A woman makes a documentary about the search for her missing brother in Hunting Matthew Nichols. On October 31, 2001, 17-year-old Matthew Nichols and his friend Jordon Reimer disappeared after venturing into the Black Bear Forest, near the small town of Port Rupert on Vancouver Island. Over two decades later, Matthew’s younger sister Tara (Miranda…
A man recounts his time smuggling rare Pez dispensers from Europe in The Pez Outlaw. In the 1990s, Steve Glew was working a dead-end job a a machinist, while maintaining a side hobby of collecting cereal boxes. However, Steve would find his true calling when he discovered there was a lucrative collector’s market for rare…
The legend of the most dangerous amusement park of all time is recounted in Class Action Park. Gene Mulvihill is a former Wall Street tycoon, who in 1979 opened up Action Park in the small town of Vernon, New Jersey. With no regard for conventional rules, Mulvihill populated this water park with some of the…
A planned music festival turns into a complete disaster in Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. Billy McFarland was a New York based entrepreneur, who co-founded the music booking app Fyre, along with rapper Ja Rule. As a way to promote the app, McFarland decides to host a music festival on an island in the Bahamas and creates a promotional…
The events that lead up to a young woman deciding to murder her mother are broken down in Mommy Dead and Dearest. For her entire life Gypsy Rose Blanchard was publicly perceived as a wheelchair bound girl suffering from leukemia and muscular dystrophy, who received doting support of her mother Dee Dee. However, Dee Dee is…
A journalist investigates a competitive tickling league in Tickled. David Farrier is a pop culture journalist in New Zealand, who likes to focus on the weird and bizarre. One day he comes across a video for “Competitive Endurance Tickling” and decides to investigate this apparent tickling league. What he discovers is way bigger than he has ever…
A journalist investigates a competitive tickling league in Tickled. David Farrier is a pop culture journalist in New Zealand, who likes to focus on the weird and bizarre. One day he comes across a video for “Competitive Endurance Tickling” and decides to investigate this apparent tickling league. What he discovers is way bigger than he has…
A death row prisoner tells his story in The Fear of 13. After spending 23 years on death row, convicted murderer Nick Yarris decides to drop all appeals and ask to be executed. Through one highly performative monologue, Yarris tells his story and why he ultimately reached this final decision. From British documentary filmmaker David Sington comes…
My experience at Hot Docs kicked off in a big way with The Imposter. Even though it was the first film that I would see at the festival, I can say now that it is probably going to be the one to beat. The film is done in a very similar style to the films…
