HOT DOCS 2025 WRAP – Emma Badame reports
Every spring, documentary fans set their sights on Toronto and the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. This year’s event, the 32nd annual edition, which ran for 11 days from April 24 to May 4, brought audiences 113 non-fiction offerings from a whopping 47 countries. Add to that the 150 featured Q&As, and it’s not hard to see why Hot Docs is a mainstay of the annual cinematic circuit.
Despite a turbulent year behind the scenes, which included significant changes in leadership and a financial reckoning that led them to briefly close the doors of their year-long theatre space, festival programmers managed to bring another impressive programme of films from a wide range of filmmakers and backgrounds. With their latest run, Hot Docs successfully managed to uphold their mandate of presenting a wide swath of points of view, ensuring representation from across a spectrum of marginalised voices, including women, the queer community, filmmakers in exile, and more. The festival first reached gender parity with their 2018 film slate, and they’ve continued to strive for that goal with each successive year. Consequently, their line-ups always feature women en masse both in front of and behind the camera.
In 2025, two of the five big end-of-festival Audience Awards awards went to female-helmed films: Aisha’s Story, directed by Elizabeth Vibert and Chen Wang won the Audience Award for Mid-Length Documentary, and the Hot Docs Docs for Schools Student Choice Award went to Writing Hawa, directed by Najiba Noori and Rasul Noori. The latter was also given a Special Mention in the Jury Awarded Best Social Impact Documentary category. Other notable female Jury Prize winners were director Asia Youngman for Delta Dawn (Best Canadian Short Documentary), director Amalie Atkins for Agatha’s Almanac (Best Canadian Feature Documentary), director Sasha Wortzel for River of Grass (Special Jury Prize-International Feature Documentary, and director Angela Carabalí for I Dreamed His Name (Special Mention – Special Jury Prize-International Feature Documentary).
One big theme of this year’s festival was accessibility. With films like Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, Deaf President!, Life After, and short A Stop Gap Measure, the rights of the disabled were firmly in the spotlight. The post-screening discussion featuring Matlin and director Shoshannah Stern (and The Globe and Mail’s Johanna Schneller) brought the fight to the fore in a superbly engaging way, accompanied (naturally) by a host of American Sign Language interpreters making the Q&A as accessible as possible.
The new programme, Made in Exile, touched on another noticeable theme of Hot Docs 2025: displacement. With films like The Longer You Bleed, Yalla Parkour, Writing Hawa, and Khartoum, audiences were transported to areas of the world faced with migration crises and shown the difficulties faced by filmmakers and journalists risking their own lives to tell these essential stories. In a stark reminder of just how dangerous truth-telling can be, each screening featured a vacant chair dedicated to a journalist facing persecution.
When it came to films both by and about women, there was a host of options on offer for festival attendees. Popular titles included Coexistence, My Ass! (directed by Amber Fares), a look at comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi’s one-woman show about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how humour can lead to heartbreak and vice versa. Isabel Castro’s Selena y Los Dinos charts the rise of superstar Selena Quintanilla and her tragic end, while Sundance Grand Jury award winner Cutting Through Rocks found new doc fans north of the border. The film, from directors Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, follows Sara Shahverdi as she takes on her role as the first woman elected to office in her remote Iranian village. Another great hidden gem was Marriage Cops, directed by Shashwati Talukdar and Cheryl Hess, which spotlights a remarkable form of therapy-cum-justice in India. The documentary takes us inside the corridors of a Dehradun police station, where we watch as Officer Sandhya and her all-woman team mediate troubled marriages as a required step before couples can legally divorce. It’s a fascinating look inside a changing country, as traditional collides with the emerging push for women’s rights
The previously mentioned The Longer You Bleed falls into the category of resonant women’s stories and counts as a must-see given the war in Eastern Europe. The film tracks director Ewan Waddell’s partner, Liuba, a young Ukrainian woman now living in Berlin. It spotlights both her and her displaced peers as they turn to social media and increasingly absurd and humorous coping mechanisms when faced with the stark realities of alienation, displacement and trauma. Director Lena MacDonald’s Betrayal was another film destined to stick with audiences lucky enough to see it. It chronicles the takedown of Liberia’s populist rebel-turned-president Charles Taylor by his nephew/adopted son. Living in hiding since Taylor’s 2003 conviction, Cindor Reeves reflects on his role as a whistleblower and what it has cost him.
All in all, 2025 was a great year at Hot Docs for audiences and filmmakers alike. An impressive feat, given that the festival’s return was still a complete uncertainty up until a few months ago. The fact that Hot Docs returned at all is clearly due to the deep commitment of the organization and its supporters. That the event they mounted was also as successful as in years past should be counted as a major win for all involved.
So if 2026’s Hot Docs Festival comes anywhere close to this year’s event, it’s bound to be great. Doc fans, mark your calendars for next year and another lot of incredible films.
