With a massive, unrestricted salvage area, the Yellowknife dump is one of the last and largest open dumps in North America. People from all walks of life go there, to search for everything from tools to clothes to home décor. This documentary follows a group of passionate salvagers over five years as the dump evolves and eventually succumbs to the inexorable efforts of city bureaucrats to subject it to sensible regulations and controls.

In Bergen, we find one of Norway's largest harbor communities. The residents live close to the water, and even closer to one another.
2025
This short film tells the deeply personal and emotional journey of a father who made the life-altering decision to immigrate to Canada from Congo with his family. Narrated from his perspective, it dives into the challenges and obstacles he faced while fleeing his home country.
2025

A dialogue and home video about belonging, from young people living in modern colonial society.
2024

In 1968, Billy and Antoinette Edwards participated in a landmark documentary that would intimately observe their turbulent relationship. Over 50 years later, their son Bogart sat down to view and discuss the resulting film, A Married Couple.
2024

When Canada entered World War II, the National Film Board suddenly had an urgent new mission—and hundreds of women stepped forward, helping to create Canadian cinema as we now know it.
2024

2023

A group of musicians who have never met get together for a week to live in a mansion to write an album, record it in a studio, and perform it at a Masquerade Ball.
2020

Director Mirjam Leuze’s The Whale and The Raven illuminates the many issues that have drawn whale researchers, the Gitga’at First Nation, and the Government of British Columbia into a complex conflict. As the people in the Great Bear Rainforest struggle to protect their territory against the pressure and promise of the gas industry, caught in between are the countless beings that call this place home.
2019

In the midst of the chaos of México City, a group of eight bachelor millennials who call themselves ´The Hermits´, open the doors to their tiny apartments in the historic Ermita Building, in the yet-to-be gentrified neighborhood of Tacubaya, and share their life experiences in a time when precarity changes the way in which we love, feel and relate to each other. As we explore the homes of these eight neighbors, we also witness their personalities intersect in a Whatsapp chat, a virtual space that functions as a supporting system that helps them face the adversities that living alone in this city brings.
2019

Speedcubing is a sport where the goal is to solve a twisty puzzle as fast as possible. Alongside this emerging sport, a community full of diverse and driven individuals is steadily growing. It is impacting the next generation of youth and teaching them valuable life skills.
2018

Hot Docs will commemorate Canada's 150th anniversary of Confederation with the commissioning of In the Name of All Canadians, a compilation of six short documentaries inspired by Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. From Indigenous rights to multiculturalism to the controversial ‘notwithstanding clause,’ participating filmmakers have each selected a specific aspect of the Charter to explore, looking at how it resonates in the stories of their fellow Canadians.
2017

This documentary takes the viewer on a deeply personal journey into the everyday lives of families struggling to fight Goliath. From a family business owner in the Midwest to a preacher in California, from workers in Florida to a poet in Mexico, dozens of film crews on three continents bring the intensely personal stories of an assault on families and American values.
2005

Previously a central part of communal life, the movie palaces of New York’s Chinatown are now extinct. This documentary short takes us inside the title theater located on the Bowery, as it’s about to close its doors, with its caretakers ruefully looking back at the life that once was. Eric Lin’s poignant first film serves as a glimpse into the usually private—and, according to the Music Palace’s projectionist, “lonely”—operations of a theater, and mourns the loss of a once-vital movie-going locale.
2005

The filmed account of a large Canadian rock festival train tour boasting major acts. In the summer of 1970, a chartered train crossed Canada carrying some of the world's greatest rock bands. The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band, Buddy Guy, and others lived (and partied) together for five days, stopping in major cities along the way to play live concerts. Their journey was filmed.
2003

A paralysingly beautiful documentary with a global vision—an odyssey through landscape and time—that attempts to capture the essence of life.
1992
A Circle-Vision 360 degree film capturing the sites, sounds, and people of Canada.
1987

Gil Cardinal searches for his natural family and an understanding of the circumstances that led to his becoming a foster child. An important figure in the history of Canadian Indigenous filmmaking, Gil Cardinal was born to a Métis mother but raised by a non-Indigenous foster family, and with this auto-biographical documentary he charts his efforts to find his biological mother and to understand why he was removed from her. Considered a milestone in documentary cinema, it addressed the country’s internal colonialism in a profoundly personal manner, winning a Special Jury Prize at Banff and multiple international awards.
1987

This short documentary is part of the Canada Carries On series of morale-boosting wartime propaganda films. In Home Front, the various WWII-era social contributions of women are highlighted. From medicine to industrial labour to hospitality, education and domesticity, the service these women provided to their country is lauded.
1940
In the vastness of the Iranian desert, young artists strive for freedom, community, and the preservation of their cultural heritage in the ancient caravanserai of Deyr-e Gachin, while facing the harsh conditions of their surroundings.

“Chicago’s Titanic” the S.S. Eastland, a Great Lakes passenger ship in which 844 people lost their lives, is brought up from the seabed.
1915