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
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In their documentary Daughters, co-directors Natalie Rae and Angela Patton offer a moving, tender look at a daddy-daughter dance for girls whose fathers are in prison. Patton is the creator of Date with Dad, a program run… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Daughters
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Standing on the edge of a cliff or tall building and taking the leap with only a parachute or wingsuit to catch you might not be everyone’s idea of a good time. But it’s the regular pursuit… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Fly
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In her latest documentary Look Into My Eyes, Director Lana Wilson (Miss Americana) introduces us to a selection of New York City psychics as well as their clients. While psychics are usually thought to be the domain… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Look Into My Eyes
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto What if the designs on playing cards actually represent the answer to a long-lost mystery about the real cause of death for France’s King Charles VIII? This is the question that the Vancouver sleight-of-hand magician Shawn Farquhar… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Lost in the Shuffle
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Director David Hinton’s expansive new documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger offers an absorbing mix of film essay and tribute to these cinematic masters, guided by Martin Scorsese’s enlightening narration. Hinton’s documentary offers… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Gorgeously shot on 35mm film, Irish filmmaker Ken Wardrop’s latest documentary So This is Christmas is a tender portrait of lonely people in Ireland trying to make it through the holidays. The observational film goes beyond showing… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: So This is Christmas
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Filmmaker Tova Krentzman offers an intriguing glimpse into the lives of lookouts in her documentary Fire Tower, introducing us to some of the people who spend six months of the year in towers a hundred feet above… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Fire Tower
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