GOP Primary, Pussy Riot Films Highlight Hot Docs Lineup

OTTAWA – Canada’s Hot Docs film festival on Wednesday booked world premieres for A.J. Schnack’s Caucus, a look at Republican candidates competing at the Iowa caucus amid county fairs and petting zoos, and Prepare For The Worst, Barry Avrich's portrait of Canadian comedy icon David Steinberg.

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The theatrical documentaries are among 28 titles Hot Docs unveiled for its Special Presentations sidebar for its upcoming April 25 to May 5, 2013 edition.

Gus Holwerda's The Unbelievers, about scientists Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss, will also bow in Toronto.

And Hot Docs programmers scheduled earlier festival award winners like Steve Hoover’s Blood Brother, which won the documentary Grand Jury and audience choice prizes at Sundance.

Other Sundance award winners bound for Toronto include Dawn Porter’s Gideon’s Army, Mike Lerner and Maxium Pozdorovkin’s Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer, and the Georgian documentary The Machine That Makes Everything Disappear, by director Tinatin Gurchiani.

There’s also international premieres in Toronto for Martha Shane and Lana Wilson’s After Tiller, about doctors willing to provide third-trimester abortions in the U.S., the Anita Hill biopic Anita, by Freida Mock, and Jason Osder’s Let The Fire Burn, which recounts a fateful 1985 Philadelphia police bombing of a row house occupied by the radical group Move.

And there’s an international bow for Greg Camalier’s Muscle Shoals, where Mick Jagger, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Gregg Altman, Bono and others share how the tiny backwater town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama helped make them stars.

The 2013 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival will unveil its full lineup on March 19, including the opening night film.