Nishta Jain’s Farming the Revolution, a film about Indian farmers rising up against new laws, picked up the best international feature documentary prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival on Friday night.
The top jury prize win at the festival means Jain’s film, which world premiered at Hot Docs, will qualify for consideration in the best documentary feature category at the Academy Awards.
Other winners included the special jury prize for the international feature documentary went to Death of a Saint. The doc follows director Patricia Bbaale Bandak as she returns to her birthplace in Uganda after giving birth to her own daughter on the same day her mother was killed by two gunmen in that African country 24 years earlier.
The best emerging international filmmaker trophy went to Ismael Vasquez Bernabe, director of The Weavers’ Songs, a Mexican doc about weavers in San Pedro Amuzgos, Oaxaca. The best Canadian feature documentary award went to Pablo Alvarez-Mesa for The Soldier’s Lagoon, which retraces Simón Bolívar’s campaign to liberate Colombia two centuries ago.
In other prize-giving, the special jury prize for a Canadian feature documentary was given to directors Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee for Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, about a pioneering Black trans performer from Nashville who left the spotlight at the height of her fame.
The best social impact documentary trophy went to Erin Lau and Amber Espinosa-Jones for Standing Above the Clouds, which chronicles the journey of three Native Hawaiian families to defend their sacred mountain where a telescope is set to be built on Mauna Kea.
Also Friday night, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck received an outstanding achievement award in Toronto. The prize-giving capped off a chaotic 2024 edition for Hot Docs that included artistic director, Hussain Currimbhoy, and 10 programmers abruptly leaving the festival organizing team ahead of its kick-off on April 25.
In all, 15 trophies were handed out on Friday night at the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto during a ceremony with no media invited due to limited capacity, Hot Docs organizers said.
The departure of Currimbhoy and his programming team led Hot Docs president Marie Nelson — the former ABC News and Disney exec who took the helm at the Canadian festival in June 2023 — to install Heather Haynes as festival director and to lead the final film picks ahead of this year’s Hot Docs getting underway.