10 films we can't wait to see at Hot Docs 2022

The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival — the largest documentary film festival in North America — is returning to in-person events in Toronto this year (in addition to virtual screenings available to anyone in Canada). We here at CBC Arts are very excited to take a dive into the festival, so we're offering up our picks for the films we're most eager to see. 

Aftershock

When I think back to the birth of my first child, I never held a lot of anxiety. That all changed in one evening though – after my wife signed us up for an infant CPR course. I was ready for dirty diapers and sleepless nights, but not even remotely prepared for a room full of nervous parents desperately probing the instructors about defibrillators and SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome).

After that evening, I had imagined every possible scenario to safeguard my child, but the one very real possibility that I never even considered was that the most vulnerable person in the labour room might not have been my baby, but my partner. Aftershock looks at exactly that, exposing the disproportionate number of Black mothers who die every year because of how the American health-care system has failed them. By honouring the lives of Shamony Gibson and Amber Rose Isaac in its opening scenes — both who died shortly after giving birth — the film places us in the joy and anticipation of new life, before descending into the unfathomable grief of their respective partners, who became fathers and widowers in the same year.

Gibson was only 30 years old at the time. Two weeks after being discharged from the hospital, despite sharing her pain and symptoms with doctors, she died of a pulmonary embolism. Isaac, meanwhile, at only 26 years old, died after doctors induced labour and performed what should have been a routine caesarean birth. Some of her final words were delivered in a tweet about "dealing with incompetent doctors."

Directed by Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt, the film unpacks the circumstances of these deaths as a starting point to discuss the medical expliotation of Black women dating all the way back to slavery and worsened through modern day capitalism. The precarious nature of Black life in the medical system is expertly encapsulated in a quote from one expectant Black mother in the film, who states: "A Black woman having a baby is like a Black man at a traffic stop with police."

Last year, I personally experienced the birth of my baby girl and the death of my father a few months later. I know firsthand the overwhelming challenges of navigating the health-care system with practitioners who don't extend the same level of compassion and care to racialized patients, and while this will be a difficult watch, I thank films like this for reminding us that on the other end of those statistics are real Black lives that meant something to someone. -Lucius Dechausay, CBC Unscripted Content senior video producer

For Real

What happens when the creative persona you've constructed for yourself no longer fits who you really are or what you want to do? That's the question behind For Real. When French rapper Ichon felt like the hard-edged image he'd developed no longer worked for him, he moved back into his childhood bedroom, taught himself to play piano, and, cheered on by his mother, re-emerged as a singer-songwriter. If there are two things I love, it's music documentaries and stories of personal growth — and this sounds like it's about to tick all the boxes. -Chris Dart, CBC Arts producer

Framing Agnes

In the early 1960s, Agnes Torres — a pseudonymized transgender woman — participated in sociologist Harold Garfinkel's gender health research at UCLA, making her the first subject of an in-depth discussion of transgender identity in sociology. And while Torres's story has long been considered a pioneering moment in trans history, it's given a remarkable new platform in Chase Joynt's convention-defying film Framing Agnes. 

The film — which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, winning two major prizes — is having its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs, offering audiences its innovative approach to storytelling. Joynt teams with trans actors Angelica Ross, Zackary Drucker, Jen Richards, Max Wolf Valerio, Silas Howard and Stephen Ira to bring to life both Agnes and other other subjects in Garfinkel's research. Garfinkel's interviews now take the format of a 1950s-style talk show, with Joynt himself playing a version of Garfinkel. What results is a powerful blend of documentary and narrative filmmaking that interrogates how trans stories are told, and by whom.  -Peter Knegt, CBC Arts producer

Freedom From Everything

Prolific Canadian experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom has been creating work since the mid-1980s, with much of his early films coming out of an urgency he felt after being diagnosed with HIV (he made 27 films in the six years following his diagnosis, including Frank's Cock, which won the best Canadian short award at the Toronto International Film Festival). Hoolboom's newest film, Freedom From Everything, borrows its title from German artist Hito Steyerl's essay of the same name. Developed during Hoolboom's time in lockdowns and responding to isolation related to COVID-19, it reflects back on his experience during the AIDS pandemic — and the neoliberal agenda that has spread "like a virus" ever since. Narrated by Hoolboom and blending everything from 8mm film and video games to clips of Margaret Thatcher and David Hasselhoff, Freedom From Everything is sure to be one of Hot Docs' most provocative offerings. -Peter Knegt, CBC Arts producer

F**K IT UP!

For a very brief moment in the mid-'00s, British band Towers of London looked like they were going to be a very big deal. The glam punk outfit garnered comparisons to both Guns N' Roses and the Sex Pistols, despite having neither the musicianship of Slash or Duff McKagan, nor the creative vision of Malcolm McLaren and John Lydon. Still, between 2005 and 2007, they had five singles chart in the U.K., and were the subject of a 10-episode reality TV series, with the cameras documenting their every naughty move. They got ample press attention, sometimes for their music, but more frequently for doing things like fighting their fans, getting banned from the Download festival and having a scuffle with the drummer from My Chemical Romance.

And then it all kind of fell apart. Lead singer Donny Tourette spent 48 hours on Celebrity Big Brother before scaling a wall and running away. He followed that up with another disastrous TV appearance, going on the BBC panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, where host Simon Amstell and his fellow panelists spent the show brutally roasting him. The lead guitarist and drummer quit the band and were replaced with a revolving door of fill-ins. Their sophomore album flopped. Eventually, they broke up.

As much fun as it would be to just watch these guys implode, F**K IT UP! promises more than just a meltdown. The trailer shows the now 40ish-year-old Towers looking back at when it all went wrong, and frankly, I'm expecting a big emotional payout, deep self-reflection and some analysis on the nature of fame and what the media rewards. 

But also, if it's just the Towers flaming out, I'm still down. -Chris Dart, CBC Arts producer

Handle with Care: The Legend of The Notic Streetball Crew

Longtime Canadian basketball heads know about the Notic. In the early '00s, the streetball crew from Vancouver — a place that, even by the relatively modest standards of Canada at the time, was not a hoops hotbed — went proto-viral with their VHS mixtapes that featured acrobatic dunks and almost magical ball-on-a-rope handles, all done in alarmingly un-aerodynamic baggy shorts and Allen Iverson-inspired headbands.

What fewer people know is the story behind the Notic: how it came out of a need to use basketball as a tool for self-expression and as a reaction against some of the racism its players faced both on the court and in the world around them. -Chris Dart, CBC Arts producer

My Old School

The year is 1993, and a transfer student has just arrived at a high school in suburban Glasgow. His name is Brandon Lee (no, not the guy from The Crow). And though he fits in quickly — with students and teachers alike — Brandon doesn't seem like the other kids: he was privately tutored in Canada; he drinks chardonnay; he boasts an unusual knowledge of late-'70s post-punk; and, broadly speaking, he's considered something of a prodigy, even scoring the lead in the school musical. 

Now, I haven't seen the movie (yet), nor did I grow up in Scotland, where this story's apparently a bona fide urban legend. But I've read enough blurbs to guess there's a mighty big swindle at the core of this one — albeit something closer to Never Been Kissed than, say, The Imposter. 

But here's a twist that won't double as a spoiler: director Jono McLeod went to school with Brandon, and to tell the story, he reunites a bunch of their classmates from the time, Brandon included. The man himself won't appear on camera, so the one and only Alan Cumming subs in for Brandon on screen, lip-synching interviews in a series of re-enactments. That's not the only creative flourish that might pique your interest, though. For the flashbacks, the story gets the animated treatment, and those segments are a major homage to something Canadian '90s kids will definitely know about: the cult TV series Daria. -Leah Collins, CBC Arts senior writer

Nelly & Nadine

Nelly Mousset-Vos was an opera singer in Paris. Nadine Hwang was the daughter of a Chinese ambassador to Spain. They would meet on Christmas Eve, 1944, in the most horrifying of places: the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Winner of the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival's Teddy Award for best LGBTQ documentary, acclaimed Swedish filmmaker Magnus Gerten's Nelly & Nadine tells the unlikely love story of its titular couple, who would survive the Holocaust and go on to spend most of their lives together. Crafted through a trove of diary entries, photographs and private films discovered by Nelly's granddaughter, it offers a window into the remarkable quest of these two women to not just be free, but to be free to love one another. -Peter Knegt, CBC Arts producer

Sexual Healing

Sex is — and, for many, will always be — a taboo topic. Meanwhile, the intersection of sex, disability, age and gender adds a whole other level of complexity. But with documentaries like Somebody to Love and Take a Look at This Heart as well as scripted shows like Special and Sex Education, discussions and depictions of sex and intimacy in disabled communities has been getting a little more heat as of late. This year, Hot Docs joins the conversation with Sexual Healing, which is a film about Evelien, a middle-aged Dutch woman with a disability, who is seeking her first gratifying sexual experience. While these types of stories can be difficult to tell without exploiting, minimizing or fetishizing the protagonist in the process, the trailer starts off with a line that has stuck with me. As our heroine states: "Someone once said that intimacy and sex make you more whole as a person."

There's a lot to unpack in those words, especially when she believes that there is truly no one out there for her. If intimacy makes you more whole as a person, but you believe your barriers to intimacy to be insurmountable, then how does one fill that hole? Evelien decides it's time to take matters into her own hands.  

From sex toys to swings, lingerie to liasons, instead of continuing to be swiped left, Evelien is determined to change her previously held belief systems. Along the way, she contacts a company who organizes "intimate contact" for people with disabilities, empowering herself to swipe right for the first time in her life.

I hope by the end of this film, Evelien finds love in herself and realizes that she doesn't need another person — or two or three — to make herself whole. As she shares this intimate journey with us, what better way can we make her feel loved in turn than by giving her a standing O at its premiere? -Lucius Dechausay, CBC Unscripted Content senior video producer

The Thief Collector

What kind of person robs a museum? On some level, that's the question driving The Thief Collector, a film that appeals to the same part of the brain that compelled me and every other Netflix subscriber to binge the entirety of Lupin. But of course, this one's a true story — and it's all the stranger for it. 

In the opening acts, director Allison Otto recaps the history of a great American art heist, which baffled authorities for 32 years until the missing painting, Woman-Ochre by Willem de Kooning, turned up in rural New Mexico, hanging in the bedroom of two retired school teachers. That couple, Jerry and Rita Alter, provide the doc's true, jaw-dropping mystery. Who were these two, anyway? Just kind and quirky world travellers, as friends and family remember them? Because, if Jerry and Rita truly did swipe the painting (as everyone in the doc would seem to agree), something else must have been going on behind closed doors — more than a quiet interest in Abstract Expressionism, anyway. 

Jerry, it turns out, self-published a book before his death in 2012, and as Otto discovered, its tales of travel and adventure mirror the author's real life with discomfiting similarities. (There's a yarn about a museum heist, for example — but also one about murdering the handyman.) The doc re-enacts some of those stories alongside re-creations of the 1985 heist; Glenn Howerton (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and Sarah Minnich (Better Call Saul) play Jerry and Rita. Read more about the story behind the film here. -Leah Collins, CBC Arts senior writer

Hot Docs runs from April 28-May 8, 2022. For information about film times and tickets, head to the festival's website.