Hot Docs announces 2007 festival lineup

Hot Docs held its annual press conference yesterday to announce its lineup of films for the 2007 festival season. As befits the rapid growth in popularity of documentaries - and of Toronto's own documentary film festival - it's a record-breaking year for the fest.

A hundred and twenty-nine films have been selected from all over the world to screen at the eleven-day festival, which takes place from April 19th to 29th in Toronto. Hot Docs has grown to become North America's largest documentary festival, and this year's slate boasts the highest number of Canadian features yet presented by the fest (a whopping 22). Of the Canadian films present, a surprising number of them deal directly with Toronto itself.

The films include City Idol, which looks at the Torontonians who competed in the American Idol-like contest to run in the municipal elections; Last Call at the Gladstone Hotel, which looks at the gentrification of one of our favourite Toronto landmarks; and the gotta-see-it Let's All Hate Toronto, which crosses Canada in an attempt to figure out why all the other cities seem to dislike us so much.

Hot Docs '07 opens with the Canadian premiere of David Sington's In the Shadow of the Moon, the British documentary detailing the lives of NASA's Apollo astronauts. It's a guaranteed visual stunner with never-before-seen archival footage of the heyday of the space race. I'm also looking forward (if that's the right word) to Canadian doc The Suicide Tourist, which examines a Swiss company that offers legally-assisted suicide sesrvices to people from around the world.

And the design geek in me can't help but drool over Helvetica, a whole feature-length documentary devoted to that pesky font.

The full schedule is up at hotdocs.ca, and tickets are available now!