Alison Duke to receive Hot Docs’ 2024 Don Haig Award

The $5,000 annual Hot Docs award will be presented to Duke in a ceremony on May 3.

Hot Docs will honour Canadian writer-producer-director Alison Duke (pictured) with the prestigious Don Haig Award at the 2024 Hot Docs Awards on Friday (May 3).

The $5,000 Don Haig Award is presented to an outstanding Canadian indie producer with a feature-length film at the festival, as selected by a jury of independent filmmakers. The award recognizes creative vision and entrepreneurship, as well as a track record of mentoring emerging Canadian filmmakers.

Duke is a co-founder of Oya Media Group, as well as an accomplished writer/producer/director with a two-decade track record. Her first feature doc, Raising Kane: A Rapumentary, gained acclaim at the Urbanworld Film Festival in New York City, winning the HBO award for best documentary and setting the stage for her career.

She has collaborated as a producer on numerous feature docs, including Andrew Nisker’s Garbage: The Revolution Starts at Home, Dany Chiasson’s My Joan of Arc and Thomas Allen’s Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photography and the Emergence of a People, and helmed several powerful social justice films across genres.

Duke made her dramatic debut with the short film Promise Me, which screened at more than 30 festivals and earned numerous awards, including two Golden Sheafs for best direction and best scripted for fiction at the 2021 Yorkton Film Festival. In 2021, she became the first Black woman to direct a Heritage Minute for Historica Canada on Chloe Cooley.

She is a co-producer on the doc A Mother Apart alongside fellow Oya Media Group co-founder Ngardy Conteh George and the National Film Board of Canada’s Justine Pimlott. The film is making its world premiere in the Persister program.

“I am humbled and honoured to receive this award, and I am grateful to Hot Docs for this recognition,” said Duke. “When my partner, Ngardy Conteh George, and I joined forces to found Oya Media Group in 2018, we did so to bring an authentic perspective to screen-based platforms through socially relevant, life-changing stories that amplify Black experiences. We are deeply connected and inspired by our community, and we recognize that our stories must be told as we strive for the highest calibre of quality and professionalism.”

Past winners of the award include producers Bonnie Thompson (2023), Mila Aung-Thwin (2022) and Lalita Krishna (2021), among others.

Image courtesy of Hot Docs