Diana Sanchez, executive director of Hot Docs, is a two-decade veteran of TIFF.Tijana Martin/The Canadian Press
Only six weeks into her job leading North America’s largest and most prestigious documentary film fest, Diana Sanchez has had to relaunch a cultural institution that spent much of 2024 on the verge of collapse.
That’s why the executive director of Hot Docs has a modest metric when it comes to determining whether or not this year‘s film festival was a success.
“I mean the fact that we even had a festival, that got the team excited,” Sanchez says with a laugh.
The not-for-profit’s pileup of challenges offered enough juicy material for an investigative documentary all its own: the exodus of programming staff, public pleas for government funds in light of financial difficulties, the departure of president Marie Nelson (just a little more than a year after taking on the job), the temporary shuttering of the organization’s flagship Toronto cinema and the restructuring of its board.
Yet all the organizational tumult didn’t deter Sanchez, a two-decade veteran of the Toronto International Film Festival, from stepping into the job on the eve of the 32nd edition of Hot Docs, which wrapped May 4. (Long-time production executive Janice Dawe had been serving as interim executive director after Nelson’s departure this past July.)
“This is my community – I go to this cinema, it’s my neighbourhood,” Sanchez says in her first interview since joining Hot Docs. “There are also natural ebbs and flows to every film festival. Look at Venice in the eighties and nineties, or even TIFF in 1986” – the year that Leonard Schein, former director of the Vancouver Film Festival, took over for a single and controversial term.
“To me, what a lot of people see as a challenge, I thought of as a real opportunity,” Sanchez adds. “I’ve started film festivals, I’ve worked at big film festivals and I’ve seen every facet of what it takes to put on a film festival around the world.”
While Sanchez and her fellow organizers were not able to provide final audience numbers for this year‘s 10-day festival, initial projections show attendance being “on par” with recent editions in terms of overall capacity.
Yet Hot Docs 2025 was also a significantly smaller affair than usual, screening just 113 feature-length docs – down from the 168 programmed in 2024 and the 214 in 2023. According to Sanchez, next year‘s festival will lean toward a similar size and scope.
“We found a model that’s worked well, and the next steps will be polishing what we’ve done and growing incrementally,” she says. “I think this year worked really well, so imagine taking that and doing more to what you already have: more guests staying for longer, more industry elements. Not scaling up, just polishing what’s already there.”
The slimmed-down offering is the result of myriad financial challenges for the organization, a registered charity. Its tax return for the reporting period ending May, 2024, showed a deficit of $2.6-million.
Ahead of this year‘s festival, organizers said Hot Docs is operating on an approved budget for the fiscal year of 2025 with a 14-per-cent reduction in spending (amounting to roughly $1.6-million). Savings were attributed to organizational restructuring, pausing and restructuring the cinema’s year-round programming, and reducing overhead.
The organization has also been able to convince a large number of supporters to convert their capital-campaign donations – money originally meant to help revamp and expand the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, with the possibility of adding a second screen – to daily operational funds. And the “Friends of Hot Docs” fundraising campaign is currently on tack to hit its goal of raising $100,000, which will be matched by the Bennett Family Foundation.
Meanwhile, days before this year‘s festival opened, Hot Docs accepted a conditional offer for the purchase of its Bloor Street West theatre. The organization will be allowed “to continue operating and programming the cinema year-round,“ according to the purchase terms, which include a lease-back arrangement.
“We’re excited about the cinema sale and waiting upon closing to share more details,” Sanchez says. “The focus right now is being fiscally responsible – we are tracking toward a lower deficit than when we filed in November, and we’re working on those numbers.”
With a new leader in place, the board is looking to reconstitute itself and add additional members to its current “working board” roster of just three: documentarian Nicholas de Pencier, Nulogy chief operating officer Kevin Wong and Pemberley Investments’ Lydia Luckevich.
Yet there have been no decisions as to what role the Documentary Organization of Canada might have in that new makeup. DOC founded Hot Docs in 1994 and has been deeply linked to the organization through its historic representation on the board and the annual royalty payments that the group receives from festival revenue. But tensions emerged between the two groups last year.
During the opening weekend of the 2024 festival, DOC released a statement urging Hot Docs’ long-time leading sponsor, Bank of Nova Scotia, to divest from Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. (The bank’s sponsorship of Hot Docs concluded after this year‘s edition of the festival.)
“The documentary community in Toronto is so small, and we have to work together,” Sanchez says. “So the board and I are focused on that – reviewing the relationship with DOC and looking at how we can discuss it in a way that makes sense for Hot Docs.”
Meanwhile, as she crafts a new five-year strategic plan, she is hoping to prioritize Hot Docs’ educational programs, which were put on pause last year.
“There’s a lot of interest in supporting those initiatives, which we can do at school, on campuses,” Sanchez says. “And of course, the focus is the festival – we need to do that engagement of getting people inside the cinema.
“You have these incredible conversations and moments during a screening. I went to see Facing War during the festival, and then Bob Rae showed up for the Q&A. We had the last female ambassador from Afghanistan. We had artist Rashaad Newsome. These are the connections that we do best.”
A year ago, Hot Docs’ greatest threat seemed to be itself. But today, the organization is also at the centre of an industry that has itself had a large target placed upon its back.
Just as Hot Docs was under way earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to cut public funding for American news organizations PBS and NPR, both of which contain large documentary units.
“It is a concern and something that we do have top of mind – how we can figure it out and best respond,” Sanchez says. “We need to look at what we’re doing year-round to support this industry.”
