Hot Docs’ 2025 Industry Conference had a distinctively nostalgic vibe. Owing to the festival’s hard-fought rise from near ashes, proceedings were considerably and understandably scaled back this year – the most notable sign of which was the absence of the Industry Pitch Forum.
Like Hot Docs of decades ago, the three-day event was staged at a modest hotel conference centre, this time the Yorkville Sonesta, replete with spontaneous side hallway chats, and corner meet ups next to conference rooms and coffee tables—crowded but warm. And it had something for everyone – from works-in-progress screenings (nearby at U of T), to “Deal Maker” sessions, to brief “Hot Takes” and “Close Up” chats with gatekeepers, to larger themed panels. And like HD of the late ’90s, some sessions chewed on old chestnuts (“truth” and “bias” debates), and new ones, like threading the ethical needle on AI.
The gatherings were friendly, intimate, and it felt very much like a buzzing community that knows all too well the big bad authoritarian polarized world is nevertheless out there pressing in. Leaving one session, producer Andrew Munger (Play It Loud!) told me “à la minute” news that President #47 had just ‘fired’ the entire board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—this as he was entering a “close up” session with PBS’s Nina Chandry. The broadcaster has reserves but they face being gutted amid the terrorizing of any arts or media or human category of existence that doesn’t privilege or centre #47. Canada’s all too slim market of documentary funds looks like a rich spring in comparison. Yes, it is that bad; indeed, I heard one too many horror stories to comprehend from American filmmakers who have recently lost committed grants and funding (from the National Endowment for the Arts, or NEA, for instance). Will some come to Canada? They’d like to!
Meanwhile, filmmakers like Canada’s Jen Markowitz has just landed the other way, in LA, but back at Hot Docs to lead a Hot Take session on “Getting Real after Reality TV.” This, too, at first blush reminded me of an industry panel Hot Docs convened some 25 years ago, when doc series, doc soaps and the early glimmers of reality TV were getting commissioned from documentary filmmakers and producers, with everyone giddy and nervous about whether their doc values and ethics would take a hit in the face of more sausage factory production, strict story formats, and budgets. Spoiler alert: It does.
Before taking a bow at TIFF in 2023 with their debut feature — the warm and heartfelt Summer Qamp (about a group of queer teens at their own camp), Markowitz had been in the salt mines of television, directing and producing competition reality like Canada’s Drag Race, Big Brother, makeover shows, and fun queer content, like My Fabulous Gay Wedding. They shared in the session that they realized two things from which they sought some liberation: the anvil of money and speed, which rules the industrial form of reality series. Not much of the former, but you’d better get the latter in terms of story (even if you have to massage it out of participants!) and fast. Still, they wished for greater collaboration with participants, and with their first feature, they got it. The terror and excitement of the doc form, its vérité format and the need to let participants take the lead, meant leaving behind the internalized demand to produce story beats fast and on a dime.
It’s refreshing to learn twenty years after some of us began to walk this dual path of plying our trade in television series while leveraging our skills for long form, that another generation of filmmakers like Markowitz are learning these lessons anew with fresh perspectives and even optimism. Their own? The wish to transform reality TV enough by sneaking in some of those good old-fashioned values of collaboration with participants, hewing to their truths, and giving the time necessary to let both bloom. I wish them godspeed. And if they do it – they can hire me!
