Hot Docs 2026: Music Superstar Carole Pope and Filmmaker Michelle Mama Talk About Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions

This year’s Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival kicks off with a headliner in the truest sense of the word. Director Michelle Mama’s Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions takes an intimate, behind-the-scenes look at the past and present of a queer music pioneer. 

Alongside longtime musical partner Kevin Staples, Canadian singer-songwriter Carole Pope created the seminal rock band Rough Trade, which rose to prominence on the strength of radio hits like “High School Confidential” and “All Touch.” From the outset of the band and through to her current solo career, which sees Pope still going strong in her seventies, she has always written blunt, catchy, boundary pushing songs from a provocative, unapologetically queer perspective. At the time, some radio listeners might not have realized “High School Confidential” was a song about queer lust because it was such a sick jam, but today, it’s a lot easier to peg exactly where Pope is coming from. A direct line of influence can be drawn from Pope to the likes of Peaches (who recently signed on to be an executive producer for Antidiva) and Chappell Roan, artists who speak openly about their queerness and continue to push musical boundaries.

But reliving the past isn’t anything new for Pope, and Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions finds Mama taking a lot of cues from her subject’s 2000 autobiography of the same name (now available as an audiobook, with a second book planned for release later this year). But when piecing the film together in the editing room, Mama quickly realized that she had to move beyond the words in Pope’s book and songs to tell the full story.

“The original intention, as I pitched it to Carole was: ‘we’re going to take your book and we’re going to have you read chapters of it,’” Mama recalled during a recent Zoom interview alongside Carole from their respective home bases. “I wanted it to be sort of ethereal, and have lots of imagery. I was inspired by Montage of Heck, the Kurt Cobain [documentary]. I just wanted it to be a little bit more out there. And I really wanted to rely on Carole’s [voiceover] a lot more. But once we got into the edit, it was slowing things down to hear her reading for extended periods of time. And we were [told] by the network, ‘listen, we can’t do this; you have to use only minimal amounts of this,”

“And so then I made the decision, because my favourite part of the book is the Dusty chapter,” Mama adds, specifically referencing one of the chapters in Antidiva that continues to draw a lot of notice today. “Because when I read the Dusty Springfield chapter that was when I was a fan, 20 years ago, so I was like, ‘that’s the one we’re going to keep.’ And we were able to create a really lovely sequence with Carole reading her audio book at Random House, and then wrapping the Dusty stuff into that, and it was like a capsule, so it was easier to tell as a story.” 

As the film version of Antidiva began to evolve and change, Mama constructed sequences where the often shy and reserved Pope would watch footage of past performances and interviews, and the director would capture her subject’s most immediate responses. These sequences would become one of the film’s biggest and most poignant motifs.

“One of my favourite things that we did in this film was sit Carole down in front of a screen and watch her watch herself. We got some really intense close ups of her eyes and and her glasses; a reflection of her 50 years ago self in her glasses as her present self is watching. Okay, I’m a nerd, whatever,” Mama jokes with a laugh. “Just watching her expression and giggling, because Carole doesn’t giggle often. [She’s watching] herself be this sweetheart in all these interviews. We showed her this one interview where she’s like, ‘I don’t know if I want to be famous, you know, I don’t want to do do this for too long.’ And she just burst out laughing, because here we are, all these years later. I think that was one of my favourite parts. Because when do you ever get to do that: watching a legend, watch themself?”

And there’s certainly plenty of Pope to watch. In addition to their early eighties heyday, there’s also plenty of footage from a handful of reunion shows and tours that Rough Trade did after they softly and quietly broke up. (Staples remained a close friend and collaborator with Pope until he passed away from health complications last year.) But while Pope might be best known in the mainstream as part of that band, she has been a solo act for much longer than Rough Trade existed at this point. Antidiva finds Pope reflecting not only on her past, but on navigating the current minefield of modern music and touring. You don’t make it fifty years into a career without noticing a lot of changes along the way.

“I think it’s a lot of young kids running labels now, and they don’t have any knowledge of music, and it’s all about profit and creating these stars who can’t sing and have no support,” Pope says about the biggest changes she has noticed lately. “There’s a lot of that. And when we signed with True North, and back in the 70s and 80s, people believed in developing artists and putting out a few albums, so they were involved in the artistic end of it, and now it’s just like, if you don’t have a hit, you’re gone. But, you know, there are some great artists out there who survived all this hellishness.”

That survival instinct and the balance that Pope shows between who she is on stage and off combine to make her such an inspirational figure for Mama.

“Unless you’re truly an artist in your bone marrow,  running around the world with a suitcase, doing a gig over here and a gig over there takes a lot,” Mama says, expressing boundless admiration for Pope. “It’s exhausting to hang out with Carole, but as she says, it’s what she does, right? What else is she gonna do? She’s an artist. She makes art, and she performs. She’s a performer. But one thing Kevin Staples told me, which I always come back to, and which is kind of like the mantra for the film, is that Carole is very mysterious, and people have been intimidated by her and tried to figure her out. And Kevin really put it very clearly and said, ‘the Carole that’s on stage is the real Carole.’ Everywhere else, she’s shy, but the Carole on stage is the real Carole. And nobody knew Carole the way Kevin did. I think that she comes alive on stage, and that’s her. That’s why she’s on this earth. So she just keeps doing it, and keeps doing it, and and so for artists who are 20, 30, 40 years in and still doing it, you got to look and say, ‘You know what? Carole is still doing it, so I can still do it.’ You put one foot in front of the other, and that’s the kind of artist I really admire: doing the art, no matter who shows up, no matter if it’s 100 people or 10,000 people, you’re gonna do your show. And that’s Carole.”

Carole isn’t one to mince words, especially in her art, which has always placed a great amount of value on openness and honesty above all else. It’s a trait that has made her one of the greatest songwriters in Canadian music history, but also something that always carried a bit of controversy that has stayed the same then (with the innuendo heavy “High School Confidential”) as it does today (one of her most recent singles, as documented in Antidiva, is an ode to the art of fisting).

“With ‘High School Confidential,’ CHUM radio paid us to go in and do an edit, and we really fucked around,” Pope chuckles recalling a request to censor one of their first big hits. “And my friend [Marjorie] Gross wanted to change the line ‘cream my jeans’ and Marge says,  ‘just say ‘she makes me order Chinese food when she comes my way,’ And I did that. And then I made some noises, and then they just ended up bleeping it.”

“And, you know, grabbing my crotch on the Junos when they told me not to was another thing,” Pope continues, discussing an incident in 1982 at Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards. “But I have to really give kudos to the CBC, because we started doing those late night shows in the 70s, and they really let us do anything without question. We did ‘Dyke by Default,’ and I’m outing all these people. I was just outing a bunch of historical figures, and writers, and actresses, and I just didn’t care. So, yeah, I’ve never really cared. I think we just always wanted to put stuff out there, and if people liked it great, and if not, whatever. And so many songs are still relevant today, especially like, ‘What’s the Furor About the Fuhrer,’ sadly, and ‘Shaking the Foundations’ and ‘Endless Night,’ which is about being a queer and was inspired by the bathhouse raids in Toronto, and a lot of that stuff still stands up.”

Pope has shared the stage with plenty of controversial, like minded artists over the years, but one of the most inspired collaborations she ever had was something that sadly wasn’t captured extensively on film. Before they were signed to a major recording contract, Pope and Staples produced a “musical cabaret” titled Restless Underwear, which was performed once at Toronto’s fabled Massey Hall in 1977. Their star: famed drag performer and John Water’s leading lady Divine. Only about ten seconds of footage shot by Pope’s brother exists of the show, but the quality wasn’t good enough to make it into Antidiva, making it, as she describes it, Mama’s “white whale.”

“Kevin and I were huge fans of Divine from the John Waters movies, and we wanted to do this weird cabaret thing called Restless Underwear. So we went to New York, and we met Divine,” Pope says about how the show came together. “He was doing Women Behind Bars, directed by Ron Link, and we just went backstage, and we’re like, do you want to be in this cabaret musical we’re doing in Toronto? And he said yes. And then Ron Link said he would direct. And then my manager, at the time, knew [David] Bowie’s manager, and we went to his penthouse apartment and got some funding. And she also worked for Jules Fisher, and he lit all the Broadway shows. So we had that, and then we just wrote this ridiculous thing, cabaret slash musical slash acting, and put it on Massey Hall. It was sold out, and we didn’t have a record deal or anything.”

Perhaps one of the things that makes Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessionsso timely is the current/sorry state of global affairs. For queer people, who continue to see decades of steps towards equality rolled back in favour of puritanical rhetoric and outdated fears, the film serves as a testament to the kind of life one can live by being outspoken and up front about their feelings.

“Great art comes out of these kinds of times, right? Always,” Mama passionately responds when asked about what it takes to be creative during dark historical periods. “If you look back, some of the greatest art came out in the 80s, with Thatcher and Reagan and all that shit. But it’s hard. It’s very hard. It’s very hard to think we’re going to have a premiere in a couple weeks, and stand up on stage and celebrate, and people are getting blown up all over the world. You kind of have to have a dissociative ability to function these days, frankly. But I also think on this flip side of that, in a time where queer stories are being pulled out of pulled off of shelves, pulled off of streamers, queer storytelling is not being funded in the US anymore, pretty much, or bought or acquired, then it behooves us as Canadians and everybody on the outside of the evil empire to do more of it: to tell more queer stories, to put more of it out there, defiantly. And it’s important these stories get told. So in some ways, it’s depressing as hell. You don’t get want to get out of bed. But in the other on the other flip side of it, you It pisses you off enough to to act.”

Never one to pussyfoot around her feelings, Pope responds to the state of the world with blunt, witty aplomb.

“It’s inspiring. All of this shit show is very inspiring. There’s just so much to write about.”

Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions is the opening night film for the 2026 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, screening on Thursday, April 23 at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema at 7:00pm. It screens again at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema on Sunday, April 26 at 1:30pm. It will receive a proper theatrical release later this year.