Marjolein Busstra’s House of Hope, a film about a Palestinian couple teaching young students non-violent resistance in an elementary school in the occupied West Bank, picked up the best international feature documentary prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival on Friday night.
The top jury prize win at the festival means Busstra’s film, a Palestine-Netherlands co-production that world premiered at IDFA in Amsterdam, will qualify for consideration in the best documentary feature category at the Academy Awards.
Other winners at Hot Docs include the best Canadian feature documentary prize going to Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom, a film about two families connected by Eddie Adam’s iconic photo from Oscar-nominated director Kim Nguyen. And the best emerging international filmmaker trophy went to Paikar director Dawood Hilmandi, another film from the Netherlands where the filmmaker from exile in Amsterdam reflects on life as a refugee after having to flee Iran and Afghanistan.
Other winners include the special jury prize for a Canadian feature documentary going to Banchi Hanuse for Ceremony, a film about an indigenous community in Canada’s north that earned an audience prize at SXSW, while the special jury prize for an international feature documentary went to Heidrun Holzfeind, for The 49th Year, where an anarchist imprisoned since 1980 reflects on his radical past via letters.
Elsewhere, the best social impact documentary trophy went to directors Chul Young Cho, Shin Wan Kim and Jong Woo Kim for The Seoul Guardians, a film from South Korea set around protests over martial law being declared in 2024 and during a night of chaos collective citizen resistance.
Hot Docs will unveil its audience award winners on May 3.
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