Year after year, TIFF Docs tends to be populated by glossy, formally conventional, commercial fare—occasionally punctuated by works from prolific documentarians and festival award winners. Nonfiction works marked by innovation and ambition are pushed to the periphery, a consistent gesture that betrays what the festival regards as “best” in the arena of nonfiction cinema. Here and elsewhere, I couldn’t help but feel the subtle repositioning of the festival in anticipation of the impending launch of TIFF’s official market in 2026. Invitations to seek hidden, artistically driven gems, to interrogate the collapsing of boundaries between fiction and nonfiction remained open across other programs such as Wavelengths and Centrepiece.
Hybrid Docs
Working as a volunteer nearly two decades ago, Australian filmmaker Gabrielle Brady lived in and traveled all around Mongolia for 18 months. She
Martha Coolidge made her mark in Hollywood directing films like Valley Girl, Real Genius, and Rambling Rose, but before all that, she was breaking
“I don’t think of myself as a documentary filmmaker”: Documentary spoke with Kienitz Wilkins to discuss his methodology, his thoughts on documentary’s relationship to his work, and the festival landscape at large.
In 2018, to an audience of a dozen or so people at the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, Zia Anger gave a presentation of some of her abandoned work
Tommaso Santambrogio’s Oceans Are the Real Continents (2023), which opens on a black-and-white shot of an older Cuban woman sweeping her doorway
There’s a scrappiness behind Memory’s sleek exterior and dedicated cult following. The L.A.-based production company has only two full-time employees: its founders Sebastian Pardo and Riel Roch-Decter. The duo sought to create both a low-budget dream factory for passion projects and a sustainable network of filmmakers working in the DIY ethos of the 2000s, but with the stylistic inclinations of tidier, higher-budget productions.
Softening the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, the films of French-Canadian director Antoine Bourges are marked by their hybrid nature and
Brit Fryer is an award-winning queer and trans filmmaker based in Brooklyn with a creative approach that blurs the lines between fact and fiction. His most recent film, The Script, is co-directed with frequent collaborator Noah Schamus and part of Queer Futures, a Multitude Films series consisting of four short films that celebrate joy and connection while envisioning future possibilities for queer life.
Though staying in her home region of Appalachia, documentarian Elaine McMillion Sheldon departs from her vérité beginnings in her latest feature, King