Abigail Disney, Rachel Lear and Reid Davenport Films Set for 2022 Hot Docs Festival

Abigail Disney’s The American Dream & Other Fairy Tales, a documentary critical of how Disney and other big corporations treat their employees and co-directed with Kathleen Hughes, is getting an international premiere as part of the Hot Docs festival’s upcoming Special Presentation sidebar.

The U.S. indie film received its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, as did other Hot Docs picks like Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s Aftershock, a film about the crisis of Black maternal mortality in the United States; Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, about two scientists and lovers dying in a volcanic explosion; and Reid Davenport’s I Didn’t See You There, which earned the festival’s U.S. Documentary directing award.

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There are world premieres at Hot Docs for The Quiet Epidemic, directors Lindsay Keys and Winslow Crane-Murdoch’s film about the contentious medical debate around Chronic Lyme disease; Gavin Fitzgerald’s Million Dollar Pigeons, about pigeon masters competing in high-stakes bird races; and Barry Avrich’s The Talented Mr. Rosenberg.

Also headed to Toronto for Canadian premieres is Julia Bacha’s Boycott, a film about two bereaved Black fathers seeking justice from the U.S. health care system that bowed at the DOC NYC film festival; Rachel Lear’s Green New Deal doc To The End, the director’s follow-up to her AOC election film Knock Down The House; and Maria Loohufvud’s Calendar Girls.

There’s also a North American bow for Luke Griswold’s Pleistocene Park, a global warming doc about an idiosyncratic Russian geophysicist and his son transporting large woolly beasts to remote Siberia to restore the Ice Age ecosystem and help save the planet.

The 2022 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival will return from April 28 to May 8 with an in-person event in Toronto after a two-year, socially distanced hiatus that saw the Canadian festival go online.

This year, Hot Docs will also stream films online to audiences across Canada on its Hot Docs at Home virtual platform.