A showcase of the best DOCUMENTARY films in the world today.
AUDIENCE AWARDS (from the FEEDBACK Festival Screening):
Best Feature Film: SHEITEL – BEAUTY IN THE HIDDEN
Best Short Film: NORTH NODE
Best Human Interest Film: THE CALL
Best Direction: RELICS OF LOVE AND WAR
Best Editing & Cinematography: HIDDEN – THE KATI PRESTON STORY
Bet Story: SAN ESTEBAN: FREEDOM, MYSTICISM AND NOPALES
Best Society Film: MISSION PEACE 2
Best Family DOC: HAPPINESS IS
Best Environmental Film: THE NINETEEN-YEAR HUNT
The Call, 64min., USA
Directed by Laura Boyd Owen, Charles Edwin English
The Call is a powerful documentary that breaks the silence around firefighter mental health, offering an unflinching look at the trauma, PTSD, and suicide crisis facing first responders. Through raw interviews, real-life stories, and behind-the-scenes access to firehouses in New Mexico, the film explores the emotional toll of a profession associated with bravery, but rarely with vulnerability.
http://thecalldocumentary.com/
https://www.wildsound.ca/videos/audience-feedback-the-call
Relics of Love and War, 45min., Canada
Directed by Keith Lawrence Lock
This documentary takes an existential approach to time and memory within the context of Chinese Canadian history during World War Two. Using still photos and contemporary footage, filmmaker Keith Lock narrates how his mother married his father in Australia and shares inside stories of his father and twelve other Chinese Canadian veterans who volunteered for the top secret suicide mission, OPERATION OBLIVION, at a time when Chinese Canadians did not have the right to vote, could not swim in pools, or hire white women in their businesses.
https://www.wildsound.ca/videos/audience-feedback-relics-of-love-and-war
NORTH NODE, 12min., Canada
Directed by Tatjana Green, Nicole VanStone
https://www.wildsound.ca/videos/audience-feedback-north-node
HIDDEN – The Kati Preston Story, 75min., Canada
Directed by Daniel Matmor
HIDDEN – The Kati Preston Story is a powerful journey seen through the eyes of a child—a firsthand account of a society’s slow and insidious descent into authoritarianism, dictatorship, and tyranny. Kati Preston’s joyful childhood in Hungary came to an end in 1944. Bit by bit, law by law, action by action, her world was dismantled. Everything she knew and loved was stripped away.
Sheitel- Beauty in the Hidden, 86min., Canada
Directed by Lynda Medjuck-Suissa
“Sheitel – Beauty in the Hidden” is a documentary exploring the cultural, religious, and personal significance of hair covering among Jewish women, particularly in Orthodox and Hasidic communities. Through interviews in cities including Jerusalem, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax, the film reveals how wigs, scarves, and other coverings serve as self expressions of faith, marriage , identity, spirituality and empowerment.
San Esteban: Freedom, Mysticism and Nopales, 27min., Mexico
Directed by Francisco Herrera
At the foot of the mountains of Zapopan, Mexico, lies San Esteban — an indigenous town whose identity has been shaped for generations by agriculture, ritual, food, and an intimate bond with the land. Sheltered for centuries by valleys and canyons, the community now stands at the edge of an expanding metropolis, caught between preservation and transformation.
MISSION PEACE 2, 101min., USA
Directed by Gregory T. Simmons
Staunch Moderates’ MISSION PEACE 2 picks up where MISSION PEACE 1 left off, at the beginning of 2021: chronicling the movement’s evolution from a pandemic-era news source into a producer of music, film and videos distributed across a wide range of platforms, earning the group more than 200 million views and streams.
HAPPINESS IS, 45min., Canada
Directed by Jason Wayne Frye
A search into the past reveals a journey of Love, Family and Connection.
THE NINETEEN-YEAR HUNT, 18min., Hong Kong
Directed by Kelly Siu
On the sea‑facing walkways of Wah Fu Estate, Jing has spent nineteen years shadowing a syndicate she believes traps and kills stray cats, feeding a clandestine meat trade.
https://www.wildsound.ca/videos/audience-feedback-the-nineteen-year-hunt
Documentary Film Festival. Los Angeles & Toronto 
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