Hot Docs, Canadian Documentary Film Festival handed out this year’s festival awards on Friday evening.

Best Canadian Feature Documentary

INVISIBLE CITY
Director: Hubert Davis
Producers: Mehernaz Lentin, Gerry Flahive
Executive Producer: Silva Basmajian (NFB)
Once, Mikey and Kendell’s friends boasted they’d never get in trouble and never sell drugs, but by age 15 half of them have done just that. In this beautifully shot and intimate documentary, Oscar-nominated director Hubert Davis reaches beyond his own story-so eloquently captured in Hardwood-to follow two charismatic Regent Park boys as they make the transition from youth to manhood. Each runs into trouble with police, the courts, and school authorities despite having mothers whose love is palpable and Morgan’s heroic attempt at mentoring. With none of the privileges of wealth and all of the prejudices of poverty, with absent fathers, a landscape of half-demolished buildings, vacant lots and systemic racism stacked against them, the boys struggle to turn their lives around. Lynne Fernie.
$15,000 prize courtesy of the Brian Linehan Charitable Foundation

Special Jury Prize - Canadian Feature

WATERLIFE
Director: Kevin McMahon
Producers: Michael McMahon, Kristina McLaughlin, Gerry Flahive
Executive Producers: Mark Achbar, Betsy Carson, Michael McMahon, Silva Basmajian (NFB)

This stunning ode to the last great supply of fresh water on earth, the Great Lakes, immerses us in their extraordinary beauty, ecological complexity, and extreme state of distress. Under assault on all fronts by a deadly combination of industrial toxins, sewage, invasive species, climate change, and profound apathy, they are on the verge of irreversible collapse. Director Kevin McMahon (recipient of the 2007 Hot Docs Focus On retrospective) navigates with fluid clarity through industrial intervention and natural splendor, from northern Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean, using breathtaking cinematography and CGI to show us the waters 35 million of us drink every day. Propelled by a soaring, evocative soundtrack, this eloquent poetic essay allows us to absorb hard information gracefully balanced with a visceral understanding of how we are inextricably linked to the fate of these waters, transforming the way we think and inspiring us act before it’s too late. Gisèle Gordon.
Sponsored by the Brian Linehan Charitable Foundation
$10,000 prize courtesy of the Brian Linehan Charitable Foundation

Best International Feature Documentary

THE ONE MAN VILLAGE
Director/Producer: Simon El Habre
Producers: Jad Abi-Khalil, Irit Neidhardt

Ever since he was a kid, Semaan El Habre has wanted to raise cows. Sick of the pollution and crowds of the city, he moved to the abandoned village of Aïn el-Halazoun, where he lives a quiet, peaceful life. At one time, 45 families lived in this picturesque village in a valley near Beirut. But the villagers were displaced during a 15-year civil war. Some of them have returned, if only in the spring and fall, to maintain the land. “We can’t neglect the land, of course,” one of them says. “We can neglect ourselves but not the land. Our children know nothing about land and planting. When our generation passes away no one will visit anymore.” Beautifully filmed, quirky and affectionate, The One Man Village is a poetic ode to one man’s attempt to preserve a pastoral way of life.
Sponsored by A&E
$10,000 prize courtesy of Hot Docs

Special Jury Prize - International Feature

COOKING HISTORY
Director/Producer: Peter Kerekes
Producers: Georg Misch, Pavel Strnad
Executive Producer: Ralph Wieser

Who would have imagined that wars could also be fought with pots, pans, and pepper shakers? Military chefs have a unique, and until now, unshared influence on the battlefield. “A hungry soldier doesn’t feel safe,” explains a sausage-wielding army cook. Feeding troops is a tactical strategy used to truly astounding results in major European conflicts of the 20th century. A Russian woman’s meat blintzes provide 11 million soldiers the necessary courage to conquer in the Second World War. A Jewish prison camp breadmaker executes a plan against his Nazi captors with the only tools at his disposal. Tito’s personal chef shares the state dinner menus whose warring national cuisines foretell the Balkan War itself. By turns wry and rousing, the personal stories of history’s forgotten witnesses quietly humanize war’s unrecorded battles and their costs. Six wars, 10 recipes, and 60,361,024 dead - Cooking History is a fascinating retelling of the past. Myrocia Watamaniuk.
$5,000 prize courtesy of Hot Docs

Best Mid-Length Documentary
RABBIT À LA BERLIN
Director: Bartek Konopka
Producer: Anna Wydra
Sponsored by Canada Council for the Arts
$3,000 prize courtesy of Hot Docs

Best Short Documentary
THE DELIAN MODE
Director/Producer: Kara Blake
Producer: Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre
Sponsored by Playback
$3,000 prize courtesy of Hot Docs

documentary’s Don Haig Award
Brett Gaylor
Tracey Deer
Awarded by the Don Haig Award Committee - $20,000 cash prize generously sponsored by documentary

The Lindalee Tracey Award
Laura Bari
Will Inrig
$6,000 cash prize and film stock donated by Kodak Canada and valued at $3,000

HBO Documentary Films Emerging Artist Award
Chung-ryoul Lee
OLD PARTNER
Sponsored by HBO Documentary Films

Hot Docs Outstanding Achievement Award
Presented to Alanis Obomsawin by the Hot Docs Board of Directors