Image credit: Joseph Michael Howarth. Courtesy of Hot Docs
“The stories we tell say a lot about us—what moves us, intrigues us, or frightens us.” Recited by Canadian actress Emily Hampshire in an advertisement for the Canada Media Fund, these were some of the first words an audience member might hear each time the theater lights went down at the 2025 edition of Hot Docs. This innocuous, if oddly-phrased, ad gave voice to the palpable sense of unease and uncertainty I felt as an attendee. Last year, national and international press widely reported on what The Globe and Mail described as “the most tumultuous year in the festival’s history,” complete with sweeping personnel changes, social and financial pressures, and the temporary closure of their flagship Ted Rogers Cinema. Though Hot Docs managed to pull through for its 32nd year with a new executive director (Diana Sanchez, formerly of TIFF) and a replenished staff (some of the programmers, including department head Heather Haynes, returned after their prior exodus), what frightened this hamstrung fixture of Toronto’s flailing film scene was dismally clear.
Fear is presumably what made the thoroughly cash-strapped festival, whose long-standing financial troubles have also been widely publicized, finally cave to public pressures from the No Arms in the Arts movement to cut ties (effective in 2026) with its lead sponsor Scotiabank. The company funnels billions into arms developer Elbit Systems, a manufacturer of Israeli missiles used to murder countless children in occupied Palestine. Though Scotiabank is still listed on the Hot Docs web site as a sponsor for the 2025 festival, the bank has “opted to waive its recognition benefits”—speculated as an effort to avoid the kind of protests that disrupted TIFF (because of its sponsorship by RBC, an infamous investor in weapons and oil pipelines) back in September. But in a general trend of dismissive, noncommittal, and occasionally outright occlusionary attitudes by Canadian arts institutions toward Israel’s ongoing genocide, Hot Docs still has deferred its refusal of the bank’s blood money until next year.
Toronto’s geography also forces Hot Docs into an ungainly pose. While TIFF lavishly occupies a string of neighbouring theatres (and an entire street) in the entertainment district, Hot Docs awkwardly straddles the city—one foot planted in The Annex, where the Ted Rogers Cinema has stood since 1913, and the other one 3 kilometers south on King Street, where TIFF’s Lightbox theatre houses the majority of their programming. Any crowds that might flock the areas surrounding the venues are thus spread thin, with proceedings and fanfare absorbed into the workaday environments of a city content to walk on by. Inside the theatres, energy is typically low. Ted Rogers boasts two floors of seats, but each time I attended I found the balcony closed to encourage a more crowded space below. The first few days of a festival are usually the busiest, but an ill-timed flu kept me indoors until the third day, by which point even the higher-traffic Lightbox’s buzziest showings offered plenty of room to stretch my legs.
The festival’s revamped Industry Conference was missing the Forum, a main event in past years, where projects could be pitched for co-production by international investors. The industry activities took place west of Ted Rogers in the Royal Sonesta, a gaudy and slightly sinister hotel nestled in the sleek and soulless neighbourhood of Yorkville (once a hippie hub, now home to designer retail shops). The mauve-speckled tile floors resemble deli meat, clashing against adjacent floral carpets. Throughout the sessions, a chandelier flickers faintly on the ceiling above. The hallways are lined with armchairs occupied by people on their laptops, hemmed in by clusters of attendees engaged in tentative conversation and volunteers who outnumber the passholders almost 2 to 1. In the conference rooms, people shift on their hips and the balls of their feet to find a comfortable standing position, though there are plenty of seats open toward the front of the room (they don’t typically plan on staying long).
The conference sessions included “Truth of Bias: Making Documentaries in the Age of Polarization,” “Meet the Distributors,” “How to Position and Market Your Films,” and “Ethical Use of A.I. in Documentaries.” A speaker from Youtube Canada harped on digital fingerprints, copyright protections, viral marketing, and “telling great stories”; a marketing panelist described content creators on social platforms as “digital journalists”; an expert likened assistive A.I. to a grunt-working intern, and spoke about perturbing cases of ultra-convincing dupes with an almost perverse glee. The latter conference began with the speakers asking the crowd, “Who works in A.I.?” (many hands shot up) and “Who wants nothing to do with it?” (only one person, braver than I, raised their hand after a long delay). It carried on in a neutral tone, outlining the ways that the technology could be used to assist in research and enhance (but not transform) archival materials featured on screen. I couldn’t help but wonder where I might have missed its use in the films I’d been watching.
While these sessions seemed to indicate an institution content to blur the borders of technique and technology, and art and content, the festival program was informed by clear, urgent boundaries, containing manifold stories of resilience and rebellion by victims against their aggressors. A harrowing fragment of the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive (2000 Meters to Adriivka), a legal crusade for trans rights (Heightened Scrutiny), a dispiriting mission to give closure to families of missing migrants (Spare My Bones, Coyote!), a battle to protect an All Native Basketball Championship and the land that was stolen from them by the government (Saints and Warriors), a quotidian preservation of Palestinian cuisines (Aisha’s Story), and a decades-long effort to protect the Florida Everglades (River of Grass) were among the buzziest titles in this year’s slimmed-down slate. These social issues don’t entirely permeate their programming, nor do their chosen films observe such issues in totality, but Hot Docs has always strived to stay in tune with urgent matters of the present, especially through films that align their audience’s point of view with what will one day be the right side of history.
The festival also featured multiple films that looked backward in time, sifting through the archive to unravel historical struggles for civil rights—The Nest, Deaf President Now!, Life After, and most prominently, Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance, which played the festival’s opening night. The event was accompanied by a patriotic speech from Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow. She spoke with enthusiasm and force about the mutable notion of reality while disco balls cluttering the stage cast fragments of light in every direction. Chow’s involvement with Hot Docs reflects the general effort by her municipal government to show support for Toronto’s beleaguered arts organizations in the wake of conservative Premiere Doug Ford’s reelection.
The film—a joint venture by director Noam Gonick and award-winning producer Justine Pimlott (Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, Inconvenient Indian)—was an apt, if safe, choice for an opening salvo. Parade is deeply entrenched in the city’s history, chronicling the formations of and protests by various queer Canadian activist groups over the course of four decades. Though it flits between Montréal, Winnipeg, and even my hometown of Burnaby, it continually veers back toward Toronto’s burgeoning gay scene. Various talking heads (graded in black and white) guide us through the 1950s, when the under-policed Yonge Street offered an oasis of sorts for drag performers and sex workers from all walks of life (today, the gay strip has shifted westward, to a four-block stretch of the also-gentrified Church Street). The more ostensibly permissive and freewheeling ’70s brought an increased police presence, leading to brutal, relentless raids and a more hostile civilian crowd. An elder queen recounts being spat on by a woman screaming “faggot” at the top of her lungs, an experience (sans saliva) that’s still relatively commonplace in this city (some things never change).
This smooth and savvy film is hardly lacking in emotional or intellectual frissons. The AIDS section, predictably, reduced me to tears. The archival materials are especially rousing and enlightening, and the story’s thoroughly researched curlicues, which spotlight the efforts of Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Latine activists while also contextualizing the failures of an overly cop-friendly Pride to honor them in the present tense, trek through pathways both well-worn and untrod. Though the film feels defined and limited by its instructional form and is complete with bumper-sticker slogans on digital blackboards that serve as chapter cards, it successfully refracts fact through rhetoric, using history as a means of understanding the dangers and corresponding fears of our current moment.
Assembly, on the other hand, cozies up to an especially prevalent modern danger. Co-directed by Louisiana-born artist Rashaad Newsome, whose tech-oriented work traverses a vast range of topics and formats, and documentarian Johnny Symons, the film surveys the coordination and exhibition of Newsome’s ambitious 2022 multimedia installation of the same name. The installation combined traditions and aesthetics including Afrofuturism, tribal dance, ballroom, sculpture, music, holograms, fractal patterns, and even Brazilian capoeira, Ukrainian hopak, and Japanese bon odori dances. The centrepiece of the installation—but tellingly, not of the movie—is a nonbinary A.I. entity called Being. Rendered in 3D using the motion-captured gestures of ballroom dancers and trained on an open-source language model with critical texts by the likes of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Audrey Lorde, Being has been styled as a digital version of a griot.
Being’s borrowed movements are choppy, flailing, abject; I found it profoundly disturbing to watch them mimic the stylings of vogue, the diction and mannerisms of Black queer culture, and the tenets of anti-colonial theory, especially when the so-called performer stole the spotlight from fabulously talented creatives, musicians, dancers, and craftspeople who worked on the show. The insidious film is briefly saved by a long overdue turn toward the lives of his trans performers (“femme queens to the rescue,” they shout, correctly, during footage of the show), with the camera finally conveying the expressive, tactile work of the crew on and off stage. But these shifts in focus come too little too late. The question of why Newsome would place Being at the centre of this exhibition is, of course, never answered; Assembly has no interest in meaningfully engaging with the ethical concerns that are inextricable from its technological gambit.
Seemingly wary of potential controversy, Newsome buries the lede on Being, opting instead for the hyper-personal and placing himself at the film’s centre. Newsome previously shared his creation with audiences at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, hosting an interactive film experience called Being (The Digital Griot) that landed with a discomfiting thud, according to a previous Documentary dispatch. Heated exchanges occurred as audience members held court with both Being and Newsome, which led to volleys of curse words on both sides, and the ejection of some attendees from the room.
Assembly includes fleeting footage from the disastrous Sundance screening, sequenced in a way that undercuts the valid critical observations of an audience member with rowdier protests from the crowd –– after expelling these naysayers, Newsome willfully conflates their spirited objections to A.I. with a devaluation of the queer people of colour who worked on it. To whom is he referring? The uncredited dancers who modeled for Being? The hands that input the data being mined and regurgitated for “performance art”? This spurious claim, framed as the “final word” on the matter before the film goes back to business as usual, betrays a much more profound devaluation of the labor and expertise his many collaborators lent to the installation.
Joseph Hillel’s Koutkekout (At All Kosts) forms a compelling flip side, striking a more synergistic relationship between director and subject. It follows a Haitian theatre troupe through the inception, creation, and performance of a live show in their fenced-in Port-au-Prince compound. Gunshots ring out in the distance beyond a perimeter of foliage and barbed wire as the actors work through personal and cultural histories with their bodies, aided by elaborate props and set pieces; a network of acoustic tubing, braid extensions tied to the ramparts, cerulean fabrics, red pumps, and handheld mirrors. Various creatives converse with a deft, playful camera, expressing their love for and commitment to their native country—one racked by years of gang violence, political upheaval, natural disaster, and geopolitical interference.
Hillel’s presence behind or in front of the camera is never made apparent; instead, he chooses to bolster his creative subjects, paying tribute to their intrepid artistry as well as the circumstances they’re informed by. Koutkekout ends with the payoff of a packed, curious crowd and a post-performance party that rallies joy and community within concrete walls. The film’s (and the troupe’s) achievements are summarized by a sequence where a car alarm is briefly absorbed into the beat of a nearby brass band, extracting harmony from cacophony.
Crowds gather for a very different kind of spectacle in Shifting Baselines. Québécois filmmaker Julien Élie is used to making films (Dark Suns and The White Guard, both set in Mexico) that straddle or traverse the United States’ southern border. Shifting Baselines explores the region surrounding the SpaceX Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, engaging with the nomadic sycophants who live in tents and trailers while they wait to rubberneck at the latest launch.
Élie shoots in his trademark sleek black and white, finding the same harsh, dystopian beauty in the industrial hellscapes of the base as well as the razed and polluted landscape it looms over. He finds amusing parallels in the manic behaviours of the Musk devotees and the various scientists who remind us of the very real environmental dangers, such as massive shards of shrapnel falling from the sky thousands of miles away, that SpaceX’s practices pose for mankind. The film taps into anxieties that have gripped American culture since the Atomic age, and is most compelling in its bemused attraction toward juvenile obsession, apolitical delusion, and doomed escapism.
The film’s title refers to how the accepted norms of a given environment can shift in the wrong direction over the course of generations. As our city and its core cultural spheres continue to degrade in tandem, it’s increasingly difficult not to accept this state of decline as its own demoralizing norm. My experience of this as a fresh-eyed Gen-Z may very well find friction with that of older attendees who have watched these sweeping changes from a greater vantage, but my thoughts turn instinctively toward the next generation, who I fear may inherit a film scene running on life support.
Whether Hot Docs lives to see another festival—or another five, or ten, or twenty—is beside the point. These localized (yet evergreen) institutional struggles, while undoubtedly specific to Canadian interests and anxieties, are representative of the larger vexations that ripple through an international film landscape caught, as ever, between an ethical rock and a commercial hard place. The recent victory in the Canadian federal election by the Liberals, who seem far more amenable to investing in the country’s artistic future, is a thin silver lining in a sky full of storm clouds. I must remind myself that cynicism is a reflex which should be followed, in turn, by reflection and action.
Alexander Mooney is a critic and programmer based in Toronto. His writing has appeared in Toronto Star, Screen Slate, POV, The Globe and Mail, Little White Lies, MUBI Notebook, and more.