North America's largest documentary festival also gave Rodrigo Reyes' '499' a special jury prize in the best international feature competition.
The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival on Thursday awarded its best international feature film prize to Stray, an American film from director Elizabeth Lo about stray dogs in Istanbul that debuted at Tribeca.
The fest also gave a special jury prize in the international feature doc competition to Rodrigo Reyes' 499, a U.S.-Mexico co-production about the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire.
Hot Docs held a virtual market for film buyers and sellers from April 30 after the physical festival set to run April 30-May 10 in Toronto was canceled as a precaution against the coronavirus pandemic.
Also on the jury front, the emerging international filmmaker award went to Todd Chandler for Bulletproof, a doc about mass school shootings in the U.S., while the best mid-length documentary prize went to Andrea Testa's Mother-Child, a portrait of pregnant teenage girls in Argentina.
Other winners included Jean-Francois Lesage's Prayer for a Lost Mitten, a film about those claiming belongings from the Montreal subway's lost and found department, which took home the prize for best Canadian feature documentary.
A special jury prize also went to Stateless, Michele Stephenson's film about a grassroots campaign to protect citizenship rights in the Dominican Republic for people of Haitian descent.
