Why you should care about about the Hot Docs film festival

Canada’s Hot Docs will never have the glitz or the glamour of its sister event, the Toronto International Film Festival. Nevertheless, the thriving documentary film fest is one of the most important events of its kind on the planet.

What Hot Docs may lack in red carpets and celebrities, the festival more than makes up for in the fascinating and compelling documentaries department.

One could easily argue that Hot Docs (now the largest documentary film festival in North America) has become to the documentary film what fests like TIFF and Cannes are to narrative feature films. Movies that bow at TIFF frequently end up going on to win Academy Awards (as was the case with recent Best Picture winner “12 Years a Slave”); quite often, documentaries that play at Hot Docs end up winning the Best Documentary Feature prize on Oscar night. Recent examples include James Marsh’s 2008 doc “Man on Wire” and Louie Psihoyos’ 2009 doc “The Cove” (winner of the Hot Docs Audience Prize), which both went on to win Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars.

The festival’s good track record has continued since then. Seven of the fifteen documentaries shortlisted for the Best Documentary Feature this year (“Blackfish,” “The Crash Reel,” “Cutie and the Boxer,” “God Loves Uganda,” “Pussy Riot—A Punk Prayer,” “Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington,” and “Stories We Tell”) were official selections of Hot Docs in 2013. Unfortunately, Zachary Heinzerling’s doc “Cutie and the Boxer,” which was considered a very strong contender, was the only Hot Docs film to nominated for an Oscar this year, but the calibre of Hot Docs' selections is clear.

The slate for the 21st annual Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is looking equally promising. Boasting 197 films from more than 40 countries, this year's crop of documentaries has something to offer everyone.

Highlights include "To Be Takei" (the story of iconic "Star Trek" actor George Takei's efforts to bring a musical about his time in a Japanese-American internment camp to the stage), "Super Duper Alice Cooper" (a "doc opera" about legendary rocker Alice Cooper), and "I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story" (a biography of actor and puppeteer Caroll Spinney, the man behind beloved Muppet characters like Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch).

There are also plenty of documentaries covering very serious subjects on offer, like "Children 404," a highly personal account of what life is like for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans youth in Putin's Russia. There's also Brian Knappenberger’s timely tech doc "The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz" and "The Boy From Geita," Vic Sarin's heart-wrenching doc about a young Tanzanian boy born with albinism. Not to mention"The Case Against 8," a look at the U.S. Supreme Court debate over marriage equality.

Hot Docs is now a required stopping point for the best documentary films out there. If you love documentary films, then it's definitely the place to be.

The Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival runs from April 24 to May 4 in Toronto.