Semi-documentary, focusing on the training young boys receive before they are sent down the mines on their first job.

Toronto-based documentary filmmaker and cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier (Four Wings and a Prayer, Watermark) examines the complex global impact that the internet has had on matters of free speech, privacy and activism.

Examines the often overlooked, yet insidious issue of voter suppression in the United States in anticipation of the 2020 presidential election. With the perspective and expertise of Stacey Abrams, the former Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, the film offers an insider’s look into laws and barriers to voting that most people don’t even know is a threat to their basic rights as citizens of the United States.

Is it possible that Ice Age people succeeded in crossing the frozen Atlantic Ocean to North America, thousands of years before the Vikings and Columbus? Two archaeologists believe so after discovering artifacts in Chesapeake Bay that bear an inexplicable resemblance to those from prehistoric Europe. Follow them as they combine old-fashioned excavations with exciting new DNA testing to prove their theory, answer their critics, and rewrite the history books.

In intimate conversations with those involved, including 28-year-old death row inmate Michael Perry (who was scheduled to die eight days after his interview with Herzog), legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog achieves what he describes as “a gaze into the abyss of the human soul.” As he’s so often done before, Herzog’s investigation unveils layers of humanity, making an enlightening trip out of ominous territory.

This in-depth documentary explores the dark side of American higher education, exposing predatory for-profit colleges and the tactics they use to defraud students and the government.

Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker take a powerfully personal journey through the former East Germany, as Epperlein investigates her father’s 1999 suicide and the possibility that he may have worked as a spy for the dreaded Stasi security service.

Moving between two extremes – the intimate verite drama of the Miss India pageant’s rigorous beauty “bootcamp” and the intense regime of a militant Hindu fundamentalist camp for young girls. The World Before Her delivers a provocative portrait of India and its current cultural conflicts during a key transitional era in the country’s modern history.

A documentary on a former Miss Wyoming who is charged with abducting and imprisoning a young Mormon Missionary.

In this film, Laerte conjugates the body in the feminine, and scrutinizes concepts and prejudices. Not in search of an identity, but in search of un-identities. Laerte is daughter and son, grandmother and grandfather; father of three, though orphaned of one. Laerte is the one who walks their daughter down the aisle as father and woman; who, even without a uterus, gestates. Laerte creates and sends creatures to face reality in the fictional world of comic strips as a vanguard of the self. And, on the streets, the one who becomes the fiction of a real character. Laerte, of all the bodies, and of none, complicates all binaries. In following Laerte, this documentary chooses to clothe the nudity beyond the skin we inhabit.

Following a set of traumatic experiences – best friends, Fletcher Barnes and Henry Davis, drop out of college in search of meaning. After months of adventure, they find themselves living with a traveling love wizard in a bizarre Los Angeles home. Inspired by his story and determined to dig deeper – they team up and head to Africa to discover how “love” is perceived in the world today.

A simple can of ravioli propels this spectacular 30,000-kilometre, eight-country journey through all phases of food production and the far flung sources of international ingredients. A dream-like voyage with glimpses of disconcerting realities, the story begins with a single mother toiling in one of the biggest open pit mines in Brazil and ends on the shelf of a grocery store in Finland. Along the way, the workers whose calloused hands mine, raise and harvest each ingredient reveal their dreams and hopes, like the Danish pig farmer who loves his sows but longs for a girlfriend, and the Portuguese tomato picker who wants to stay healthy long enough to pay her daughters way through university. Sumptuous photography and impressive sound design make an eloquent statement about our modern, globalized world, making us aware of the hundreds of invisible people who prepare the food we eat every day. -Gisèle Gordon (HotDocs.ca)