The Hot Docs Audience Awards are annual film awards, presented by the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival to the most popular films as voted by festival audiences.
Although the festival releases a preview list of the Top 20 contenders in audience award voting while the festival is underway, the Canadian films in the list are identified only as a film that is eligible for the Rogers Award rather than by title, so as not to give away the Rogers Award contenders in advance of the final announcement.
The festival concludes with a repeat screening of the Rogers Audience Award winner, following which the preview list is updated to reveal all of the hidden Canadian film titles.
This practice was diverged from for the first time at the 2023 festival, where Philippe Falardeau's documentary television series Lac-Mégantic: This Is Not an Accident was the overall winner of the Audience Award; although a Canadian project, it comprised episodes of a television series rather than a feature film, and thus was not deemed eligible for the Rogers Award, which instead went to the film Someone Lives Here.
[3] In 2022, the festival split the Canadian award among three films instead of five, and returned to naming a single winner in 2023.