Shane Smith, formerly director of special projects with Toronto International Film Festival, will take over the position for Hot Doc’s 23rd annual edition
North America's largest documentary festival has announced a new director of programming.
Shane Smith, formerly director of special projects with Toronto International Film Festival, will take over the position for Hot Doc's 23rd annual edition.
"Documentaries are at a very exciting moment in their evolution and history," Smith told The Globe and Mail about his new position. "These new technologies and hybrid documentary forms – animated works, mixed genre, documentary arts … I'm very excited about the potential to bringing them to Toronto audiences."
Sarafina DiFelice, current programming manager, will work with Smith as she assumes the newly created position of associate programming director.
A long-time fan of Hot Docs, Smith says he is impressed with the "growth and nimbleness" of the organization as it's evolved from its humble beginning as an industry-specific event in the Metropolitan Hotel to a globally recognized festival with its own dedicated venue.
"It certainly ain't broke, and I'm not coming to fix it," Smith says. "But I do see all kinds of opportunities for the Hot Docs brand."
With no shortage of new, emerging platforms to engage with in the documentary filmmaking genre, Smith says that "digging into the heart of the organization and expanding the festival experience" throughout the year and beyond the theatre to engage new audiences is also part of his mission.
As the former director of the Canadian Film Centre's Worldwide Short Film Festival before joining TIFF in 2010, Smith also brings a global rolodex to Toronto's documentary festival, and says he is excited to introduce emerging talent and promote the early work of international filmmakers.
"I'm looking forward to continuing to shine a light on other corners of the globe, support those filmmakers and bring them to Toronto audiences," he says. He will also contribute to long-term visioning and strategic development of new initiatives on special, online and live-event projects.
"The beauty and power of cinema is empathy, this is what documentary filmmakers want to encourage and inspire to help change things," he says. "That's the underpinning of everything that inspires me about the documentary form and I want to extend that through and outside the festival."
The 2016 edition of Hot Docs will run from April 28 to May 8.