Twenty-six-year-old filmmaker Bryan Friedman capped the Hot Docs awards evening on Friday, garnering the best Canadian feature documentary prize and $5,000 for his debut full-length film The Bodybuilder and I.

Hosted by broadcaster and documentarian Avi Lewis, the ceremony at Toronto’s Isabel Bader Theatre was markedly funnier and richer than in previous years and saw more than $50,000 in cash prizes awarded to documentary filmmakers.

Family stories dominated the awards this year, with three of the six juried prizes going to films documenting dramatic blood ties. Arturo Cabanas’ Man Up (U.S.), a devastating look at the humiliating tough love dished out by a former U.S. Army Ranger to his son, won best short documentary, while the Canadian Forgiveness: Stories for our Time, a quartet of stories on loved ones coping with the death of family members, won best mid-length for Johanna Lunn.

The Bodybuilder and I follows the director’s estranged 59-year-old father to what will likely be his last major fitness competition.

By contrast, the winners among international features made more political films. Without the King, about the autocratic monarchy of Swaziland, won the international special jury prize, while Losers and Winners, about the effect of globalization as an industrial plant is moved from Germany to China, was the international winner.

Young filmmakers Hubert Davis and Trevor Anderson won, respectively, the Don Haig Award and the Lindalee Tracey Award, while legendary Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann took the outstanding achievement award. The Haig prize goes to a young filmmaker with an exemplary body of work, while the new Tracey award, named after the late writer/director, is for an emerging director whose films embody a strong sense of social justice and a personal point of view.

Serge Giguère’s Driven by Dreams, which records the passions of aging Quebecois, won a special jury prize in the Canadian feature category.