Hot Docs Film Festival 2021
One of the biggest challenges during the pandemic has been for films to be seen in the environments they’re normally featured.
But a big-time props goes out to the entire Hot Docs Festival 2021 team for bringing the experience of a film festival to its audience in a safe, interactive & compelling way! Hot Docs is North America's largest documentary festival and has been running for over 27 years now, and although we weren't able to visit the lovely Ted Rogers Cinema this year, the hybridized version offered a wonderful lineup that included 219 films from 66 countries! We were all in store for an epic celebration of thought-provoking documentary films & filmmakers, with Ann Shin’s "A.rtificial I.mmortality" opening the fest and wowing all of us with its questions of future AI technology and preserving memories for generations to come, quite the concept!!
Virtual Platform
We were thrilled to be a sponsor at this year’s event and had our Chief Operating Officer Joe Serafini & Client Services Coordinator Jade Robertson network with filmmakers, artists & other industry professionals via the great live events. We attended interviews with filmmakers where we were able to pose questions, and also take a chill in their coffee times where we even cheered a few virtual cocktails! The quality of the platform that Hot Docs put on this year was a true testament to their ability to innovate and create an exciting film festival so all those involved were able to get a great networking experience out of it! We hope to foster these great relationships that were formed virtually and encourage more documentary content within our company!
Remote Capabilities Presentation
One of the special highlights we had was our presentation on our remote post-production capabilities with Karen Kerr of Banger Films and one of our great docu-series, Hip Hop Evolution! In our presentation we unveiled a little teaser for our CARMA Kits (Calibrated agnostic remote monitoring appliance) which provide live viewing of an output from just about anywhere! In the past, we’ve used the CARMA system mainly to allow a DOP who is on location or out of town, to attend a colour session remotely... but it is proving extremely helpful in these times!
Congrats!
We’d like to congratulate Emanuel Licha with his film “zo reken” which won Best Canadian Feature Documentary Award, as well as Yasmine Mathurin, Laura Perlmutter & Andrew Nicholas McCann Smith for their film “One of Ours” which took home the Special Jury Prize! #shoutout to Laura at Sienna Films and all the incredible work we’ve done and continue to do over the years!
To all the incredible award winners at this year's fest we tip our hats to you and we can’t wait to see what’s in store for next year!!
Happy HotDocs everybody!
