War, displacement and collaboration are main themes in Hot Docs 'Made in Exile' program

Jackson Weaver · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 30, 2025 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 9 minutes ago

Director Timeea Mohamed Ahmed did not cognize precisely the benignant of movie helium was making erstwhile helium signed connected to Khartoum. 

He knew the documentary, which had its sold-out Canadian premiere astatine Toronto's Hot Docs Festival, would absorption connected his autochthonal Sudan. He knew it would bring unneurotic multiple directors from the state to archer their stories.

But what the unit couldn't cognize was how a abrupt warfare successful Sudan would marque it astir intolerable to trade the film, and eventually, intolerable to enactment determination to decorativeness it. In 2023, the squad was forced to fly to parts of East Africa, wherever they finished the movie done originative tools similar greenish screens and animation, having their subjects re-enact scenarios that weren't imaginable to movie successful person.  

And fixed the caller wars that person breached retired crossed the world, Ahmed is acold from alone. He's portion of a cohort of filmmakers astatine this year's festival, whose enactment is highlighted nether the "Made successful Exile" banner. 

The caller class is co-sponsored by the PEN Canada non-profit, and highlights stories of warfare and crisis in artists' homelands that they've had to leave.

Despite the calamity inherent to the category, Ahmed and different filmmakers spot wrong its scope astonishing signs of hope. The films item their creators' unsocial strategies, arsenic good as the collaboration inspired by their obstacles. That, helium said, is simply a heartening boon for a mean already connected the ropes. 

"This movie has a Palestinian editor, Italian shaper — it has truthful overmuch [more] radical than I thought possible, from antithetic countries and nationalities and languages," Ahmed said of Khartoum. 

"It showed maine that exile tin be also an vantage much than it's a disadvantage."

WATCH | Hot Docs is backmost aft a twelvemonth of fiscal strife, worries: 

Category came partially from fiscal troubles

According to Hot Docs' programming manager Heather Haynes, the accidental came astir partially from the organization's precise nationalist fiscal woes. As the festival employed immoderate "right-sizing" techniques — dropping its full movie number down from 214 in 2023 to 113 films successful 2025 — updating the Made In programme to screen artists from much than 1 country or portion besides seemed similar a timely change. (The class typically highlights a circumstantial country's enactment nether the "Made in" format.)

The squad had wanted to effort the task retired for the past 3 years, she said. But the authorities of the satellite successful 2025 made it a peculiarly urgent twelvemonth for testing.

One of the affected filmmakers was Areeb Zuaiter, the Palestinian manager of the 2024 sold-out Hot Docs movie Yalla Parkour. She made that documentary, which follows a young parkour athlete attempting to emigrate from Gaza, implicit the people of 10 years. 

The movie was created successful beforehand of Hamas's onslaught connected Israel — and Israel's consequent warfare — and is billed arsenic a past glimpse of a pre-Oct. 7 Gaza. But Zuaiter's idiosyncratic consciousness of exile from a Palestinian authorities predates the war: Though she was calved successful Nablus successful the West Bank, she and her parents near erstwhile she was an infant. Along with yearly trips backmost to Nablus, they made a one-time sojourn to Gaza, wherever the representation of her mother's grin by the seaside made a peculiar content connected her.

Meeting the young parkour jock coloured Zuaiter's idiosyncratic transportation to the territory, and she observes that his tendency to permission the territory triggers her ain guilt for having near truthful galore years ago.

And arsenic the warfare intensified, truthful did her project's theme.

"My afloat attraction was [in] showing … the conditions successful Gaza, how [Gazans] person this tone that I yet ended up calling the Palestinian spirit, that reminded maine of my mom," she said.

"But past erstwhile everything happened lately, we felt this consciousness of [urgency] that we request to decorativeness this film. And astatine the aforesaid time, we volition beryllium insensitive if we don't code what's going on."

Shame, trauma and hope

That impulse besides coloured the instauration of The Longer You Bleed, different entry. It looks astatine the endless watercourse of convulsive footage from Russia's warfare successful Ukraine shared connected societal media, and the toll it takes connected young Ukrainians.

The thought archetypal came from Liubov Dyvak's phone. Dyvak, the film's Ukrainian shaper and subject, made the doc with her spouse and director, Ewan Waddell.

Dyvak is presently based successful Germany, and similar galore Ukrainians, she uses her telephone for activism, Waddell said, and saves images she's seen online and from friends. But she recovered that the phone, arsenic portion of its settings, would automatically generate collages of images she'd downloaded, pairing them with bubbly popular music. Just earlier they started enactment connected what would go the film, her telephone made different one: a montage of destroyed buildings, rubble and civilians without legs.

Though she was physically successful a harmless space, astatine the aforesaid clip she felt perpetually traumatized by societal media, she said: "I noticed this benignant of guilt of endurance … and shame. And not being capable to stock your acquisition due to the fact that it feels [like] radical from your state experience, also, carnal danger. Which is overmuch much intense."

Liubov said it reinforced some the fearfulness of the war, and the separation she had from her friends successful different parts of Europe — radical who mostly utilized societal media innocently, and without encountering arsenic overmuch graphic unit arsenic she did. It besides made her wonderment astir her transportation to different Ukrainians, fixed her acquisition of being successful a benignant of exile — of not being physically in her home, but seeing her friends' experiences second-hand done their shared images.

But moving connected the documentary itself helped to alleviate immoderate of that guilt. Talking to different Ukrainians successful her situation — likewise removed from their location state during the warfare — made her consciousness much connected, not less. 

"It was precise precious to beryllium capable to explicit and benignant of analyse each these feelings," she said. "It gave maine these feelings that I'm not unsocial successful this…. This feeling of unity, which is, I think, very, precise important for intelligence sanity and for survival."