Projects from Canadian filmmakers Barry Avrich and Michelle Shephard are set to make their world premieres at the 2023 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.

Avrich’s Without Precedent: The Supreme Life of Rosalie Abella (pictured) and Shephard’s The Man Who Stole Einstein’s Brain will screen in the Special Presentations program of the festival, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary and returns to live screenings in Toronto from April 27 to May 7.

Avrich (The Talented Mr. Rosenberg) wrote and directed Without Precedent: The Supreme Life of Rosalie Abella, and also produced through his Melbar Entertainment Group alongside Mark Selby. Avrich and Selby also serve as executive producers alongside Jonas Prince, while Rosemary Sadlier is a consulting producer on the film.

Without Precedent received funding from the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit and Ontario Creates. The 84-minute film looks at the life and pioneering career of Rosalie (Rosie) Silberman Abella, who was considered by many to be the “Canadian Ruth Bader Ginsberg” while standing up for many marginalized communities during her 17 years as a justice on the Supreme Court of Canada, according to the film’s synopsis. Appointed at 29, Abella was the youngest judge in Canadian history and became the Supreme Court’s longest-serving current member as well as Canada’s first Jewish female Supreme Court Justice.

Shephard (Guantanamo’s Child) directed The Man Who Stole Einstein’s Brain, which is from Toronto-based Frequent Flyer Films and produced by Bryn Hughes and Carolyn Abraham. The 78-minute film was part of the 2021 Hot Docs Forum under the title Possessing Einstein and traces the journey of a pathologist who performed the autopsy on Albert Einstein in 1955 and covertly stole the genius’s brain in the hopes of uncovering the secret behind his brilliance.

The film received funding from the Rogers Group of Funds in 2020, with CBC’s documentary Channel attached as a broadcaster.

A total of 12 films were announced for the Special Presentations program of feature-length docs on Tuesday (March 21), a week after the first batch was revealed, including the Davis Guggenheim-directed Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, about the Canadian-born actor’s career and his life living with Parkinson’s disease.

Hot Docs’ full selection of films will be announced at a press conference on March 28.

Other world premieres in Special Presentations include France’s The Rise of Wagner, about military company Wagner Group’s mercenaries, by director Benoît Bringer; U.S. title We Are Guardians, about Indigenous guardians of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, by Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene and Rob Grobman; and a look at “one of the world’s most famous dissidents” in U.S.-Hong Kong-U.K. copro Who’s Afraid of Nathan Law? by Joe Piscatella.

Photo: Rosalie Abella on the steps of the Supreme Court of Canada. Credit: Dave Chan