The impact and success of a film festival, like many artistic endeavours, depends on timing. So, after a tumultuous 2024 – one that saw an exodus of its programmers, growing financial insecurity, and calls for divestment from lead sponsor Scotiabank, among other challenges – the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival opened in downtown Toronto in April 2025 with a mission to confirm both the relevance of non-fiction filmmaking and the vitality of the city’s arts sector. Throughout the festival, one could not escape the brushes with political strife, whether onscreen, offscreen, or behind-the-scenes. With each film’s introduction, a festival staffer recited a plea to support Hot Docs, just one of many Canadian institutions that will be hindered by an onerous trade war with the United States. (Volunteers worked to make a difference, too, frequently pushing visitors who were waiting in line to donate to the festival.) Furthermore, a range of premieres focused on wars and crises in Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan, and Sudan, and were among the most well-attended screenings at the festival. Even Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, made a cameo during pre-show ads, touting Hot Docs’s value in providing new perspectives. If this year’s festival lacked celebrity-accentuated titles and buzzy premieres, it largely didn’t matter: the social and political weight that textured many of its screenings seemed to rejuvenate Hot Docs’s sense of purpose. 

Many of the documentaries were explicitly political in their subject matter – and that ideological messaging was expressed far more often in content than formal ingenuity. You were bound to have a director or producer reinforcing their story’s timeliness in discussions with the audience. The festival was often at its most emotionally potent when operating as a space for spectatorial catharsis. I remember the pained comments from Toronto’s Ukrainian diaspora during a virtual, post-film Q&A with 2000 Meters to Andriivka director Mstyvslav Chernov – perhaps even more vividly than his very good documentary, a companion piece to his Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol. At others time, the rage bubbled up even before the movies started. At my screening of Heightened Scrutiny, which focuses on ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, a representative for the project confided that Sam Feder, the trans American director of the film, was unwilling to travel to Canada due to the risks of not being allowed back into his country.

Atop the wildly unpredictable trade war and other authoritarian political theatre south of the border, there was a heavy dose of nationalist fervor for Canada. Meanwhile, I don’t recall hearing many murmurs around lingering festival controversies. Hot Docs seemed to turn a new leaf when sustained cheers greeted the festival’s new executive director, Diana Sanchez, before the opening night premiere. You can sense a refreshed mood that evening, as Sanchez praised her programming team’s passion and commitment, noting how the festival had “faced its share of challenges.” (Ten programmers resigned from Hot Docs in March 2024, a month before last year’s festival. In a joint statement, this creative team acknowledged its “toxic workplace” and the expectations they had to work “in an ever-changing, chaotic, unprofessional and discriminatory environment.”) If Hot Docs cemented anything in 2025, it was for reigniting an interest in Canadian filmmakers, with many of the most appealing débuts coming courtesy of homegrown talent. (The National Film Board of Canada’s slate was especially eclectic, too, and included opener Parade.) As Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán has said, “A country without documentary films is like a family without a photo album.” This year, audience were primed to line up for a breadth of titles, hoping that documentaries could be tools to help them make sense of a flummoxing, fractured world.

The Turbulence of Today: Living in Trumpian Times

One sly stroke of timing was to have a federal election fall in the middle of Hot Docs, as if the political winds of change weren’t already making audiences feel tempestuous. Just in case one forgot, opening-night selection Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance, directed by Winnipeg’s Noam Gonick, is bookended by two Prime Minister Trudeaus. The documentary chronicles three decades of LGBTQ+ activism in Canada, organized around various key chapters, from the passing of Bill C-150 in 1968, which decriminalized most sexual activities between citizens over 21, to the direct action sparked by raids on a queer nightclub in Montreal in 1990. It is the elder Trudeau’s quote about keeping the state out of the bedrooms of the nation that registers across the efforts of trailblazing activists, writers, and performers. As a stealthy summary of queer rebellion, Parade affirms the spirit of the National Film Board of Canada’s mandate, offering a reflection of the lives and experiences of Canada’s LGBTQ+ community. It benefits mightily from a trove of stunning archival footage from places like the ArQuives, such as bleary images of gay men protesting for labor rights in the pouring rain in the early 1970s.

I can imagine some shrugging at the documentary’s straightforward, almost didactic approach, with talking heads of acclaimed activists, scholars, and chroniclers of queer revolt facing the camera to teach younger generations about the “true north strong and gay.” There is merit to illuminate the voices of LGBTQ+ elders, even in a familiar packaging, especially when the tenor of right-wing attacks several decades ago is more than an echo of regressive voices in today’s public sphere. When Anita Bryant appears as a looming spectre of right-wing backlash to the mainstreaming of queer civil rights – she too was protested by Canadians in 1978 – one feels her sordid influence on this day and age. (I also appreciated sections of the doc that covered Toronto’s The Body Politic, the “paper of liberation.”) After the film shows Trudeau’s son, marching as prime minister at Toronto’s Pride parade in 2016, it then focuses on the demands outlined by Black Lives Matter protesters that year to remove a police presence at those celebrations, a reminder of decades of state surveillance and scrutiny. This noteworthy chapter of local activism became a point of provocation, gesturing at the lingering animosity between police and gay men in Toronto. The edifying purpose of Gonick’s film operates a salve for these thorny times.

Parade benefits from its access to numerous archives, a wealth of defiant, wizened queer trailblazers, and for its diversity, covering the nascent arrival of key voices across sexualities and ethnicities, including two-spirit individuals. A cavalcade of trans and genderfluid voices also add heft and colour to Heightened Scrutiny, a recent Sundance premiere that profiles Chase Strangio, the attorney who presented at the Supreme Court last winter in defense of trans Americans’ rights to receive gender-affirming health care. Where Gonick’s film uses the archives of the past to inform and ignite present-day activism, the new documentary from Sam Feder (Disclosure) is most potent when revealing the extent of today’s culture wars. The film is structured around the lead-up to both the 2024 presidential election, when Republicans engaged in a spending spree of inflammatory anti-trans ads, and the US vs. Skrmetti case, which discriminates against transgender youth. Strangio, the first known trans lawyer to argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, has a small frame and giddy personality; it is unsurprising why Feder wanted to profile him. Nevertheless, one hoping for special insight into his burgeoning legal career, or details about how he prepared to present his arguments, will be left astray.

What Feder’s film does more successfully (and comprehensively) is argue that irresponsible media framings of trans healthcare, especially by liberal publications like the New York Times, have influenced several recent court decisions in the United States. Stories that assume an “objective” and inquisitive tone around a trans “debate” while largely eschewing vital gender-queer perspectives have not merely impacted public opinion, but manufactured consent for political and legislative bodies to “protect” constituents in unjustified ways. Heightened Scrutiny is most enraging, and engaging, when it analyzes the power of these media narratives, and how they have largely abandoned the young Americans whose lives will be most affected by these legal and political shifts. The most hopeful moments in Feder’s film are not even about Strangio; instead, they focus on Mila, a trans middle-schooler with a penchant for public speaking in defense of her right to exist. One tender sequence shows Mila and her family having dinner with Strangio, as they discuss the barriers the young woman will continue to confront within a repressive political sphere. To focus on a young trans person and her family offers a vital counterpoint to the objections of powerful journalists on the center-right. Simultaneously, these sequences expose how much more enlightening a documentary that centers young queer people as its subjects can be. (One Hot Docs premiere that faltered from limiting its perspective on LGBTQ+ Americans was An American Pastoral, directed by Auberi Edler. The largely observational doc about a contentious school-board race in small-town Pennsylvania courted audible, dismissive gasps at my screening as it documented the bluntly extremist points-of-view of its Christian Nationalist subjects. Yet, the lack of access to students and educators to help counter these perspectives became a glaring absence.)

Another shadowy outpost of Trump’s administration is its immigration enforcement. In the disquieting, sometimes emotionally-fraying Spare My Bones, Coyote!, a world premiere at the festival, director Jonah Malak documents the efforts of the husband-wife team at the helm of the organization Aguilas del Desierto. For more than a decade, Ely and Marisela Ortiz have led the volunteer group, donned in lime green and operating near the U.S.-Mexico border, searching for migrants who disappeared – often with perilous consequences – on the journey north. Malak’s film seldom lingers on the bodies of those found and the reactions of loved ones; instead, he uses sound design and visual tricks to capture the dizzying, imposing desert environments. The starkness of this audiovisual atmosphere – tremors in the score, an endlessly desolate landscape in the image – stands in juxtaposition to the humane interviews with the Ortizes. (The desert climate is rendered with such a blistering chill, you may even begin to feel parched.) Their volunteer efforts often encounter the horrifying and macabre, but there are few other options available to rescue and recover the remains of those that have vanished. “If we don’t take the call, who will?” Ely insists, as yet another phone call interrupts a comparably placid home life. They have weathered an emotional and financial toll to bring closure to the difficult migrations of many. In the film’s most fascinating detour, we see efforts of an Ortiz-led campaign in Mexico that is meant to inform likely migrants of the risks of passage and how to prepare for potentially bleak consequences. Balancing a haunting lyrical style with emotional clarity, Malak’s film is a captivating look at the trauma of traversing borders amidst an increasingly complex matrix of immigration. 

Of Memes and Men: A Spectrum of Indigenous and Canadian Masculinity

It takes a bit of chutzpah to start your film title with the word “endless”; nevertheless, I expect few would describe the charming Endless Cookie, which won the festival’s audience award for best Canadian documentary, as such. The award comes accompanied with a $50,000 prize for its filmmakers, Seth and Peter Scriver. The cash is a boon for a film that doesn’t just weave the length of its prolonged production process (nine years) into its title, but also its narrative: one recurring character is an “NFG officer” who initially presents Seth with a grant cheque to make the film, then keeps returning to check in on a stalled creative process. As the film is animated, it can present the “NFG officer” as a right-angle ruler. And, I will admit, it took me a few minutes to acclimate to the doc’s rubbery animation style, which reminded me of South Park’s crudely shaped characters, albeit if they had thicker accents and had heads like Easter eggs covered in too much fondant.

This collaboration between the Scriver brothers is a blend of Seth’s offbeat animation and Peter’s droll, diverting stories. The film is a record of eccentric tales about their lives, the half-brothers coming not just from different origins but also residing many miles apart (the former is white and from Toronto, the latter is Indigenous and from Shamattawa, a reserve in Manitoba). Peter is the best storyteller Seth knows, the former’s tales inviting laughs and awe without usually building momentum. If Endless Cookie sometimes seems scattered, the result of Peter’s rambling but endearing storytelling abilities and the barrage of familial interruptions – toilet flushes, a small village worth of snoring dogs – that tilt the paths of these tales, its episodic nature is more a feature than a bug. The documentary also uses the levity of its oral-storytelling approach and quirky animation style to confront morbid subjects, such as the “debt trap” of shopping at a Northern reserve grocery store and a high incarceration rate among Indigenous Canadians. (Several of the film’s laughs also come at the expense of the RCMP officers, who are rendered as pathetic.) It’s a deft way to avoid falling into traps of miserabilism; instead, we experience the colourful textures and joyful paraphernalia of Indigenous communal life. If the hangout vibe of the project, and the frequent interruptions of other characters, start to make this feel like an activated family album, it helps that Peter lives up to his lofty reputation as a master storyteller. The bite-sized episodes, amusing and bizarre, may not make for a filling meal, but they satisfy.

Endless Cookie’s offbeat comic sensibility lends more easily to an audience prize than some of the other sensitive portraits of Indigenous and Canadian men I saw during Hot Docs, but I found two others to be especially insightful. As one figure explains in #skoden, Indigenous humour is “a survival tactic that’s been used across generations.” The resilience of an Internet meme becomes fodder for an exploring of Indigenous masculinity and stereotyping in Damien Eagle Bear’s film. The virality of a meme’s central image – of a middle-aged Blackfoot man in a windbreaker with his hands up, posing as if ready to fight – was interpreted as a shorthand for Native resilience as well as ridicule. One can view the image as inspiring or infuriating, depending on the viewer’s perspective. Eagle Bear pointedly introduces the meme image in fragmented chunks in the opening minutes of #skoden, which will proceed to reclaim and resuscitate the late figure it has mythologized online: Pernell Bad Arm.

Eagle Bear met Pernell at a shelter in Lethbridge, AB. a decade ago, and decided to interview him about his struggles with alcohol addiction and homelessness – long before the man became a mocked and tokenized symbol online. The filmmaker also speaks to friends, relatives, and social workers who remember Pernell fondly, lamenting how they hoped they could protect him from his demons. These attempts toward humanism revert the story away from focusing too extensively on a stereotyped, pixelated image that has circulated wildly. Eagle Bear’s strongest achievement is re-emphasizing the man as a figure of creativity, warmth, and autonomy, as well as a victim of systemic political apathy toward the beleaguered. The director recalls that, although some considered Pernell to be a threatening individual who was to be approached with caution, that was not the experience of many of his peers, such as Mark Brave Rock, and case manager Deanna Vincent. Most usefully, the director connects this indifference to Pernell’s humanity online – rendered through a reductive, essentialized image of Indigenous buffoonery – to the way he was treated by the state. A slightly richer telling of this story may have further contextualized how politicians in Alberta, and the doomed social programs they enacted, continue to linger over Lethbridge’s most vulnerable. Nevertheless, as Eagle Bear informs us, certain elements of “revitalization” reek of the same failed policies; without meaningful change, the work of tending to trauma and relapse falls to a select few who cannot shoulder the burden alone.

#skoden is a stirring character-study that succeeds despite lacking access to the subject as its core, thanks to Eagle Bear’s sensitivity as an interviewer and chronicler of social and political inaction. In contrast, Denis Côté’s latest documentary curio, Paul, benefits from its director’s hands-off approach and a fascinating titular figure. It examines the daily life of a self-described “cleaning simp,” a Montreal resident of Filipino heritage who becomes increasingly devoted to a journey of self-improvement – one that involves cleaning as a kink. He adopts the role of a submissive, attempting to wash, spray, wipe, and polish the apartments of his domme clients. Côté’s camera is far from judgmental, and it helps that Paul is documenting his progress through Instagram videos. “I love to serve women,” he tells the audience in these compilations. Despite some hectoring from the clients he serves about him eating better and losing weight, Paul finds joy (and a growing base of regulars, all women) in physical debasement and deconstructing normative gender roles. (Paul admits it would be awkward to share this “cleaning simp” life with his family, who still expect him to settle down with a wife from a similar cultural background.)

A raw and humane chronicle of the realities of sex work and the fluidity of kink, Paul reminded me of the earlier films of newly-minted awards darling Sean Baker. But the titular figure is also a decidedly contemporary subject, confident and confessional as he recounts the history of depression and social isolation he wants to overcome, both in the vibrant aesthetic of his promotional Instagram videos and in Discord chats with an online community held captive by his story. Paul is aware of his audience, and it affords Côté access into his subject’s lifestyle without the burden of first-person interviews. The digitized blips between scenes of cleaning, much of which are filmed by the protagonist, is a reminder of the virtual and diaristic nature of Paul’s experience: is it even a journey fulfilled if you aren’t completing it for an audience? Paul loves directing videos that compress time, showing before-and-after poses (of his body and of the places he makes spotless) with an added sheen. Naturally, moments of viral Internet attention make Paul anxious. Throughout, I kept wondering about how the titular subject’s aim to present his journey with directorial authority may be accentuated, or perhaps hindered, due to the involvement of a documentary film crew.

Empty Chair, Full House: Docs “Made in Exile”

Typically, one Hot Docs program binds to a single country, navigating a tapestry of illuminating stories from a specific region. In 2025, with various civil unrests around the world, the “Made In” program shifted its approach, instead spotlighting films made by directors and/or featuring protagonists who have been displaced from their home countries. In association with co-sponsor PEN Canada, a non-profit, some of these screenings contained an empty chair, purposefully left open near the front of the auditorium, in solidarity with writers and journalists living in a similar indeterminacy. The gesture made the theme of absence an even more palpable presence in two of the festival’s most disarming and stunning films: Writing Hawa, directed by Najiba and Rasul Noori, and Yalla Parkour, by Areeb Zuaiter. 

Writing Hawa begins with a long take of Najiba on a flight to Paris from Kabul, scanning over the ground below: the director and journalist had to flee instantly once the Taliban threatened to re-assume power. Among the remnants left behind was the completion of this film, caught in limbo, a captivating portrait of her mother, Hawa, as the woman commits to starting a career (making and selling embroidered garments) and an education she was once denied to instead tend to a husband 30 years older. The latter is done with the help of her schooled grandchildren, who kindly help with grammar lessons. The documentary explores the pregnant tension of waiting for the Taliban occupation – one that Hawa fears will further entrap her newfound autonomy – but also serves as a poignant glimpse at the personal tragedies tainted by patriarchy. “We’d never even talked about love when we got married,” Hawa explains, lamenting how often she has had to tend dutifully to a grumpy older husband. Then, her granddaughter, Zahra, escapes a household where the girl is expected to be sold into an arranged marriage, and finds solace at Hawa’s home. The Nooris’ film – Rasul aided with the filming after Najiba fled – is a testament of its subject’s quiet dignity and defiance, a stunning resolve against threats of external gender-based violence and oppression.

Maternal ties are also a common motif within Zuaiter’s film: in Yalla Parkour, the director even appears on camera while commemorating her Palestinian mother. “The longer you were away, the more your smile faded,” she narrates, explaining how the spark of a woman she remembers fondly was corrupted by time spent away from her homeland. Zuaiter, living in a vaguely snowy area of the United States, spends much of the documentary confined to indoor spaces, murmuring in a contemplative mode about home and away. But the film is also about a connection she finds with a fellow Palestinian, a teenager named Ahmed, who sends her crisply-shot videos of death-defying jumps and flips. Around a decade ago, Ahmed and his buddies did not merely pursue parkour as a hobby, but took it seriously, hoping their stylish tricks would be their ticket out of a devastated Gaza. (It would be, as Ahmed says, “a way for the world to see us.”)

Yalla Parkour’s first half is buoyant. Not only are the leaping, acrobatic feats showing a sense of bodily freedom and exuberance that Palestinian subjects are often denied onscreen, but the boys’ scrappy camerawork (aided in some instances with drones) is often breathtaking, capturing seaside dunes and the cavernous ruins of a destroyed airport, among other sites. I appreciated how Zuaiter, conscious of the parallels between her dream to return to Palestine and Ahmed’s wish to flee, did not need to overstate narratively how parkour, and the freedom of movement it emphasizes, is a fitting activity for those impacted by war and blockades. Yalla Parkour is not just a documentary capturing the bustle of bodies yearning to break free from a shackled state, but also examines the misfortune of remaining in stasis. In one of the film’s most intense scenes, we witness boys swiftly climbing the edge of a tall building, only for one to fall from a perilous height – we fortunately do not see the tragic end. The metaphor is cogent without becoming overwrought.

These two films within the “Made in Exile” program, made with gripping urgency, were among the highlights of my festival, to the point that I wished I had caught the other two entries: Khartoum, from Sudanese director Timea Mohamed Ahmed; and The Longer You Bleed, produced by Liubov Dyvak, the film’s Ukrainian subject. What synchronizes the four documentaries are themes of resilience in times of war and displacement – a coherence that made this program feel especially resonant in the present political reality. Nevertheless, my favourite film from the 2025 festival leaps into the past, where its archival images could shimmer boldly as its message of hope and resilience finds precise emotional textures.

Neshoma, directed by Sandra Beerends, takes its name from the Yiddish word for “soul” or “spirit.” At first glance, a film composed nearly entirely of high-quality footage of Amsterdam’s Jewish community between the World Wars may have seemed like a glorified museum exhibition, expanded for a larger screen. Under closer inspection, Neshoma is an especially immersive project, one where the synchronicity between sound and image – and the archival records are indeed stunning – work to the advantage of the absorbing storytelling on display. The story is a work that blends fact with historical fiction: it is an amalgam of dozens of testimonies from Dutch Jews in the interbellum years, although told from the perspective of Rusha, who is writing letters to a brother who has moved to Indonesia. That her correspondence is a composite does not taint the stories’ power. Instead, hewn to the stunning glimpses of bustling Jewish life, both religious and secular, the viewer feels a more immediate immersion with the people and places onscreen.

Rusha’s words capture more than two decades of Jewish life, from the construction of a “new” Amsterdam in a flurry of postwar buoyancy to glaring encroachment of fascism that predated the annihilation of a large capacity of the city’s Jews (which included, perhaps most famously, a young girl named Anne Frank). Running just 85 minutes, Neshoma encompasses the verve and vibrancy of the city’s Jewish community: their movement into factories and workshops to join the city’s bustling, and unionizing, middle-class; their patronage of the arts in giant movie palaces, like the Tuschinski; their balance of religious faith (Passover customs) with more secular celebrations (such as the Queen’s Day). Found-footage films about Europe’s Jews before the Holocaust tend to navigate their subjects soberly, taking a somber approach of a community that will soon be ill-fated. What I found most refreshing about Beerends’s film was its capacity to witness comfort, joy, and camaraderie. The film does not resemble a moving photo album, elegiac and cautionary. Instead, due to the wit of Rusha’s voice – the creation of the filmmaker, and itself an expression of a community’s bliss in a modernizing, diversifying Europe – and the seamless editing, Neshoma shimmers as a vital, restorative historical record.

Volume 29, Issue 3-5 / May 2025 Festival Reports   canadian film   documentary   lgbtq+