Children of War (in 5 Films) – a Hot Docs 2026 Round-Up
As the world grapples with wars raging around the globe, filmmakers capture and curate the awesome devastation for posterity and greater understanding, documenting unpleasant realities so that they cannot be denied. And, in these five stunning and sobering films, they look beyond the buildings destroyed and soldiers lost to those who perhaps experience the most lasting damage from these ugly conflicts: the children of today and tomorrow. These filmmakers turn their unflinching lenses on not only literal children whose lives are being lost, but also on the now-adult children of past wars, or wars that have never ended, and their quests to build safe and happy lives, unmoored from their homelands by conflict. Their struggles to pass peace on to their own children after lives lived in the shadow of fear, anger, and uncertainty. In 90 minutes or less, each of these stories captures a tapestry of globalization, where stunning cinematography meets eye-opening insights into humanity.
American Doctor dir. Poh Si Teng
Final Rating: 5/5
Steel your heart and keep the tissues at hand, because everything you might have heard about one of the buzziest documentaries to premiere at Sundance this year is true: watching Poh Si Teng’s American Doctor is as devastating as it is essential. The opening conversation thrusts you straight into the debate: should the bodies of children killed in Gaza be shown on camera, to force the world to acknowledge what’s happening?
This film’s answer is yes. But you will also see many children’s lives being saved – and the other, sometimes harder work the three doctors referenced in the title must do: giving interviews, lobbying, op-ed writing, anything to convince those in power to intervene. And to somehow do all this without losing themselves.
Along the way the camera captures the nuances of the bureaucratic obstacles and backlash, and how they hit each man differently (one being Palestinian-American, another Jewish, and the third Zoroastrian). How these three men soften, harden, or otherwise change through it all. If The Voice of Hind Rajab moved you last year, meet the doctors (including many more than the film’s three primary subjects) trying to save hundreds of other Gazan children every day, by surgical knife or by changing hearts and minds one screening at a time. With one hell of a potent finale.
American Doctor had its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs. Distributed by Watermelon Pictures, it will receive a North American theatrical release in August. Thank you to Watermelon Pictures for the screener.
Paikar dir. Dawood Hilmandi
Final Rating: 3.5/5
Paikar unravels like a dream, frequently leaping suddenly between time and location to the poetic cadence of Dutch-Afghan filmmaker Dawood Hilmandi’s almost whispered narration. So has Hilmandi himself been swept along in his own life, like a leaf in the winds between Afghanistan, Iran, and the Netherlands – his 14 siblings scattered in between and beyond. He retraces these steps, searching for his own identity between his life’s most significant locations, confronting his family’s history as he goes. He especially hunts the softness he knows is at his father’s heart, investigating the source of his former cruelty, probing at the festering wounds of generational trauma.
The story is bookended by loss in the family, a melancholy air floating even over the moments of respite, as you see the family in places you might recognize from the news as now being coated in bombs that this past filmmaker seen on screen had hoped might not come. It’s very much a film about grief, grief for peace as much as lives lost. But there is beauty throughout, from its intensely intimate close-ups to its surreal editing, breathy confessional tone, and ASMR soundscape. The name of the film, Paikar, is Persian for “war” or “warrior” – and the filmmaker lives up to this childhood nickname of his, never giving up his fight for answers and reconciliation.
Hot Docs was Paikar’s international premiere, where it featured in the International Spectrum. The film previously won three awards at its IDFA debut in the Netherlands: Best First Feature, Special Mention: Best Dutch Film, and the FIPRESCI Award (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique). Thank you to Taskovski Films for the screener.
A Fox Under a Pink Moon dir. Mehrdad Oskouei
Final Rating: 4.5/5
When 16-year-old Soraya’s cherubic face first fills the frame, you’re given a few minutes to see her as she should be: a student having fun with friends. As the film unfolds, though, A Fox Under a Pink Moon reveals layer by layer why she never got that chance, from her mother’s departure for Europe when she was eight years old, through a youthful and violently unequal marriage, to teen years spent trying to find her way to Europe herself. Soraya is also a child of Afghanistan largely raised in exile in Iran – however, in her case, she has never even stepped foot in the country that forms the identity assigned to her.
Mehrdad Oskouei directed the film remotely, with the subject herself holding the reins (in this case, an iPhone), capturing footage across five years. A good companion film to Paikar, which looks more at the experiences of living in Afghanistan and Iran under violence and bombings, this film turns more to the dangers and endless complications of trying to extract yourself from that system – with the added burdens of a woman living under misogynistic extremism.
Soraya finds refuge through creative expression. An animated fox shows up looking over her shoulder in the first frame, one of the spirits within Soraya that she seeks to nourish to keep herself going. As the film reveals the migration experience from the inside, she confides the secrets of her own inner life through haunting, horror-tinged watercolor animated scenes full of colorful whimsy. As Soraya passes through a chain of horrors, from vermin infestations to near-drownings, she grants us peeks at her quiet dreams of free expression – always leaving time to play with a child or stop to pet a kitty that crosses her path.
Hot Docs was A Fox Under a Pink Moon’s Canadian premiere. The film previously won two awards at its IDFA debut in the Netherlands: Best Film in the International Competition, and it was named one of the Top 10 Audience Favorites. Film seen during Hot Docs 2026. Thank you to the festival for the screener.
Birds of War dir. Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader
Final Rating: 4/5
Journalist Janay Boulos was working for BBC Arabic when she made her first contact with a Syrian man named Abd Alkader (or “Habak” to his friends). A man who would begin as her inside source for videos showing the unrest inside Syria in unsettling detail, but who would become in just a few short years her husband – much to her Christian Lebanese parents’ initial chagrin.
Birds of War, directed by the couple themselves, is the story of their love: how it stems from their love of their own countries, too often pitted against each other, and how the complexities of their identities drive them toward each other as well as through the turmoil of guilt of seeking their own peace, when that might separate them from those for whom they fight.
Excellently edited and enthrallingly paced, the movie operates equally as a love story and a series of reminders of the toll of war. Boulos says at one point, of the 2006 end of Lebanon’s war with Israel: “People celebrated in the streets as if we had won.” The yearning for peace peeks through the seams in every shot. Even in pauses between rounds of explosives raining from the sky, we see both director-subjects as young people with ready jokes (a necessarily dark sense of humor).
It’s a bit of a documentary about the insidious effects of capitalism-driven journalism, as much as it’s a bit about immigration, a bit about resilience. All of this loaded with the eternal question: is change really possible? Most of all, though, it’s a film about how life persists even in the rubble of society – how, through surreptitious international journalism, moments of revelry with friends, and rooftop gardens, (yes) even love can blossom.
Hot Docs was Bird of War’s Canadian premiere. The film previously won the Special Jury Award for Journalistic Impact during its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Thank you to See-Through Films for the screener.
Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom dir. Kim Nguyen
Final Rating: 3.5/5
Kim Nguyen’s Saigon Story is the celebrated Canadian director’s second documentary feature after 2014’s The Empire of Scents, an interwoven tapestry of vignettes about the role the human sense of smell plays in our lives and society as a whole.
This new documentary, by contrast, seems to take more nods from his fiction films, such as War Witch (2012) and The Hummingbird Project (2018), with a more tightly focused (if still somewhat diffuse) narrative: the film follows the children of two of the men in the famous 1968 photo “Saigon Execution” by Eddie Adams, as well as journalists in Vietnam and abroad also touched by this turning point in news media. How this legacy shapes the lives left behind, and how it affected the way those children parented their own children, lies at the heart of this exploration.
If this sounds familiar, it’s not to be confused with last year’s documentary from Bao Nguyen, The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo, which is about the Vietnam War’s other most famous photo (the one colloquially known as “Napalm Girl”). But, yes, it is about the same photo as last year’s Oscar-shortlisted documentary short “On Healing Land, Birds Perch” by Naja Pham Lockwood.
While that short would act as a thematic companion piece, with three times the running length, this feature-length exploration leaves more room to not only dive deeper into the “Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom” of the title (the gunshot, and the photo that captures it), but also the legacy that image has left in Vietnam and the US, where questions still linger as to which is worse: being aligned against the US and participating in a massacre, or committing a war crime on camera in broad daylight.
New discoveries nearly 50 years in the making are revealed, tucked between historical footage interlaced with imagery of a thriving Saigon today. Dotted throughout, in one of Kim Nguyen’s signature surreal touches, the photo itself grapples with its own legacy through narration. The editing keeps you on your toes, but this is a film that may require repeat viewings to catch everything it’s putting down.
Hot Docs was the global premiere of Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom, where it was named the Best Canadian Feature Documentary. Thank you to NFB for the screener.
