What's worth watching at Hot Docs 2025?

Between financial woes and staff upheaval, the Hot Docs Film Festival has been through the wringer of late, but organizers are ready to raise the curtain on another year. The event, which is considered the largest of its kind in North America, will open its 2025 edition in Toronto on April 24. 

True, the program is leaner than last year, down by more than 50 titles, but there remains an overwhelming number of stories to discover: 113 films from 47 countries, many of which champion marginalized narratives and voices. 

The CBC Arts staff has combed through the listings, and these are the docs we're most excited to see.

Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance

What better way to kick off a festival than with a parade — or a documentary about one. LGBTQ folks have been proudly utilizing parades to fight for their rights over the last 60 years, and Noam Gonick's Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance offers a uniquely Canadian history of this movement, showing how this country's queer activists and elders fought for the rights we have today. The film will open the festival on April 24, and through rarely seen archival footage and first-person accounts, audiences will have an opportunity to be inspired (and at times, enraged) by the complex history of Canada's LGBTQ rights movement.  

–Peter Knegt

The Dating Game

Few narratives are as inherently packed with emotion as the search for love and companionship, and in the post-Tinder era, the stakes have never been stranger or more desperate. That's especially the case in China, where the One Child policy (which ended in 2015) has produced a nation of lonely bros. Men outnumber women by the tens of millions, and in The Dating Game, director Violet Du Feng introduces three lovelorn bachelors who are ready to leave their rural towns for the bright lights of Chongqing. They arrive in the city for a week-long crash course in landing a wife, and their teacher, Hao, claims he can deliver them results. Under Hao's supervision, the boys will surrender themselves to a professional glow up. They'll get new wardrobes, new haircuts — and, crucially, new glamour shots for their dating profiles. But will they buy into Hao's fake-it-till-you-make-it philosophy, which may be more than a little inspired by pick-up artist techniques? The doc was reportedly an audience favourite at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where it played to "overflow crowds." Early reviews suggest the story is imbued with humour and heart. Plus, who doesn't love a good makeover sequence? 

–Leah Collins

Spreadsheet Champions

As plenty of docs have already gone to show, you can make a sport out of just about anything. Old-school arcade games (The King of Kong), spelling (Spellbound), hobbyhorse dressage (Hobbyhorse Revolution). So why not Microsoft Excel? For 20 years, the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship has been the premiere battleground for international youngsters with a genius-level knowledge of proprietary software. The event's crown jewel is its Excel competition, described by Microsoft as a "true test of analytical and problem-solving skills." And in Spreadsheet Champions, a new feature from Australian filmmaker Kristina Kraskov, we go inside the scene, following six kids to the main event in Orlando, Florida. The young all-stars of the tournament, who range in age from 13-22, are already winners in their home countries, but this is their one and only shot at international glory. Per the championship's rules, there are no repeat visits, and the stakes are higher than you might imagine. Past competitors have seen their reality change with a keystroke, going on to secure plumb jobs and academic opportunities. The film premiered at SXSW last month, where it was on several critics' must-see lists, and according to early reviews, the cast of data wizards is a fascinating bunch, exactly the sort of characters you'd hope to meet in a picture like this one. That's compelling enough to sell me on the quirky premise.

–Leah Collins

Ultras

If you've ever watched a soccer match and noticed the people in the stands chanting, waving flags, letting off road flares, jumping up and down and unveiling tremendous artworks, you've probably asked yourself a few questions. Who are they? Why are they doing that? Who cares that much about soccer? Who, frankly, cares that much about anything? Those football fiends are the ultras, and their love of the game goes beyond fandom. Theirs is an all-encompassing subculture, and in the documentary Ultras, filmmaker Ragnhild Ekner explores what motivates them and how they interact with the broader world. While making the doc, Ekner spent time in eight countries: Argentina, Egypt, Italy, Morocco, Poland, Sweden, Indonesia, and the U.K. While there, she immersed herself in the world of these misunderstood megafans. The film will have its North American premiere at Hot Docs.

–Chris Dart

Endless Cookie

Seth and Peter Scriver are half brothers who were born 16 years apart. Seth is white and was raised in Toronto. Peter is Indigenous and grew up on Shamattawa First Nation in northern Manitoba. One is a renowned cartoonist and visual artist whose animated movie Asphalt Watches won the award for best Canadian first feature film at the Toronto International Film Festival. The other is a respected storyteller, carver and trapper, who once served as chief of his First Nation. Nine years in the making, Endless Cookie is a full-length animated documentary co-directed by the siblings, and it untangles the memories and misadventures that colour their complicated relationship. Told in the younger Scriver's outlandish and psychedelic trademark style, the oddball flick premiered at Sundance earlier this year. The goal was to "make something funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple and true," Seth says in the trailer. Together, they've sketched a family portrait that appears to be heartfelt and more than just a little offbeat. But what's weirder than family, right?

–Chris Hampton

The Conscience Files

Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona is known for the abundance of fossilized trees that litter its badlands. If you're caught removing one of the specimens, you'll face a fine. But according to accounts stretching back nearly a century, you could also bring home something much worse: it's said that thieves are cursed with bad luck. People have ascribed all manners of tragedy and ruin to pinching even just a tiny rock from the park: divorce, legal trouble, unemployment, poor health and death. A longstanding display at the visitor centre exhibits some of the letters the park has received over the decades. They're penned by remorseful pilferers who would like to return what they've taken.  

Director Brian Bolster's documentary The Conscience Files will see its international premiere at Hot Docs. The short film explores these tales of woe and repentance, which form a bizarre, exceedingly human archive of regret and restitution collected by the national park. This 14-minute collage of stories is, admittedly, a bit of a wild card as far as recommendations go. But its incredible premise is just too tempting not to pick — much like the petrified wood, apparently. It screens as part of a triple bill alongside Life Invisible and Lichens Are the Way, fellow shorts that look similarly unusual, abstract and environmentally minded.

–Chris Hampton

The Nest

In my opinion, Chase Joynt is one of the most exciting Canadian voices in documentary film (No Ordinary Man, Framing Agnes), and for The Nest, he's teamed up with decolonial writer and academic Julietta Singh. Joynt and Singh co-direct the picture — a collaboration which seems poised to be a very powerful union — and the narrative follows Singh to her grand childhood home on the Assiniboine River in Manitoba. There, she listens to stories about the women who formerly lived in the house: Japanese women, Deaf women, Métis women, Indigenous women, Irish women. The film guides us through their tales — tracing 140 years of history — while reflecting on Singh's own difficult upbringing.

–Peter Knegt

Saints and Warriors

On its face, Saints and Warriors is a sports doc about the Skidegate Saints (a basketball team from the Skidegate First Nation on Haida Gwaii) and their quest to maintain dominance at the All Native Basketball Tournament. The event is the biggest basketball competition in B.C., and it doubles as the largest Indigenous cultural event in Canada. So as the Saints fight to keep their crown, they'll face stiff competition. The Saints are up against hungry young upstart squads as well as every athlete's arch nemesis: Father Time

But there's another story which takes place off the hardwood: the Haida people's fight to regain control of their traditional lands and waterways. Many of the key players in that struggle are also on the team — because the Saints aren't just hoopers, they're leaders in the community. Ultimately, this is a film about how basketball is more than a sport. It's also an act of resistance. Directed by Patrick Shannon, it will have its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs.

–Chris Dart