Pictured: Morgan Spurlock’s POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Ground zero for Canuck filmmakers at the upcoming Hot Docs festival in Toronto is the returning Canadian Spectrum competition, this year to feature 26 films, including the latest docs from Rohan Fernando, Trish Dolman and Matt Gallagher.

Hot Docs booked a world premiere for Fernando’s The Chocolate Farmer, about a Belizean cocoa plantation farmer following in the footsteps of his Mayan ancestors, and Dolman’s Eco Pirate: The Story of Paul Watson, which portrays the legendary, and controversial, co-founder of Greenpeace.

Also Toronto-bound is Montreal filmmaker Mia Donovan’s Inside Lara Roxx, a doc from EyeSteelFilm about a young Canadian woman who made world headlines for being the first female porn star to contract HIV/AIDS while working in Hollywood. The film grapples with the impact of that tragedy long after the paparazzi lenses have disappeared.

Hot Docs also programmed several war and conflict pics: Thomas Selim Wallner’s The Guantanamo Trap, which follows four lives forever changed by the infamous U.S. detention camp; The Pirate Tapes, a Canadian hidden camera footage film about a Somali pirate cell from Matvei Zhivov, Roger Singh, Andrew Moniz, and Rock Baijnauth; and Igal Hecht’s The Hilltops, an investigation into the Middle East peace process.

Other competition entrants from Canada are Joel Heath’s People of a Feather, set in the Arctic north; Shannon Walsh’s St-Henri, The 26th of August, about next-generation Quebec filmmakers revisiting the storied neighborhood; and Jaret Belliveau’s Highway Gospel, about highway longboard racers.

Typical of docs where the directors are front and centre is Matt Gallagher’s Grinders, where the Canadian filmmaker, out of work and with a new baby, penetrates the world of high-stakes poker.

Hot Docs will open this year on April 28 with U.S. filmmaker Morgan Spurlock’s POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, an expose about product placement unashamedly financed by product placement, marketing and advertising.

The opening night film comes to Hot Docs via distributor Mongrel Media.

In all, around 2000 doc submissions were boiled down to 199 titles from 43 countries to unspool at Hot Docs’ upcoming 18th edition.

Hot Docs director of programming Sean Farnel said indie doc makers this year are busily rejigging the medium amid reduced film financing and new market opportunities.

“What we’re seeing is a form reinventing itself. We have scripted docs, 3D docs, directors becoming fictional characters in their own films,” he said.

“Non-fiction continues to expand, to deal with stories and issues of our times. We haven’t lost sight of the stories themselves,” Farnel added.

The festival is boosting its slate by around 30%, and will screen films for the first time in satellite Toronto neighbourhoods, including The Beaches and Roncesvalles.

In addition to the Special Presentations program already unveiled, Hot Docs also booked 34 docs in the international spectrum sidebar, including Mexican filmmaker Bulmaro Osornio’s Fly; Belgian filmmaker Lotte Stoops’s Grande Hotel; Danfung Dennis’s Hell and Back Again, about soldiers in Afghanistan and at home; and Peter D. Richardson’s How to Die in Oregon, the Sundance winner about terminally ill patients.

Another 39 films are Toronto-bound for the world showcase program. These include world premieres for Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley’s Battle For Brooklyn, about a community fight against property development; Jenifer McShane’s Mothers of Bedford, a portrait of five mothers inside a New York maximum security women’s prison; and Antony Butts’s After the Apocalypse, where two mothers near a nuclear testing site fight to keep their unborn children.

The Hot Docs Forum is returning to help indie doc makers finance their projects, with the potential help of around 300 funders, buyers and distributors on hand for the film financing market.

The Forum will also hand out a $40,000 prize to the best Canadian doc pitch, courtesy of the Shaw Media Hot Docs completion fund.

Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary festival, is set to run from April 28 to May 8, with awards to be handed out on May 6.