Cinema Series

Hot Docs' screening series centering Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC)-led stories and filmmakers, named in honour of Canadian civil rights icon Viola Desmond. This series seeks to affirm Hot Docs as a space of inclusion for BIPOC creators and audience members alike. To minimize barriers to audience participation, all screenings in this series are free of charge. 



For Viola is curated by Kourtney Jackson.

Kourtney Jackson is a Toronto-based filmmaker, lens-based artist, and film curator. Her artistic practice employs hybridized and experimental forms of storytelling that permeate interiorities of Black queer womanhood. As a film programmer, she seeks to champion underrepresented filmmakers and platform BIPOC, queer, and feminist media that subverts inherited cinematic conventions. In lieu of “representation” as a means for legibility, her personal work endeavours toward a repatriation of the self through somatic, spiritual, and ecological sensibilities. Her award-winning films have screened locally and internationally at festivals including TIFF Next Wave (Toronto), BlackStar Film Festival (Philadelphia), Sundance Film Festival, Ignite x Adobe (Utah), and the Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal (Montréal). She has curated cinema series for the Nia Centre for the Arts, the 519, and Hot Docs.

This program is supported by