Hot Docs ended its 2025 festival on a high note. This did not feel like a festival that faced an uncertain future exactly one year ago. The 2025 event defined itself with optimism and energy. Full screenings, engaged audiences, and an overall positive vibe marked a confident riposte to last year’s mix of chaos of awkwardness.
Sure, Hot Docs didn’t shy away from acknowledging that it was a do-or-die year for the festival, but it generally did so by reminding its people of its role in the community. This included an in-theatre trailer that featured numerous recognizable figures from the Toronto film scene, and Mayor Olivia Chow scarfing down popcorn, as they enjoyed the collective experience of watching a movie at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. It was cheesily effective. Scaling down this year’s festival helped make each screening a communal event. There’s no reason why 2025 shouldn’t give Hot Docs the right momentum for a full comeback.
Highlights
Highlights at the festival again included the jam-packed Big Ideas series with Oscar winner Marlee Matlin arguably providing the headliner event on Sunday night. In a discussion moderated by The Globe and Mail’s Johanna Schneller, Matlin and Not Alone Anymore director Shoshannah Stern delivered an engaging post-screening conversation about the actor’s legacy and her fight for accessibility. Moreover, the live event was pulled off with multiple American Sign Language interpreters in the audience and on the stage, who delivered a rapid-fire conversation without a hitch.
Similarly, a virtual Q&A with Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim and co-director Nyle DiMarco following Deaf President Now! marked another example in which Hot Docs celebrated two documentaries breaking ground for accessible filmmaking. Both screenings gave the sense that a festival does far more than screen movies. Hot Docs expanded the experience for everyone in the audience and used the in-theatre event to involve attendees in the stories they just witnessed.
Come See Me (Again) in the Good Light
In terms of the films, Hot Docs was especially great as an opportunity for the Canadian audience to catch some much buzzed-about Sundance documentaries. Or, in my case, see them again. My pick for Best of the Festival was, again, Come See Me in the Good Light, Ryan White’s life-affirming portrait of poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley as they hold strong in the wake of the former’s terminal cancer diagnosis.
The doc was my favourite during Sundance for its cathartic tribute to life and love, but seeing the film with a full house at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema raised it to another level. I didn’t quite appreciate how funny it was while watching it at home alone on a screener back in January. But seeing in a room enveloped by warmth and laughter, Come See Me in the Good Light delivered a much different and far more refreshing release—high praise for a film that was already my pick for the best of the year so far. I was thrilled to see that the Hot Docs audience agreed, giving it the Hot Docs Audience Award as the top film of the festival.
Made in Exile
Other highlights on the international front included Hot Docs’ Made in Exile programme. The spin on the festival’s annual national spotlight turned its lens to stories of displacement. The existence of this programme made good on one niggling criticism from previous years: that Hot Docs showed political films, but didn’t really do politics. This year, in partnering with PEN Canada, screenings in the Made in Exile series featured a vacant seat dedicated to a journalist facing persecution. Moreover, the films, including Yalla Parkour, Writing Hawa, and Khartoum more overtly involved audiences with the ever-present migration crisis and the realities that filmmakers face in bringing these stories to screen, often risking their own personal security to tell the tales.
That series also included a standout world premiere at Hot Docs: The Longer You Bleed by Ewan Waddell. The doc offered a harrowing account of the war in Ukraine, told from the perspective of refugee and producer (and now Waddell’s partner), Liubov Dyvak. The film considered the role of social media in connecting displaced persons to tragedies back home, on one hand keeping them abreast with news from their communities, but trapping them into an endless cycle of traumatic doomscrolling on the other. While many docs about Ukraine have inevitably skewed towards reportage in breaking a story of history in the making, The Longer You Bleed offered a more thoughtfully considered take on the complexities of telling these stories and distributing images of wartime in real time.
International Highlights
A fine bit of reportage also came in Unwelcomed, Amilcar Infante and Sebastian Gonzalez Mendez’s provocative observation of Venezuelan migrants caught in limbo in Chile. This snapshot of the global migration crisis felt very much a conversation piece in the festival, aligning with themes and topics discussed in fellow selections like Casas Muertas and Spare My Bones, Coyote!. It put human perspectives of a tragedy often reduced to figures and statistics when its reported at all, capturing the heartache and desperation of people on one side of the divide and the fury and frustration of citizen on the other.
Other international highlights included Rashad Newsome and Johnny Symons’ Assembly, an audacious celebration of queer Black experiences, and Sammy Baloji’s The Tree of Authenticity, a visually stunning essay film that brought audiences to the depths of the Congolese forest for a stirring environmental parable—partly narrated by a tree. Equally evocative on the environmental front was Sasha Wortzel’s lyrical and thoughtful exploration of the complex ecosystem of the Florida Everglades in River of Grass. Meanwhile, Petra Costa knocked it out of the park with her follow up to her Oscar-nominated The Edge of Democracy with Apocalypse in the Tropics. The doc about Brazil’s rightward spiral hit just the right note the morning after the federal election. Another Oscar nomination may be incoming.
A Great Year for Canadian Docs
This year, however, Hot Docs was really all about the Canadian films. Perhaps that helped give the festival its community vibe, as filmmakers who found their footing through Hot Docs were on hand to share with audiences why the festival matters. That was evident in the festival’s opening night choice, Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance, an upbeat and engaging tribute to queer activism and voices who pushed for change. The doc marked a strong year for NFB docs at the festival with highlights including Sinakson Trevor Solway’s Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man, a handsomely shot consideration of masculinity, and Virginia Tangvald’s Ghosts of the Sea, a strikingly cinematic study of familial loss in turbulent waters.
The Canadian Spectrum competition, which included the latter two titles above, arguably delivered the best batting average for the festival. Its big winner, Agatha’s Almanac, proved an artistic triumph for director Amalie Atkins. Her loving portrait of her quirky 90-year-old aunt Agatha was arguably the hidden gem of the festival—a bright, effervescent slice of filmmaking that reflected its protagonist’s joyous and colourful spirit. At the other end of the spectrum, Matt Gallagher’s Shamed was anything but joyous and colourful, but a top-tier character study of an appropriately bleak order. In probing the actions and complex psychology of online vigilante Jason Nassr, Shamed expanded beyond its sicko subject to consider the impact of the social media mob and the role of media literacy in the age of viral videos. It’s a provocative work that showed audiences (and Nassr) what good journalism is all about.
So too was Damien Eagle Bear’s #skoden, a consideration of the life behind the meme that stormed the internet with the image of an elderly Indigenous man putting up his dukes. The film thoughtfully and humorously considered the genesis of the viral sensation as various talking heads reflected upon #skoden offering a rallying cry for Indigenous people fighting the good fight. But Eagle Bear’s doc defined itself with a sobering turn as it considered the untold story that put the man in that situation in the first place, tying together a complicated study about the legacy of violence caused by residential schools and the inadequacy of social programs that should treat and aid vulnerable people. Like Shamed, it provided a compelling case study about media literacy and critical engagement.
On a different side of the documentary spectrum, however, was Denis Côté’s Paul. This offbeat study observed a Montrealer who overcame anxiety by cleaning the houses of dominant women. The peculiar tale looked at Paul’s kink without judgment. Moreover, it worked thanks to the tangible authorial voice behind the tale as it reflected Côté’s own idiosyncratic style. Similarly, Endless Cookie, which won the Rogers Audience Award for top Canadian doc, invited festivalgoers to embrace the strange with its animated yarn about brothers Seth Scriver and Peter Scriver as the former tried to make a movie by gathering the latter’s many stories. It marked one of the most original works at the festival, but also the funniest—and a refreshing reminder of the role that humour can play in elevating and opening up a story. Or, rather, series of stories told with fits, starts, and loose ends.
Finally, two titles in the Canadian Spectrum asserted themselves with awesome feats of scale: Shifting Baselines by Julien Elie and The Track by Ryan Sidhoo. The former whisked audiences to Texas town where Elon Musk’s gambit in the space wars devastated the local landscape and ecosystem. It boasted an epic feat of observational filmmaking, imposing the grandeur of Musk’s operation to illustrate the corresponding threat to the Earth and humanity with such an operatically misguided endeavour. Bleak yet funny, the thoughtful doc inspired a sense of awe with a cause.
Similarly, The Track proved in the age of streaming that good docs demand the big screen experience. This portrait of luge athletes in Sarajevo followed Olympic hopefuls Mirza Nikolajev, Zlatan Jakić, and Hamza Pleho, along with their coach Sedan Omanović. It delivered one of the sure-fire crowd pleasers of the festival. As the athletes trained on the titular track that was a source of national pride during the 1984 Winter Games, the film’s exhilarating cinematography captured the rush of the sport and the complexity of training on the crumbling and pine cone laden raceway. But the real power of the film came in the hopeful spirit of its stars, particularly Nikolajev, who was on hand at the festival.
The Track offered a triumphant underdog story for Hot Docs. It was fitting reminder that nobody should ever be counted out. With the right discipline and determination, anyone can come back swinging.
