Queer Acts of Love & Resistance’

The Hot Docs Canadian Documentary Festival will open with the world premiere of Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance from Canadian director Noam Gonick and the National Film Board of Canada on April 24.

The feature doc explores the trajectory and milestones in Canada’s 2SLGBTQ+ movement, including pride and protest footage and first person accounts. “This is such a wonderful and meaningful acknowledgement,” Parade producer Justine Pimlott told a Hot Docs press conference on Tuesday. “There is still much work to be done. My hope is that our film serves as an inspiration and a call to action, not only for the queer community, but also for our allies,” she added.

News of the festival opener came as Hot Docs, North America’s biggest documentary showcase, released its full film lineup for its 32nd edition set for April 24 to May 4 in Toronto.

The Special Presentations program is programmed with mostly Canadian premieres with titles like The Nest by co-directors Chase Joynt and Julietta Singh; Come See Me in the Good Light, Ryan White’s Sundance film about spoken word artist and poet laureate of Colorado Andrea Gibson and produced by Tig Notaro; Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim’s Deaf President Now!, another Sundance doc about the landmark 1988 student protest that transformed accessibility rights in the U.S.; and Life After, where director Reid Davenport investigates assisted suicide laws for disabled people.

Elsewhere, the International Spectrum Competition has world premieres for Vivek Chaudhury’s I, Poppy, about a son’s fight against corrupt officials in India; Janusz Korczak’s King Matt the First, which follows young Polish sisters as they grapple with impending adulthood; and Unwelcomed, by directors Sebastian Gonzalez Mendez and Amilcar Infante as they look at Chile’s migrant crisis in 2021.

Also booked into Hot Docs is Shoshannah Stern’s Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, a film about the Oscar-winning deaf performer Marlee Matlin; Coexistence, My Ass!, activist and comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi’s film out of Sundance about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game, about desperate bachelors in China joining a dating boot camp; director Sam Feder’s Heightened Scrutiny, which follows legal battles against assaults on trans rights in the U.S.; Isabel Catro’s Selena Y Los Dinos, a portrait of Selena Quintanilla, or the “Queen of Tejano Music”; and Spreadsheet Champions, Kristina Kraskov’s film about students skilled at Excel competing at the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship.

This year’s Hot Docs festival will follows then president Marie Nelson — the former ABC News and Disney executive who took the helm in June 2023 — leaving Hot Docs after a chaotic 2024 edition. “I think there were some questions whether we’d be here today,” interim executive director Janice Dawe, who helped navigate Hot Docs this past year through corporate and financial challenges, said when opening a press conference in Toronto on Tuesday morning.  

Dawe has been replaced with veteran film programmer Diana Sanchez as the new executive director of Hot Docs ahead of its 2025 edition. “Toronto, and the doc community, we need Hot Docs, and I am committed and very excited to work with this incredibly talented team that’s welcomed me so warmly,” Sanchez said when addressing the Hot Docs Cinema audience.

Hot Docs, as it restructures financially, briefly shuttered its flagship Toronto cinema and scaled back its board of directors and operating staff. Prior to unveiling the 2025 lineup, Heather Haynes, director of programming at Hot Docs, drew attention to Hamdan Ballal, one of the co-directors of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, who was beaten and injured by Israeli settlers and detained in a West Bank conflict on Monday.

“These acts lay bare the growing dangers faced by courageous journalists, filmmakers and ordinary citizens who risked their lives to share their vital stories. We are united in hope for Hamdan’s safe return to his loved ones,” Haynes said. On Tuesday morning, Abraham on social media said Ballal had been freed from a military prison and was headed home to his family.

No Other Land, directed by four filmmakers — two Israeli, two Palestinian — took home the prize for best documentary at the 97th annual Academy Awards on March 2. The film documents the forced displacement of Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, as well as a budding friendship between a Palestinian activist and Israeli journalist, between 2019 and 2023.

In all, 113 documentaries from 47 countries will screen during Hot Docs’ 2025 edition, including 26 homegrown Canadian feature docs, in addition to industry events and programs.