Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival returns this year with 115 documentaries representing 51 countries featuring World and North American premieres.
Like previous years, Hot Docs offers us a full menu when it comes to documentary films. As it has become my custom, I am sharing some of my personal picks for you to add to your Hot Docs lists.
Hye’s Hot Docs Picks
The Sandbox
Dir. Kenya-Jade Pinto
The film explores global borders where surveillance and AI decide who lives and who dies. From the Arizona desert to the Mediterranean sea, suffering is clinically managed while control is packaged as security. But if there is no opting out, who is The Sandbox really protecting?
Black Zombie
Dir. Maya Annik Bedward
From colonial Haiti’s haunted cane fields to the flickering screens of Hollywood horror, the living dead’s buried origins are unearthed and reclaimed as a symbol of survival and spiritual resistance.
MySpace
Dir. Tommy Avallone
Many of you will remember MySpace, one of the “OG” social networks. This film will tug at the heartstrings of millennials and curious newcomers, with a nostalgic portrait tracing how this pioneering social networking platform shaped the digital world we now inhabit, from online fame to social media overload.
The Tower That Built A City
Dir. Mark Myers
Toronto’s skyline-defining CN Tower launched a five-decade transformation of the ‘Big Smoke’ into the ‘6ix’. Celebrate the tower’s 50th anniversary as it continues to symbolize a city that’s become a world-class cultural force in sports, music and global identity.
A War on Women
Dir. Raha Shirazi
Long before the world chanted “Woman, Life, Freedom,” Iranian women have been rising up. Intimate interviews and archival footage trace 40 years of feminist resistance against the Islamic Republic, culminating in a revolution led by the very women the regime tried to silence.
Nekai Walks
Dir. Rico King
At 16, Nekai Foster was shot while walking home in Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood. His journey of survival and recovery—defying all medical odds as he relearns to walk—exposes how gun violence shapes bodies, families and communities.
Love Apptually
Dir. Shalini Kantayya
Tired of swiping? Follow a journalist’s quest to unpack the dating app algorithms shaping modern romance as she reveals how, in an already lonely world, technology, bias and profit are increasingly influencing who we meet and why.
Virtual Girlfriends
Dir. Barbora Chalupová
As three women navigate careers as sexual-content creators on OnlyFans, they reveal the tantalizing, transactional and ultimately fragile dynamics of digital intimacy. Raw and unflinching, this fly-on-the-wall film investigates self-worth, validation and the human cost of the gig economy.
Let Our Mountains Live
Dir. Håvard Bustnes
Should renewable energy come at the cost of Indigenous rights? In Norway’s mountainous Fosen region, Sámi reindeer herders and youth activists win a Supreme Court victory against a large wind farm but face a bigger battle when economic interests stall political action.
Birds of War
Dirs. Janay Boulos, Abd Alkader Habak
A love story blossoms between a London-based Lebanese journalist and her on-the-ground contact, a Syrian-based cameraman, through 13 years of war, revolutions and exile. But can two people from such disparate worlds make a life together?
LANDSTONE
Dir. Faraz Fadaian
In the Iranian desert, an elderly man and his wife face mortality and fading bonds. Seeking solace in a handmade cave, the man struggles to reconnect with his past in this lyrical and visually striking study of a vanishing way of life.
A WOLF IN THE SUBURBS (Short)
Dir. Amélie Hardy
Welcome to Mississauga where lawns are clipped, neighbors are watchful and no blade of grass dares misbehave. Except at Wolf Ruck’s place. His lawn grows wild, and so does the trouble.
PARASISI
Dirs. Zaïde Bil & Sébastien Segers
Along the Lawa River, Wayana families live with the quiet aftershocks of intrusion. In luminous black-and-white, this lyrical film traces how mining, missionaries and medicine ripple through daily life, revealing colonial histories etched into lands and bodies.
The 49th Year
Dir. Heidrun Holzfeind
Through thoughtful letters from prison, an anarchist incarcerated since 1980 reflects on his radical past. This meditative portrait pairs humane narration with contemporary Japanese landscapes, exploring the quiet tensions between aging, political militancy and time itself.
The Delivery Line
Dir. Nance Ackerman
On the edge of life, on the frontlines of crisis and conflict, women are still giving birth and midwives are risking everything to help them. The film reframes and re-examines some of our most overwhelming global issues, migration, crime, poverty, climate change and war, through one of life’s most joyous experiences: childbirth.
Additional Festival Details
Same-Day Tickets
- Available for all screenings online and at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema Box Office until one hour before the scheduled start time, subject to availability.
- Available at each venue’s box office for screenings at that location. Venue box offices open 60 minutes before the first screening of the day.
Rush Tickets
- If advance tickets for a screening are sold out, a limited number of rush tickets may be released at the venue box office approximately 15 minutes before the start time.
- Rush ticket line-ups begin approximately one hour before the screening.
Free Daytime Screenings
- Students and patrons 60+ with valid ID can attend regular Festival screenings that start before 4:00 PM at no cost.
- Free student and senior tickets are only available on the day of the screening and must be picked up at the venue where the film is being shown.
Hot Docs films and other special events take place in Toronto until May 3, 2026. Festival listings, schedule and tickets are available at hotdocs.ca.
