Truth Matters: Final Installment - Documentary Confronts Fake News

DOC Institute’s Truth Matters returns for its final installment. This discussion will explore key issues such as the future of political documentaries, the rise of hostile rhetoric, and the growing conflict between journalistic standards and the flexibility of documentary storytelling.

There will be a cash bar and complimentary hors d'oeuvres.

About our moderator and panelists:

Aisha Jamal (Moderator)

Aisha Jamal is a filmmaker and film programmer based in Toronto, Canada. Her films have screened at venues and festivals world wide. Aisha’s feature film debut A Kandahar Away, which explores her family’s connection to the small hamlet of Kandahar, Saskatchewan, premiered in 2019 and played on CBC Gem and on the documentary channel. She recently finished her second feature documentary, The Theft, about Afghan art and repatriation. Aisha programs Canadian and international films for the Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival and frequently hosts on-stage conversations with directors, artists and other creatives.
Allya Davidson (Panelist)

Allya Davidson is a multiple Emmy, RTDNA and Canadian Screen Award-winning investigative journalist. She is the executive producer of CBC News’ flagship investigative documentary program, The Fifth Estate, which is in its 51st season. Allya has produced documentaries for VICE and CTV's W5, and internationally for Channel 4 (UK), ZDF (Germany), Four Corners (Australia) and PBS Frontline. She is passionate about mentoring BIPOC journalists and advancing equity in the field. Allya gave the inaugural Al Hamilton Lecture at Toronto Metropolitan University in the Spring of 2024; her lecture’s contents are now part of first-year journalism syllabi at TMU.

Habiba Nosheen (Panelist)

Habiba Nosheen is a Pakistani-born Peabody and three-time Emmy award-winning journalist and a filmmaker. She is the creator and host of the investigative podcast Conviction: The Disappearance of Nuseiba Hasan, with Gimlet Media and Spotify which was named one of the best podcasts of 2022 by The Guardian. Her film Outlawed in Pakistan premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it was called "among the standouts" of Sundance by The Los Angeles Times. Her This American Life radio documentary, “What Happened at Dos Erres?” was dubbed “a masterpiece of storytelling” by The New Yorker.

Habiba was previously the co-host of CBC's The Fifth Estate. She is the 2025 Chicken and Egg Award recipient. She was named DOC NYC’s 40 under 40. Her films have been supported by PBS FRONTLINE, JustFilms, The Firelight Media, ITVS, The Center for Asian American Media, CBC, The National Film Board of Canada, Canada Media Fund and others. She has taught filmmaking at Columbia University.

Tanya Talaga (Panelist)

Tanya Talaga is an award-winning Anishinaabe journalist and author. Through her bestselling books, acclaimed documentaries, podcasts and powerful keynotes, Talaga aims to amplify Indigenous voices and stories across Canada and the world. Talaga is a born storyteller, who is passionate about education reform and a more inclusive and equitable future.

Talaga is of Anishinaabe and Polish descent. She is a proud member of Fort William First Nation, in the Robinson-Superior Treaty territory and her maternal family has ties to Treaty 9. Her father was Polish-Canadian.

For more than 20 years, Talaga was a journalist at the Toronto Star and is now a regular columnist at the Globe and Mail. In 2021, she was part of the Globe team that won the Michener Award in public service journalism for reporting on the Catholic Church’s efforts to avoid responsibility regarding Indian Residential Schools, and the pursuit of an apology from Pope Francis. She has been part of teams that won two National Newspaper Awards for Project of the Year while at The Star.

Talaga is the author of three national bestsellers. Her first book, Seven Fallen Feathers, won the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities Read Award: Young Adult/Adult. Her second book, All Our Relations: Finding a Path Forward, was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and for the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. Her third book, The Knowing, retells the history of this country as only she can—through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family, as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide.

The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today. It is the focus of a four-part, CBC docuseries that Tanya co-directed and co-wrote, which was awarded the 2024 Playback’s Directors of the Year and Best Writers at the 2025 Canadian Screen Awards.

Talaga is the founder of Makwa Creative, a production company formed to elevate Indigenous voices and stories through podcasts and documentary films, including the Canadian Screen Award nominated War For The Woods, and Mashkawi-Manidoo Bimaadiziwin Spirit to Soar that received the ”Audience Award” for best mid-length documentary at the Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival. In 2025, the documentary Ni-Naadamaadiz: Red Power Rising, which she produced and co-wrote with the film’s director Shane Belcourt, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival - a story of a youth-led Indigenous land reclamation in Anicinabe Park ON. Tanya is the executive producer of the podcast, Auntie Up! made for Indigenous women by Indigenous women.

Talaga holds five honorary doctorates. She was the 2017/2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, and in 2018, was the first Anishinaabe woman to be the CBC Massey Lecturer. Talaga is the recipient of the 2025 Canadian Journalism Federation Tribute which recognizes media luminaries who have made an exceptional journalistic impact on the international stage. She was also given the 2025 Rosemary Brown and Neil Reimer Awards, both for her journalis

Michelle Shepherd (Panelist)

During her two decades at the Toronto Star, she reported from more than 20 countries, including Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan and went behind the wire at the U.S. Naval Pr*son, Guantanamo Bay more than two dozen times. Among her films, Shephard was the co-director and producer of the Emmy-nominated documentary Guantanamo’s Child, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015 and won Canada Screen Awards (CSA) for best direction and the Donald Brittain Award for Best Social or Political Program. Her film, The Perfect Story, was nominated for a CSA and won the DGC Canadian Documentary Feature Award at Calgary Film Festival in 2022. Her most recent films include, The Man Who Stole Einstein's Brain, which premiered at Hot Docs Film Festival in 2023 and the CSA-nominated The Way Out. She was the creative producer for Uyghurs: Prisoners of the Absurd and was a contributor to the Peabody Award-winning Under Fire: Journalists in Combat.

She is also a three-time recipient of the National Newspaper Award; and the Governor-General’s Michener Award for public service journalism, and the author of Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr, Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zone, and Code Name: Pale Horse, which she co-write with retired FBI Special Agent Scott Payne, dubbed by Rolling Stone Magazine as the “Hilbilly Donnie Brasco.” He spent more than twenty years going undercover to infiltrate the Klu Klux Klan, outlaw motorcycle gangs, and a Neo Nazi accelerationist group.

Her podcast series that she has hosted and produced include Sharmini, a six-part investigation of a cold case she first covered as a cub reporter for the Toronto Star; Brainwashed, which looked at the CIA’s covert Cold War program “MK Ultra" and was nominated for an Ambie and White Hot Hate; a podcast that dove deep into the far-right terrorist group, The Base, and garnered a silver for best serialized podcast by the New York Festivals Radio Awards. She was also a writer and producer of the podcasts Unascertained; Do You Know Mordechai and The No Good Terribly Kind Wonderful Lives and Tragic Deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman.

In 2018, Michelle joined award-winning producer Bryn Hughes in creating Frequent Flyer Films.

Michelle continues to write on foreign policy issues and terrorism for various publications and is the co-president of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) and on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher DOC Institute