Film Festival Watch: 17 Sundance Institute-Supported Films to Screen at the 2026 Hot Docs Festival

Championing documentaries that illuminate and expand the artform is at the core of what we do at the Sundance Institute. It's a mission we share with the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, North America's largest celebration of nonfiction cinema.

Each spring, Toronto becomes a gathering place for nonfiction storytelling, and this year's festival, running April 23 through May 3, is no exception. Now in its 33rd edition, Hot Docs will showcase 115 films from 51 countries, and we're especially excited to see a number of titles that premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, as well as projects supported by our artist programs, including the Documentary Film Program and Artist Accelerator, featured in this year's lineup.

Watch #WhileBlack and Baby Jackfruit Baby Guava, films supported by our year-round programs. And screen 2026 Sundance Film Festival premieres Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild], winner of the Audience Award: NEXT, Birds of War, winner of the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Journalistic Impact, To Hold a Mountain, which took home the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary, and more.

Add these titles to your schedule if you're attending. And for more about the programs mentioned in this list, click here.

FEATURESAanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] - 2026 Sundance Film Festival, winner of the Audience Award: NEXT

Logline: Trapped in museum archives, Ancestors bend time and space to find their way home. History, spirituality, and the law collide as tribal repatriation specialists fight to return and rebury Indigenous human remains, offering a revealing look at the still-pervasive worldviews that justified collecting them in the first place.

American Doctor - 2026 Sundance Film Festival

Logline: When three American doctors - Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian - enter Gaza to save lives, they find themselves caught between medicine and politics, risking everything to expose the truth.

Baby Jackfruit Baby Guava - Artist Accelerator

Logline: When an unplanned baby enters the lives of a conservative mother, mentally ill daughter, and detached gay son, the dysfunctional trio travels back in time through their diaries to mend ruptured bonds and prepare for a new cycle of motherhood.

Barbara Forever - 2026 Sundance Film Festival, winner of the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award: U.S. Documentary

Logline: An archive-driven exploration of the life, work, and legacy of iconic, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.

Birds of War - 2026 Sundance Film Festival, winner of the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Journalistic Impact

Logline: The love story of a London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman as told through 13 years of personal archives across revolutions, war, and exile.

Ghost in the Machine - 2026 Sundance Film Festival

Logline: The untold origins of artificial intelligence lie not in machines but in power, revealing the fantasies behind the hype that got us here and where we go next.

Jaripeo - 2026 Sundance Film Festival

Logline: A journey to Michoac n's hypermasculine rodeos descends into the subconscious of memory, queer desire, and longing, leading to a reckoning with the wounds and beauty of a home left behind.

My Father and Qaddafi - Documentary Film Program

Logline: A daughter unravels the disappearance of her father, the peaceful opposition leader to Qaddafi, and pieces together her mother's 19-year search to find him. Without any memory of her father, she tries to reconnect with him and reconcile with her Libyan identity.

Public Access - 2026 Sundance Film Festival

Logline: An unprecedented look inside one of the greatest media experiments to hijack American screens. Rare archives from New York's underground capture a world of creators who shattered rules, defied censors, and transformed our televisions into a free-speech battleground where anyone could be a star.

Sentient - 2026 Sundance Film Festival

Logline: An investigation into laboratory research on animals exposes a hidden world in which it's not just the animals getting hurt. The story of Dr. Lisa Jones Engel, a primatologist turned animal welfare advocate, asks whether harming animals and ourselves in science's name is justified.

The Oldest Person in the World - 2026 Sundance Film Festival

Logline: A decade-long global journey chronicles the ever-changing record holders of the title of oldest person alive. What begins as a portrait of longevity becomes a meditation on the passage of time, the randomness of fate, and the joy and profound human experience of being alive.

Time and Water - 2026 Sundance Film Festival

Logline: Facing the death of his country's glaciers and the loss of his beloved grandparents, Icelandic writer Andri Sn r Magnason turns his archives into a time capsule to hold what is slipping away - family, memory, time, and water.

To Hold a Mountain - 2026 Sundance Film Festival, winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary

Logline: In the remote highlands of Montenegro, a shepherd mother and daughter proudly defend their ancestral mountain from the threat of becoming a NATO military training ground, stirring memories of the violence that shattered their family.

When A Witness Recants - 2026 Sundance Film Festival

Logline: In 1983, author Ta-Nehisi Coates learned that a 14-year-old boy was murdered in his Baltimore middle school. Upon revisiting the case, he uncovers the truth: Three innocent teenagers were wrongfully convicted and spent 36 years in prison - creating a lasting impact on the accused, the witnesses, and their community.

#WhileBlack - Documentary Film Program

Logline: Darnella Frazier, who filmed George Floyd's death, steps forward in this powerful documen

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