News

Audience votes have been tallied and the 2017 Audience Award winner is Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (D: Catherine Bainbridge; Canada), the story of Native American rock guitarist Link Wray and other Indigenous musicians who shaped popular music.

Rumble also received the Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary, and a $50,000 cash prize, courtesy of Rogers Group of Funds, was given to director Catherine Bainbridge and co-director Alfonso Maiorana. With this prize, Hot Docs has awarded over $300,000 in cash and prizes during the Festival.

Also in the audience poll, the top short was The Forger (D: Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia, Pamela Druckerman; USA), and the top mid-length doc was Death in the Terminal (D: Asaf Sudry, Tali Shemesh; Israel), which also won Best Mid-Length Documentary Award at the Hot Docs awards presentation on Friday.

The top 20 audience favourites as determined by audience vote are:

1. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (D: Catherine Bainbridge; Canada)
2. Chasing Coral (D: Jeff Orlowski; USA)
3. Step (D: Amanda Lipitz; USA)
4. The Last Animals (D: Kate Brooks; USA, UK)
5. Dolores (D: Peter Bratt; USA)
6. Birth of a Family (D: Tasha Hubbard; Canada)
7. Bee Nation (D: Lana Šlezic; Canada)
8. Unarmed Verses (D: Charles Officer; Canada)
9. Muhi - Generally Temporary (D: Rina Castelnuovo-Hollander, Tamir Elterman; Israel)
10. La Chana (D: Lucija Stojevic; Spain, Iceland, USA)
11. State of Exception (D: Jason O’Hara; Canada, Brazil)
12. A Better Man (D: Attiya Khan, Lawrence Jackman; Canada)
13. Long Strange Trip (D: Amir Bar-Lev; USA)
14. Strad Style (D: Stefan Avalos; USA)
15. Last Men in Aleppo (D: Feras Fayyad; Denmark)
16. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower (D: Joe Piscatella; USA, Hong Kong)
17. Unrest (D: Jennifer Brea; USA)
18. Becoming Bond (D: Josh Greenbaum; USA)
19. City of Ghosts (D: Matthew Heineman; USA)
20. Shadowman (D: Oren Jacoby; USA)