I’m always so happy after going to Hot Docs. This year, the festival saw its largest audience attendance, and rightly so. The quality of the programming was consistently excellent, and I can confirm that every film I saw was pretty great. 

Doug Block’s The Kids Grow Up was first on my plate, soon after my arrival in Toronto. The documentary depicts the filmmaker—a loving parent—figuring out how to let go of his college-bound child. Block’s approach is self-reflexive and he clearly is interested in his accountability as filmmaker and parent. You feel like the subjects in the film—mainly, his daughter and his wife—have agency. They frequently exercise it by calling out the flaws inherent in a project in which recorded memories take the place of lived ones. It was also nice to briefly catch up with the doc’s producer, the smart and affable Lori Cheatle, whom I met at the IFP Documentary Rough Cut Lab in April. This kid wants to be Lori when he grows up. 

The Regretters, by Marcus Lindeen, is a Swedish doc with an intriguing premise: two men who had opted to become women and then transitioned back to being male. The style of the film has the two characters interview each other. Although their stories are factually similar, they are also unique. Shy Mikael faced so much rejection from female partners that he believed the only way to find love was to become the woman he desired. Orlando, on the other hand, came of age at a moment in history in which being gay was illegal and dangerous. Since he was attracted to men, he concluded that becoming a woman was the way to love men. It was poignant to see that Orlando was at peace with his life choices, while Mikael was still struggling with how to be in the world, no matter what his sex or gender identity. 

The next film on my slate was A Small Act, in which the incredible team composed of director/producer Jennifer Arnold and co-producers Patti Lee and Jeffrey Soros highlight an amazing story: How one Holocaust survivor who sought refuge in Sweden and became a teacher helped finance a young Kenyan’s secondary school education. The latter would go on to Harvard and the United Nations, where he advocates for the human rights of refugees. The film features such remarkable characters and it looks stunning, thanks to Lee, doing double duty as Director of Photography. 

Another fantastic female D.P. represented at the festival was Kirsten Johnson, who shot Laura Poitras’ The Oath. This documentary tells the tale of two men bound by their ties to Osama bin Laden. The irony she highlights is that while Abu Jindal, the man who was closest to bin Laden, is free and driving a cab in Yemen; his brother-in-law, Salim Hamdam, who was a mere driver for bin Laden, is on trial at Guantanamo. Jundal is a talker and I wondered what was the impulse behind his revelations. I don’t feel like I quite got that from him, though, and he remained an opaque character.     

A definitely more open personality is the title character in Cameron Yates’ Canal Street Madam. While the doc is a portrait of New Orleans madam Jeanette Maier, it also argues the case that the criminalization of prostitution is a measure taken by an oppressive and misogynist State. Yates uses different types of footage—from home movies, news reports, F.B.I. wiretaps, and original material he shot—to drive this point. Maier is a charismatic woman. As an audience, I spent 90 minutes with her, and although she reveals many of her views on sex, family, and power, I still felt like I missed her motivations.

Not-so-obscure motivations guide a middle-aged man to construct a fantasy village, populate it with Barbies and action figures, create elaborate storylines to go along with the set-up, and capture the scenes in astonishingly cinematic photographs. This is precisely what Mark Hogencamp does in Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol. Actually, Hogencamp was creating and living Marwencol long before Malmberg got to him with his camera. The former had been living in upstate New York, and was beaten up senseless by a group of men. He was maimed so badly, he lost sensory skills and his memory. Events in his life—his marriage, for example—were facts for him only because he had the photos to prove them. The village of Marwencol was born after his beating, and becomes a way for Hogencamp to work through his trauma.

An undercurrent of this year’s Hot Docs was its emphasis on showcasing the work of female filmmakers. One of those filmmakers was Kim Longinotto, who received a much-deserved retrospective. As an audience member, I feel lucky that she’s so prolific, as witnessed by all the films represented in the festival. I managed to catch only one, Sisters-in-Law, a verite look at two female judges who are helping to bring justice to several women and children in Kumba, Cameroon. She is one of my favorite documentarians, whose love for her subjects and faith in their lives shows in her films, and whose warm and genuine personality comes through in her Q&As.

Another highlight of Hot Docs is the enthusiastic audiences that come to the screenings. It helps that the festival makes the films free to attend for students with ID and senior citizens for shows before 6 p.m. Still, it’s heartening for filmmakers to have packed theaters at 11 a.m. on a Thursday morning! Packed screenings, along with helpful volunteers, lovely theater venues (the Bloor and Isabel Bader theaters, Innis Town, Hall, Cumberland Cinemas, etc.), spelt apple cranberry muffins from Urban Herbivore (food in Kensington Market, in general), and the occasional donut at Tim Horton’s, make Hot Docs one of my favorite film festivals.