The 28th edition of Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival has come to a close. The fest announced the winning films in this year’s official competition and the recipients of additional awards honoring Canadian filmmakers, and women directors took home a number of prizes.
The Special Jury Prize – Canadian Feature Documentary was presented to “One of Ours,” Yasmine Mathurin’s portrait of a Haitian-born youth whose sense of identity in his Indigenous adoptive family shifts after being racially profiled at a basketball tournament. “This intimate coming of age story adeptly and lovingly examines the nuances of race, sexuality, and family relationships in present day Canada in all its glorious and heartbreaking messiness,” the jury commented. “With such exceptional access the film reassures the viewer that tenderness and acceptance and respect remain front and center of the story.”
“I made this film in an attempt to understand what it means to belong as a Haitian-Canadian and reflect on what it means to heal. In the process of this attempt, I shared a story showing that healing is not linear and that families are complex,” Mathurin told us. “I hope ‘One of Ours’ encourages folks to expand their imagination on what it means to belong and what it means to be both Indigenous and Black. I’d also hope it challenges folks to reflect on the ways anti-Black racism exists around them, whether out in the world or in their communities.”
The Emerging Canadian Filmmaker Award is given to a first or second-time Canadian filmmaker with a feature film in the Canadian Spectrum program. This year’s winner is Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers for “Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy,” a look inside her Blackfoot community’s response to the opioid crisis. The jury described the doc as a “story that remained unflinching in its treatment of an issue we’ve often seen only from the outside. The on-going tragedies are portrayed with deep familiarity and care, so every frame beams with a sense of love and support for the dignity of this unjustly wounded culture. With one fiction feature film, and now two documentary feature films to her name, Tailfeathers is a filmmaker on the rise.” Tailfeathers previously directed 2017 doc “c’sna?m: The city before the city” and co-directed 2019 drama “The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open.”
“As a filmmaker and a community member, I felt an urgency and a responsibility to document these radical changes and also honor the lives of those lost to this crisis,” Tailfeathers explained in an interview with us. “Kímmapiiyipitssini — which means giving kindness to each other — is a Blackfoot teaching that reminds us that practicing empathy and compassion is how we survive as a people. It is how our ancestors survived genocide, and it is how we, as a community, will survive this crisis. Kímmapiiyipitssini is our harm reduction.”
Svetlana Rodina and Laurent Stoop’s “Ostrov – Lost Island,” a look inside a Russian village of fisherman on an island in the Caspian Sea, won the Best International Feature Documentary Award. “The jury was taken by this gorgeous, insightful film. The access the filmmakers had was remarkable and resulted in a truly powerful cinematic experience which shows the everyday reality of people in Russia,” the jury stated.
“Getting to and working on Ostrov was not easy: the heat, the mosquitoes, and the lack of hygiene on the island, since the only way to shower is outside and there’s only one water point on the island — except for those who have wells. The telephone connections were random, depending on the wind direction. Of course, there was no internet. But the most difficult thing was getting closer to people,” Rodina revealed to us. “The islanders — who live outside the system, outside the law — were suspicious of us. They thought that maybe the police sent us, and that we wanted to sniff out specific details of their fishing business, but we didn’t search for that. We were interested in the characters, the emotions, family stories. We spent a lot of time there, almost losing hope that they would open up to us.”
Check out the rest of Hot Docs’ 2021 winners over on the fest’s website.
