The 12th annual Hot Docs, April 22 to May 1, marked the Toronto doc fest’s biggest and busiest year to date. Audiences grew, delegate numbers were up and, with documentaries becoming a hotter commodity for broadcasters and theatrical distributors internationally, market events were busier than ever.

‘Everything is tracking way ahead,’ said festival director Chris McDonald of growing audience and industry attendance, with three days still to go. ‘So far we’ve had almost twice as many sold-out screenings as last year.’ Public attendance rose to 41,000 this year, up from 37,000 in 2004.

Min Sook Lee’s Hogtown: The Politics of Policing, for example, was given a second screening on May 1 after its April 23 debut. The feature-length doc exposing political pressure, scandals and bad behavior of the Toronto Police Services Board, found an international audience despite its local subject matter.

‘I wondered how Hogtown was going to play for audience members from outside Toronto, but people from out of town really liked it and responded to something universal about the subject matter,’ said McDonald, hours before the film won best Canadian feature doc at Hot Docs’ awards. The ceremony was held April 29 at the Isabel Bader Theatre, with host George Stroumboulopoulos of CBC’s The Hour.

Oscar-winning American filmmaker Errol Morris received Hot Docs’ Outstanding Achievement Award this year. Throughout the festival, Hot Docs screened a retrospective of Morris’ philosophical docs, including the feature The Thin Blue Line.

Other Canadian winners this year included André-Line Beauparlant, who was honored with best director in the Canadian Spectrum for her feature doc Little Jesus, a portrait of a family dealing with a seriously disabled child. Nadja Drost’s Between Midnight and the Rooster’s Crow won best Canadian short, and Jeremy Munce’s The Alma Drawings won best director in the short category. This year’s audience award went to Marshall Curry’s Street Fight, an American feature-length doc about Cory Booker, an African-American mayoralty candidate for Newark, NJ, and the race and democracy issues raised by his candidacy.

McDonald says the growing popularity of documentary film makes the festival a more important event for commissioning broadcasters and, to a growing extent, theatrical distributors. This year there were 1,700 industry delegates, up from 1,500 last year.

‘Having that critical mass of buyers and broadcasters at the festival helps us attract higher-profile films and filmmakers,’ he says, explaining that market events running concurrently with the cultural festival creates an atmosphere well suited to doing business. ‘I know a lot of the broadcasters go to the public screenings and are interested in seeing how films play to audiences.’

According to National Film Board president Jacques Bensimon, it’s not only the festival’s size that is increasing, but its usefulness to the domestic industry.

‘There is no doubt that over the years Hot Docs has moved up quite a few notches and has truly become a professional endeavor,’ he says, adding that he hopes the festival will find ways to reclaim the sense of energy and intimacy it had before expanding beyond Toronto’s Little Italy neighborhood in 2003.

Another key issue Hot Docs will face in the coming years, according to Bensimon, are changes in the doc market resulting from the growth of digital distribution via the Internet, much discussed at this year’s MIPTV.

‘Documentary film is not going to escape [digital distribution]. On the contrary, it is going to be one of the formats that works very well,’ he says. And it’s a good thing, too, because ‘Canada’s not very good in the old traditional model of distribution. There are very few exporters in Canada for docs abroad.’

‘The content of our films as Canadians is more and more international, universal, and reaching out to the world, but our systems of distribution are not yet on par with the filmmakers’ message,’ he says.

This makes Hot Docs all the more important as a venue for showcasing Canadian docs to commissioning editors and buyers from around the world. One of the things that distinguishes Canadian docs, according to Canadian Spectrum programmer David McIntosh, is diversity of content and esthetic approach.

‘Canadian filmmakers are speaking directly and eloquently about specific Canadian issues, such as Hogtown, but also from a very comfortable international perspective, which points to a vital production community,’ says McIntosh.

Director Helene Klodawsky’s No More Tears Sister: Anatomy of Hope and Betrayal, for example, tells the story of Rajani Thiranagama, an activist and feminist in Sri Lanka who was assassinated in 1989, from the perspective of her Canadian family.

Global themes were a distinguishing characteristic of Canadian pitches made at the Toronto Documentary Forum, held April 27-28 at the University of Toronto.

Kike Like Me, a darkly comic look at what its like to be Jewish in the world today, was well received. Jamie Kastner pitched the project with commissioning broadcaster Rudy Buttignol of TVO, and it was a clear fave around the table, although several commissioning editors suggested a less provocative title.

SPAM: The Documentary, pitched by Jeannette Loakman, Sally Blake and director Dave Manning, with commissioning broadcaster Andrew Johnson of CBC, is a humorous look at the serious world of Internet spam. Blood Sweat & Code – How Computer Games are Transforming the World, pitched by Rachel Low and Marc de Guerre, with commissioning broadcaster Jerry McIntosh of the CBC, is about how computer games are changing the world. Both pitches were well received, with immediate interest expressed by at least one broadcaster.

Throughout the two-day event, commissioning editors were more active than usual. ‘This is the TDF’s most successful year yet in terms of responses to projects,’ says TDF director Michaelle McLean.

When Kevin Dunn from Winnipeg-based MidCanada Entertainment and CTV’s Bob Culbert pitched As Seen on TV: The K-Tel Story, a doc that looks at the history of the Winnipeg-based company, broadcasters jumped on board immediately. By the end of the day, Dunn had two offers from Australia, one from SBI and another from ABC, as well as a firm ‘oui’ from Jean-Pierre Laurendreau of Quebec-based Canal D.

‘Hot Docs for me this year has proven to be my most successful market to date,’ says Dunn. ‘I would attribute that to the TDF and the instantaneous meetings arranged and offers made.’

-www.hotdocs.ca