By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival ran from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto If you didn’t know that Excel spreadsheets were a thing you could be the best at, well, have I got news for you. There’s a whole competition for it, where students come from around the world to… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Spreadsheet Champions
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival ran from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto In their aptly titled documentary They’re Here, co-directors Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez introduce us to a group of UFO enthusiasts from upstate New York. They all claim to have their own experiences with sightings or encounters,… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: They’re Here
By John Corrado The 2025 edition of Hot Docs has just come to a close, and the winners of the festival’s Audience Awards have just been announced. Coming in first for the Hot Docs Audience Award is Ryan White’s incredibly moving Come See Me in the Good Light, which was also my personal favourite of… Read More #HotDocs25 Audience Award Winners
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto When standup comedian Tig Notaro, one of the producers of Come See Me in the Good Light, faced her own cancer diagnosis, she announced it to the world by opening a show with the line “good evening,… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Come See Me in the Good Light
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto In their documentary Deaf President Now!, co-directors Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim take us back to the student protests to elect the first Deaf president of Gallaudet University, offering a fantastic, cinematically rendered time capsule of this… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Deaf President Now!
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto The provocative title of My Boyfriend the Fascist refers to the relationship between self-identified left-wing Italian filmmaker Matthias Lintner and his Cuban boyfriend Sadiel Gonzalez, a right-wing activist fighting communist influences. Lintner’s film takes a verite approach,… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: My Boyfriend the Fascist
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto In her documentary Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, director Shoshannah Stern crafts an engaging, intimate portrait of actress Marlee Matlin, who become the first Deaf actor to win an Oscar for her lead performance in the 1986… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto The title of #skoden refers to an Indigenous phrase that is the shorthand of “let’s go, then” said with an Indigenous accent. The saying became immortalized as a meme through a viral image of a Blackfoot man… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: #skoden
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto In their documentary Marriage Cops, co-directors Shashwati Talukdar and Cheryl Hess take us inside a police station in northern India, where a team of female officers provide marriage counselling to couples experiencing marital problems. It’s a way… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Marriage Cops
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto Shot on luminous 16mm film, Agatha’s Almanac is a portrait of Agatha Bock, a subject who, in her mid-eighties, is proudly carrying on the traditions of rural farm living in southern Manitoba. The film is directed by… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Agatha’s Almanac
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto Ai Weiwei’s Turandot looks at the Chinese artist and activist’s modern re-staging of Puccini’s opera at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. The film opens with the quote “everything is art, everything is politics,” before dramatic footage from… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Ai Weiwei’s Turandot
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto Director Noam Gonick’s documentary Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance, which opens this year’s Hot Docs Film Festival, looks at the history of gay rights in Canada, and the origins of our country’s first Pride Parades as… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival ran from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In 2019, Ina Steiner and her husband David, the bloggers behind the website EcommerceBytes who specialized in providing advice to eBay sellers, began receiving a series of threatening and intimidating messages. These messages gave way to a… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Whatever It Takes
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival ran from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto This is Going to Be Big is a very heartwarming and inspiring documentary that follows a group of neurodiverse high schoolers in Australia preparing for a school play, and is refreshingly told from the perspectives of the… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: This is Going to Be Big
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In 2003, a collective of eight artists in Rhode Island stealthily moved into a hidden space within the Providence Place Mall, and lived there undetected for four years. The story of their elaborate ruse is told in… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Secret Mall Apartment
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto The documentary Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story is a very sweet and beautifully filmed portrait of a childless couple and the wild otter they adopt into their lives. Billy and his wife Susan live in… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In their documentary Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, co-directors Isaac Gale and Ryan Olson take us into the world of Swamp Dogg, an aging musician with a storied, unconventional career. Born Jerry Williams, he adopted the… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In his latest documentary, Canadian filmmaker Larry Weinstein offers a wide-ranging exploration of the enduring legacy of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a piece that has remained recognizable over the past two hundred years with its fourth movement Ode… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Maria Gros Vatne and her husband Nik Payne were homeschooling their four kids on a farm in Norway, giving their children a free-range upbringing that included growing their own food and subsisting off the land as much… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: A New Kind of Wilderness
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Barry Avrich’s Born Hungry is a wonderful portrait of Sash Simpson, and his journey from homeless street kid in India to top chef in Toronto. Sash’s earliest memories are of getting lost in India and being unable… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Born Hungry
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