The 2025 Hot Docs Festival closed with an incredible bang as Endless Cookie, the uniquely animated documentary directed by Seth Scriver and his half-brother Pete Scriver, took home the Hot Docs Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary. The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in California with a 97-minute runtime. It is a fitting honour for a film that defies all expectations, delivering a strange, hilarious, and poignant exploration of Indigenous storytelling through personal anecdotes, surreal animation, and raw familial connection.
The film opens with a right-angled ruler character, practicing how to announce to Seth that Canada’s prestigious grant “N.F.G.” has been awarded to him. It is a funny, memorable opening that not only humours you but also hooks you right into what the film could be. Behind the laughter, Endless Cookie, offers something deeply human: a love letter to the way stories – messy, funny, half-finished – shape memory, culture, and resilience. At the core of the film is Pete Scriver, an Indigenous man from Shamattawa, Manitoba, whose tales meander through themes of hardship, humour, and identity. Whether recalling the time he got his hand stuck in a trapline, commenting on RCMP misjudgements, or just laughing about how his children hesitate when he says a meal is good, they think it will taste bad; Pete’s narratives are vibrant, layered, and always interrupted –– by a toilet flush, dogs barking, or noisy kids.
Seth is a Toronto-based illustrator and filmmaker. His debut feature, Asphalt Watches (2013), won the Toronto International Film Festival’s Best Canadian First Feature Award. Later, he received a grant for the making of Endless Cookie. His co-director, Pete Scriver, makes his screenwriting and directing debut with Endless Cookie. A resident of the Shamattawa First Nation community in Manitoba, Canada. He is raising nine children, several dogs, and served as a chief and magistrate. Together, they set out to record seven stories, but – after multiple interruptions – later realizes that the beauty lies not in perfectly finished tales, but in the spontaneous, digressive nature of oral storytelling. The result is similar to a physical scrapbook, it is like a montage and series of anecdotes of Indigenous life, filtered through family history, cultural critique, and outrageous humour.
It took nine years to produce the film, a total of eleven years along with the post-production, with Seth beginning the animation in Flash before upgrading to Adobe Animate. The time and care show. From characters with balloon noses, all the colourful and detailed backgrounds, and to the references cartoons like Garfield and Peanut the dog (like Mr. Peanut). Endless Cookie is a feast for the eyes. Every frame teems with visual jokes, historical Easter eggs, and cheeky references to colonialism, like graffiti that reads “Free Leonard Peltier.”
What elevates Endless Cookie beyond its anarchic surface is its careful attention to the Indigenous experience, without falling into the trap of portraying pain as a monolith. Pete’s stories touch on land theft, RCMP issues, and the rising cost of food in the North. Cookie, Pete’s daughter and a key character embodies the next generation of storytellers. Her innocent yet sharp observations – often fart jokes or keen insights – act as a bridge between past and present, showing how storytelling continues to evolve within families.
It is no wonder that Endless Cookie captured the hearts of audiences at Hot Docs. The film’s warmth, irreverence, and innovative approach to documentary filmmaking make it unlike anything else in this year’s festival. At its heart, it reminds us that even the most meandering story has value. With this win, Endless Cookie, not only cements its place as a standout Canadian documentary, but also as a vital act of cultural preservation – delivered with a wink, a fart, and a whole lot of heart.
The Hot Docs Festival 2025 ended after eleven days, 113 films, and 179 screenings showcasing Canadian and International documentaries. To see the full list of the top twenty documentaries voted in the audience poll, as well as all fourteen award-winning films, check out the official Hot Docs News and the 2025 Award articles on their website.
