Hot Docs (www.hotdocs.ca), North America’s largest documentary festival, conference, and market, takes place each spring in Toronto, Canada, presenting more than 230 lms to audiences numbering over 200,000.
Hot Docs also mounts a full roster of conference sessions and market events and services, including the renowned Hot Docs Forum, Hot Docs Deal Maker and The Doc Shop, for the more than 2000 attending industry delegates.
Year round, Hot Docs, in partnership with Blue Ice Group, programs and operates the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, one of the world’s first and only documentary focussed cinemas. With screening series and initiatives such as Doc Soup, the Bell Media Hot Docs Showcase and Bell Media Best of Hot Docs Weekend, Hot Docs and its partners bring documentaries to screens across Canada, including in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary.
Online, the Hot Docs Collection is featured on iTunes in Canada, Australia, and the USA, as well as numerous VOD platforms across Canada and the US.
Each year, Docs For Schools, Hot Docs’ wildly popular education program, offers more than 90,000 students from over 300 Ontario schools the experience of outstanding documentaries during the Festival and throughout the school year for free. Teachers are provided with educational resource packages tailored to each lm and related to curriculum and are invited to participate in an annual conference that offers professional development in the use of documentaries as teaching tools.
Production funds administered by Hot Docs have provided $3.8 million to Canadian and international documentary projects. The Corus-Hot Docs Documentary Funds provide development and completion support to Canadian documentary filmmakers; Hot Docs-Blue Ice Group Documentary Fund provides production and professional development support to African filmmakers
living and working on that continent; and the CrossCurrents Doc Fund supports emerging international filmmakers from underrepresented communities with funding for both short to mid-length and feature-length theatrical documentary projects, in partnership with the R&M Lang Foundation and the Panicaro Foundation. Hot Docs also supports the professional development of emerging filmmakers through such programs as documentary Channel Doc Accelerator and Corus Diverse Voices.