Shot in Canada with some scenes filmed in Hungary, Hidden – The Kati Preston Story has won the Best Documentary award at the 2025 Canadian International Film Festival, CIFF.
Hidden – The Kati Preston Story is a docudrama in which Holocaust survivor Kati Preston narrates how her childhood in Hungary was shattered in 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary. It was local forces, buoyed with anti-Semitic ideology, who forced her into solitary hiding in a barn. She alone was saved by a frightened but courageous peasant woman, while most of Hungary’s Jews were deported and murdered in concentration camps.
The film uses Preston’s own voice, interwoven with reenactments, to convey the terror, hunger, and silence of a five‑year‑old waiting in the dark. It explores her fragile hope that her father will return, even as the audience comes to understand, later in the movie, that he has been killed. By focusing so tightly on one child’s experience, the film restores a sense of individual peril to a history often reduced to statistics. The filmmakers who spoke after the screening, the director Daniel Matmor and the cinematographer and editor Jody Glover hope this festival and other events will see the film get recognized, approved and added to Holocaust education packages. The easy-to follow narrative is a valuable tool to combat hate and inform the next generation in the face of resurging antisemitism and all the distortion in today’s bifurcating media.
Documentaries at the Canadian International Film Festival
Canadian International Film Festival uses the screening rooms at Innis Town Hall on the University of Toronto campus to show movies which inspire more understanding, equality, social justice, and multiculturalism. CIFF’s coveted Best Documentary title was awarded on Sunday evening, the 21st December to the director, Daniel Matmor in a formal ceremony in Toronto.
The Canadian International Film Festival is run by Paco Curry, Cinematheque Coordinator at the University of Toronto, among other directors. They have recently broadened the event’s categories and thus heightened its appeal for filmmakers seeking to promote narratives which inspire understanding, equality, social justice, and multiculturalism. Paco runs a comprehensive evaluation process and only selects high-quality films which challenge conventions and champion global stories. As a documentary, Hidden – The Kati Preston Story is praised for its soft touch and subtle messaging because it avoids graphic imagery and sweeping historical montages, instead letting Preston’s own words carry the story forward. Reenactments are used sparingly and only when they directly impart the child’s emotional reality, especially the isolation, fear, and the constant waiting for soldiers to leave, for her father to come home, without exploiting or aestheticizing the trauma.
Franky Glover Portrayed Kati Preston as a Child
The story follows Kati Preston, a middle class Jewish child in 1944 Hungary, through the Holocaust and then into the harsh Stalinist years that followed. In presenting her experience, the film does a good job showing how fear, hatred, and obeying immoral authority can tear a society apart, and eradicate childhood.
The film carefully portrays the peasant woman who hides young Kati as a fearful, ordinary person whose practical courage was rare and morally costly, underscoring that such a rescue was exceptional. Preston herself laments how so many of the people she loved were killed, and how the Holocaust in Hungary grew in the abeyance of its sheep-like bureaucrats.
Dramatically, the core of the film is Kati’s time spent hidden in a barn, and soldiers repeatedly searching for her while she remains concealed in straw, including some hard-to-watch moments where a knife comes dangerously close to her face. The narrative puts this personal story in the larger context of the near‑annihilation of Hungary’s Jews, but deliberately resists overwhelming viewers with scale, instead using one child’s survival to illuminate the broader machinery of persecution. By involving her own family and local community in the production, and by carefully calibrating intense scenes so they are psychologically safe for a child performer, and yet emotionally truthful, Matmor and Glover translate an almost unspeakable childhood terror into a story that today’s audiences, including students, can confront without turning away.
Co-Written, Edited and Produced by Jody Glover
Co-writer and editor, Jody Glover was also a Producer of Hidden – The Kati Preston Story. She was responsible for shepherding the project from development through production and ensuring that Preston’s testimony could be understood. Jody also shares writing credit with director Daniel Matmor, shaping how Preston’s narrative is structured on screen, and how interviews, historical framing, and reenactments are interwoven so that the film remains rooted in Kati’s voice rather than in external commentary. Jody did a hundred other jobs, including wardrobe, transport, set decoration, catering and even website designer. She also assembled much of the production team, secured numerous festival admissions, and ultimately positioned the film as a tool for Holocaust remembrance and contemporary education.
Hidden – The Kati Preston Story is an engaging, historically significant film. It’s important media because of scarcity of living survivors, a surge in global antisemitism, the proliferation of misinformation on social media, and the need to educate younger generations. As the horrific event moves from living memory into history, media serves as a crucial tool to combat revisionism and ensure “Never Again” remains actionable.
“10% of people are awful, 10% are wonderful, but 80% are sheep. It’s the sheep that scare me.” – Kati Preston
