Nishta Jain Cultivate the revolutiona film about Indian farmers rising up against the new laws, won the award for best international feature documentary at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival on Friday evening.
The top jury prize at the festival means that Jain’s film, which had its world premiere at Hot Docs, will qualify for the Best Documentary Feature category at the Oscars.
Other winners included the Special Jury Prize for International Feature Documentary awarded to Death of a saint. The documentary 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 the African country 24 years earlier.
The trophy for best emerging international filmmaker was awarded to Ismael Vasquez Bernabe, director of The Weavers’ Songs, a Mexican documentary about the weavers of San Pedro Amuzgos, Oaxaca. The award for best Canadian feature documentary went to Pablo Alvarez-Mesa for Soldier’s Lagoonwhich traces Simón Bolívar’s campaign to liberate Colombia two centuries ago.
Among other awards presentations, the Special Jury Prize for Canadian Feature Documentary was awarded to directors Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee for By Any Other Means: The Jackie Shane Story, about a pioneering black trans artist from Nashville who left the spotlight at the height of her fame.
The trophy for best social impact documentary was awarded 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 to be built on Mauna Kea.
Also Friday evening, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck received an award for outstanding achievement in Toronto. The awards ceremony capped a chaotic 2024 edition of Hot Docs in which artistic director Hussain Currimbhoy and 10 programmers abruptly left the festival’s organizing team ahead of its April 25 kickoff.
A total of 15 trophies were presented Friday evening at the Center for Social Innovation in Toronto in a ceremony without media invitation due to limited capacity, Hot Docs organizers said.
The departure of Currimbhoy and her programming team led Hot Docs president Marie Nelson – the former ABC News and Disney exec who took over as CEO of the Canadian festival in June 2023 – to install Heather Haynes as as festival director and to lead the final selection of films before this year’s Hot Docs begin.
