HOT DOCS 2018: WHAT WALAA WANTS

Toronto’s own Christy Garland makes her third appearance at Hot Docs International Documentary Festival after Cheer Up and The Bastard Sings the Sweetest Song.  What Walaa Wants is her third instalment in this year’s documentary festival and it has to be one of her biggest yet.  The international co-production follows a young woman named Walaa in a span of five years where she is raised in a refugee camp while her mother is in an Israeli prison.  The kicker in this film is that Walaa wants to become one of only a handful of women in the Palestinian Security Forces.  Overcoming this barrier might be difficult for Walaa in a society where women’s rights are not equally distributed and where she likes to break the rules.  We caught up with director Christy Garland as she discusses her film What Walaa Wants and what it means to be part of this year Hot Docs focus on women directors.