Films with Manitoba connections at Hot Docs range from surreal animation to history of 2SLGBTQ+ rights

With its launch in Toronto last week, the documentary film festival Hot Docs celebrated its 32nd year in earnest after coming perilously close to dissolution last year due to money woes and key staff resignations. If one can say it has rebounded in 2025, no small credit goes to Manitoba filmmakers and Manitoba subjects.

Like the Toronto International Film Festival last September, Hot Docs has a rich abundance of Manitoba content (if not actual Manitoba productions) that, at minimum, affirms the province's plurality of talent.

The festival began with a resounding bang with the April 24 evening opening premiere of Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance at the Hot Docs Cinema, the first of 113 docs on the program. The press/industry screening and the first public screening were held back-to-back.

The National Film Board production was directed by current Winnipegger Noam Gonick and produced by former Winnipegger Justine Pimlott.

Despite being laid off from the NFB last year, Pimlott has been having an impressive run of films, including her project Any Other Way, a portrait of trans soul singer Jackie Shane that just this week won a Peabody Award in the documentary category and also won the $50,000 Rogers Documentary Prize from the Toronto Film Critics Association.

A comprehensive history of the fight for 2SLGBTQ+ rights over the past 60 years, Parade combines a history of activism and queer themes, both of which are near and dear to the hearts of Pimlott and Gonick, both children of activists.

The opening night screenings went over enthusiastically, especially since many of the activists interviewed in the film showed up for the screenings, filling the stage of the cinema with living witnesses to the events depicted.

Gonick, for one, was happy to share the stage.

"When it's just one person out there to represent all those voices, that's just not the way it should be," Gonick said in an interview after the screening. "So it was just perfect that we had, like, a photo call of 35 people.

"Svend Robinson [Canada's first MP to come out as gay] flew in all the way from Cypress just to be there that night."

Pimlott, who premiered Any Other Way at Hot Docs last year, called the festival "this incredible platform to get word out."

"At the public screening, we got a standing ovation, and most of the activists were there. So the Q&A was really taken up with these moments of these incredible people all being together in the same room, and God knows when they were last together," she said.

"The audience got a chance to be in communion with these incredible elder activists," Pimlott said. "So that was really remarkable."

Endless Cookie — perhaps the most eccentric documentary since Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg — is an animated feature centred on the lives of half-brothers and storytelling collaborators Seth and Peter Scriver. Seth, who is white, lives in Toronto, while Peter, who is white and Cree, lives in Shamattawa First Nation in northern Manitoba.

Their relationship and their larger family lives are expressed in chaotic animation. This is the closest any filmmaker has come to capturing the psychedelia of Heavy Traffic-era Ralph Bakshi, courtesy of animator Seth, who co-directed the 2013 animated road movie Asphalt Watches.

More than nine years in the making, the film went through changes, including the fact that little children seen in the beginning of the film transmogrified into adults by the end, including the title character Cookie (who, of course, is drawn as a literal cookie).

"Cookie is not a little tiny Cookie anymore," Seth said at a Q&A following the screening last Sunday. The nature of the film revealed itself during attempts to record typically clean animation dialogue, he said.

"Originally, when we started, it was going to be straight up good recording, with no interruption," said Seth. "But Pete lives in a four-bedroom house with nine kids and 16 dogs, so it's insane to try to record anything.

"So eventually, we gave into the insanity and let it go."

Will the film have a premiere in Shamattawa?

"We have to figure that out. But that's the plan," Seth said. "There's tons of people that are bugging us to see it, but only the family has seen it. But it's going to happen."

Another doc with Winnipeg roots, The Nest focuses on a Victorian mansion in the city's Armstrong's Point neighbourhood, a storied house on West Gate that was the childhood home of the film's Winnipeg-born co-director Julietta Singh.

She joined forces with co-director Chase Joynt in a lush and often startling investigation of the house's history, which includes being the residence of Métis firebrand Annie Bannatyne, housing a school for deaf people, and serving as home to a Japanese family after wartime internment, in addition to the story of Singh's mother, who raised her mixed-race children there and spent decades restoring the house to its Victorian-era glory while running it as a bed and breakfast.

"I left the house as a teenager — actually moved out when I was 15, and I left Winnipeg itself in my early 20s to go to school," said Singh, who now teaches post-colonial literature, along with gender and sexuality studies, at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

"Before the film, my experience of the house was a hard one. It was the repository of difficult family memories of filial violence, but also it was a very white and racist neighborhood when we were growing up there," Singh said.

"When we moved in, in 1980, we were told very explicitly, 'We don't want your kind around here,'" she said.

"So my coming back and forth from Winnipeg has been to visit my mother and to visit that house over many decades, and my experience of the house really shifted through the making of the film."

At 90 years old, Agatha Bock is the unlikely star of Agatha's Almanac, directed by her niece Amalie Atkins.

Over its 86-minute running time, we witness Agatha tending to her ancestral Mennonite farm in rural Manitoba, lingering over details both beautiful (buckets of ruby-red strawberries) and subtly hilarious (Agatha likes to put masking tape on objects for easy identification, such as "Very good bucket — 2003").

But viewed as a whole, the film is a testament to living a quiet, rich life.

Prior to a screening in Toronto, Agatha recalled the genesis of the film.

"She started by taking a few pictures and then eventually decided she would make a film out of it," Bock said. "And so she just kept coming and coming."

Atkins, who lives in Saskatoon, said she showed Agatha a rough cut last year, and the subject of the film maintained her honesty in her critique.

"I went for her 90th birthday, and I showed her the first hour," Atkins said. "And she said, 'You've got to cut this down!'"

There wasn't time then to watch the second hour.

"But that was enough feedback," said Atkins, laughing. "So then I went back into the film and kept arranging and cutting and trimming."

The 10-minute documentary Becoming Ruby is one of six shorts commissioned by Hot Docs to celebrate ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things.

That certainly describes Alex Nguyen, Manitoba's first drag artist-in-residence at Winnipeg's Rainbow Resource Centre in the persona of Ruby Chopstix.

Winnipeg director Quan Luong, who, like Nguyen, is of Vietnamese heritage, says it was fun to shoot Ruby in performance, but he was just as compelled by the film's quieter behind-the-scenes moments.

"The relationship between Alex and their mom was so beautiful to capture," said Luong.

Nguyen said it was a challenge to reveal the person behind Ruby's elaborate makeup.

"To make a movie about me was very scary, but very rewarding," Nguyen said, adding it was "very healing to talk about myself for once."

"I was imagining my younger self watching it," Nguyen said. "Really, this is a very impactful thing that I wish I had growing up."

Hot Docs continues in Toronto until May 4.