North American premieres include David Wants To Fly, Feathered Cocaine and The Oath.

Toronto’s Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival announced the line-up for its 17th edition today, including the world premiere of Jan Tenhaven’s Autumn Gold, an Austria-Germany coproduction that explores a different meaning of extreme sport: track and field athletes aged 80 and up.

The Opening Night film is the Canadian premiere of French filmmaker Thomas Balmes’ Babies, the StudioCanal-backed documentary acquired at Cannes 2009 by Focus Features for North America and other territories.

Among the several world premieres from Canadian filmmakers are Shelley Saywell’s In The Name Of The Family, an investigation into honour killings in North America and John Kastner’s Life With Murder, a profile of rural Ontario parents who stand by their son despite his conviction for the murder of their daughter.

The festival will also feature the North American premieres of David Sieveking’s David Wants To Fly, a Germany-Austria-Switzerland coproduction that follows filmmaker David Lynch in his search for enlightenment through Transcendental Meditation; Icelandic filmmakers Thorkell Hardarsson and Orn Marino Arnarson’s Feathered Cocaine, which follows a falconer into a world of international intrigue and obsession; US filmmaker Laura Poitras’ The Oath, a Yemen-US co-production about a former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden; and Alexander Gentelev’s Thieves By Love, an Israel-Germany coproduction that explores the Russian Mafia through interviews with three former kingpins.

Also screening are documentaries from the festival circuit including Alex Gibney’s Casino Jack And The United States Of Money; Steven Soderbergh’s tribute to Spalding Gray, And Everything Is Going Fine; French filmmaker Nicolas Philibert’s Nenette, a portrait of an orangutan and the human apes around her; and Bus 174 director José Padilha’s Secrets of the Tribe, a UK-Brazil co-production that explores ethical breaches by anthropologists studying Amazon tribes.

Hot Docs 2010 runs from April 29 to May 9. The aligned Toronto Documentary Forum runs May 5 and 6 and will feature 28 project presentations. The festival will present its 2010 Doc Mogul Award to veteran sales agent Jan Rofekamp of Montreal-based Films Transit International.

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