world premiere to watch. “It has such coming of age appeal,” says Pertic. He also cites Love Apptually, about dating in the digital age, as a highlight in the Big Ideas series offering extended post-screening Q&As. “The filmmaker, Shalini Kantayya, has been part of Hot Docs, but not in person till this year because she had her films in the pandemic era,” notes Pertic. Kantayya’s Coded Bias screened as part of the 2020 all-virtual festival and her follow-up TikTok Boom played as part of the 2022 hybrid festival. The all-in-person debut of her new doc reminds audiences of the value-add of human connection in the virtual age.
In addition to appearing in the Big Ideas series, Love Apptually screens as part of Digital Witnesses, Hot Docs’ thematic programming stream this year. That thread of the line-up highlights stories about technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and the impact of the algorithm on human rights in docs like Sidney Fussell and Jennifer Holness’s #WhileBlack and Kenya-Jade Pinto’s The Sandbox. (Read about both films in our new issue.)
“Obviously, we have such a trend of AI, of social media, we got so many film submissions about this stuff,” explains Pertic. “Putting together Digital Witnesses was something that, even though we only have a few films in the program, we could have had a hundred films about this topic. Focusing on the films that we are showcasing was a conversation that we had with the programmers about how this is what people are talking about. Given everything that’s happening within the world, this is one of the top conversations.”
Besides a flood of stories about technology and AI, Pertic says that an uptick in Brazilian submissions made the Latin American nation an ideal spotlight country for this year’s Made In programme with Hot Docs’ new international programmer Carmen Thompson going down south to survey the scene. Made in Brazil features four features, including the world premiere of Solar Shadow, directed by Hugo Haddad and Isadora Canela, an Indigenous film about astronomy and poetic aspects of human nature written in the stars.
For audiences who want to explore docs that test the boundaries of non-fiction, they can embrace the strange with Better Go Mad in the Wild, Miro Remo’s film about twin brothers on a farm in a story narrated by their cow. “That’s the most experimental film, but something that people definitely should see. It will look great on the big screen and will be a conversation starter,” says Pertic. “It’s very strange. It’s very lovely, and I’m really happy that it’s part of the festival.”
A documentary with a talking cow might be an obvious example for why a festival like Hot Docs matters in 2026. Fewer documentaries screen in local theatres, while the streamers increasingly play conservative with predictable hits, so the festival remains a key forum for non-fiction.
“People are happy to sit and watch a streaming service showing films. Here we get to present films that you might not see on those streaming sites and filmmakers are coming from all around the world,” says Pertic. “We’re still working away on our intro and Q&A schedule of who gets to come. It’s an experience. It’s something that you get to sit back and potentially ask a question or just enjoy the embrace of the community of what Hot Docs is. What we have been trying to build back here this year is that community.”
