The Hot Docs Audience Awards are annual film awards, presented by the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival to the most popular films as voted by festival audiences. There are currently two awards presented: the Hot Docs Audience Award, presented since 2001 to the most popular film overall regardless of nationality, and the Rogers Audience Award, presented since 2017 to the most popular Canadian film.[1]
The Rogers Audience Award comes with a CA$50,000 prize from the Rogers Group of Funds, and is considered the most important award at the festival. Although the festival releases a preview list of the Top 20 contenders in audience award voting while the festival is underway, the Canadian films in the list are identified only as a film that is eligible for the Rogers Award rather than by title, so as not to give away the Rogers Award contenders in advance of the final announcement. The festival concludes with a repeat screening of the Rogers Audience Award winner, following which the preview list is updated to reveal all of the hidden Canadian film titles.
If a Canadian film wins the overall award, then the Canadian award is not given to a different film in lieu, but instead the same film wins both awards. This practice was diverged from for the first time at the 2023 festival, where Philippe Falardeau's documentary television series was the overall winner of the Audience Award; although a Canadian project, it comprised episodes of a television series rather than a feature film, and thus was not deemed eligible for the Rogers Award, which instead went to the film Someone Lives Here.[2]
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, in both 2020 and 2021 the festival opted to split the Canadian award and its associated prize money among all of the five highest-ranked Canadian films of the year instead of singling out only the top-ranked Canadian film.[3] In 2022, the festival split the Canadian award among three films instead of five, and returned to naming a single winner in 2023.[2]
| Year | Film | Director(s) | Ref | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | Southern Comfort | [4] | ||
| 2002 | The Last Just Man | [5] | ||
| 2003 | War Babies | [6] | ||
| 2004 | Death in Gaza | [7] | ||
| 2005 | Street Fight | [8] | ||
| 2006 | A Lion in the House | [9] | ||
| 2007 | War/Dance | [10] | ||
| 2008 | [11] | |||
| 2009 | The Cove | [12] | ||
| 2010 | Thunder Soul | [13] | ||
| 2011 | Somewhere Between | [14] | ||
| 2012 | Chasing Ice | [15] | ||
| 2013 | Muscle Shoals | [16] | ||
| 2014 | The Backward Class | [17] | ||
| 2015 | Unbranded | [18] | ||
| 2016 | Angry Inuk | [19] | ||
| 2017 | [20] | |||
| 2018 | Transformer | [21] | ||
| 2019 | Maxima | [22] | ||
| 2020 | The Walrus and the Whistleblower | [23] | ||
| 2021 | Dear Future Children | [24] | ||
| 2022 | Eternal Spring | [25] | ||
| 2023 | ||||
| 2024 | Yintah | Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell, Michael Toledano | [26] |
From 2020 through 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic the festival split the Rogers Audience Award and its associated prize money among all of the top five (2020, 2021) or three (2022) films instead of naming only the top film as in other years. For those years, the film that was the overall top Canadian film in audience voting is denoted in the table below with a †.
| Year | Film | Director(s) | Ref | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | ||||
| 2018 | Transformer | |||
| 2019 | Prey | |||
| 2020 | 9/11 Kids | |||
| First We Eat | Suzanne Crocker | |||
| The Forbidden Reel | Ariel Nasr | |||
| There's No Place Like This Place, Anyplace | Lulu Wei | |||
| The Walrus and the Whistleblower † | Nathalie Bibeau | |||
| 2021 | † | |||
| Hell or Clean Water | Cody Westman | |||
| Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers | ||||
| Someone Like Me | Steve J. Adams, Sean Horlor | |||
| Still Max | Katherine Knight | |||
| 2022 | Eternal Spring † | |||
| Mark Bone | ||||
| Barri Cohen | ||||
| 2023 | Someone Lives Here | |||
| 2024 | Yintah | Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell, Michael Toledano | [27] |