The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is set to open with Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions, about the 1980s and 1990s Canadian queer trailblazer, organizers said Tuesday.
The doc feature from director Michelle Mama centers on “High School Confidential” singer Carole Pope, who broke barriers for gay musicians on Canadian radio in the 1980s as co-lead of the Rough Trade rock band.
“Carole Pope arrived on the music scene like a meteor, writing about love and lust and queerness in ways nobody had ever seen. A film about her life is long overdue and it was my honor to be the one to bring it to the screen,” Mama said in a statement about the film with appearances by k.d. lang, Peaches, Jann Arden and Rufus Wainwright.
News of the festival opener on April 23 came as a scaled-down Hot Docs released its full film lineup of 80 features for its 33rd edition in Toronto after a chaotic 2024 edition and a leadership and boardroom overhaul.
For its 2026 edition, the festival booked world premieres for Oscar-nominated War Witch director Kim Nguyen’s Vietnam War memory doc Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom, from the National Film Board of Canada; Shalini Kantayya’s Love Apptually, about dating app algorithms; Raha Shirazi’s A War on Women, about 40 years of feminist resistance by Iranian women against the Islamic Republic; The 49th Year, about an imprisoned anarchist and directed by Heidrun Holzfeind; and Andrea Suwito’s A Distant Call, about local tradition and modern faith in a remote Indonesian community.
Ceremony
Hot Docs Festival
There’s also world premieres for Faraz Fadaian’s LandStone, about an elderly man and his wife living in a handmade cave in Iran; Parasisi, directed by Zaïde Bil and Sébastien Segers; Stories for Sandro, director Giacomo Boeri’s portrait of his father after he is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; Hamed Zolfaghari’s Vanishing Tracks, about a family in Iran’s remote nomadic landscape; and Vegapolis, from director Micha Barban Dangerfield.
Hot Docs will also screen around 30 Canadian features, including the SXSW documentary spotlight audience award winner Ceremony from filmmaker Banchi Hanuse; and world premieres for Sébastien Trahan’s Code of Misconduct, about five Canadian pro hockey players on trial for sexual assault; Ryan Ermacora and Jessica Johnson’s Concrete Turned to Sand; Ree Wright and Meaghan Wright’s The Last Days of April, about a disabled advocate living with a tethered spinal cord and chronic pain; director Rico King’s Nekai Walks; and Evan Adams and Eileen Francis’s təm kʷaθ nan Namesake, where a request from the Tla’amin Nation to change the name of Powell River, British Columbia ignites a heated local debate.
The latest additions to Hot Docs join earlier announced world premieres for Kenny Loggins: Conviction of the Heart, directed by Tony-winning Broadway producer Dori Berinstein; and Mark Myers’ The Tower That Built a City, about Toronto’s skyline-defining CN Tower and its surroundings.
Hot Docs, to run April 23 to May 3, will also include industry events and programs.
LandStone
Hot Docs Festival
