Mexican refugee crisis film takes top jury prize at Hot Docs Fest

Mexican refugee crisis film takes top jury prize at Hot Docs Fest

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival on Friday, May 5 night handed its top jury prize to a film about Mexico's immigration crisis, The Hollywood Reporter reveals.

Mexican director Pau Ortiz's film The Other Side of the Wall, about two undocumented Honduran immigrants forced to fend for themselves after their mother is jailed in Mexico on trumped up charges, nabbed the best international feature doc prize.

And Irish filmmaker Chris Kelly's A Cambodian Spring, a documentary about land rights in Cambodia, earned a special jury prize in the international feature doc category. The prize giving at North America's biggest documentary festival follows 230 films from 58 countries, of which 48 percent were directed by women, unspooling in Toronto over an 11-day run.

A special jury prize in the Canadian feature documentary category went to Resurrecting Hassan, by Carlo Guillermo Proto, a film about a family make a living singing a cappella ballads in the Montreal subway system. That came before the best Canadian feature documentary trophy went to Charles Officer's Unarmed Verses, a film about young black women and race issues in a Toronto social housing complex facing relocation.

And the trophy for best short doc went to Tamta Gabrichidz's Sovdagari, while the best mid-length documentary prize went to Death in the Terminal, directed by Asaf Sudry and Tali Shemesh. The Israeli film won the same best mid-length doc trophy at IDFA.

Elsewhere, Hot Docs tapped Norwegian filmmaker Egil Håskjold Larsen to win its 2017 emerging international filmmaker award for his feature directorial debut, 69 Minutes of 86 Days. The film about the Syrian crisis follows a three-year-old refugee from Greece to Sweden.

And Francois Jacob was named winner of the best emerging Canadian filmmaker, for his film A Moon of Nickel and Ice, about a closed-off Russian Siberian town.

Hot Docs opened on April 27 with a world premiere of Lana Slezik's debut feature documentary, Bee Nation, a film about an indigenous spelling bee. The festival wraps on Sunday.

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