Overview

• The film, Canceled: The Paula Deen Story, has its world premiere in Toronto on Saturday, with Deen and her sons expected to attend.
• It revisits Deen’s admission in a 2013 deposition that she had used a racial slur, which led to her firing from Food Network and lost endorsements.
• Deen says in the documentary that her last use of the slur was during a 1980s bank-robbery incident, a detail she argues was lost in the original coverage.
• Corben recorded extensive on-camera conversations in Savannah, focusing on the Deen family’s rise, rupture, and how they processed the fallout.
• Early festival coverage notes the film offers sympathetic context and counterpoints from historian Michael W. Twitty, with critiques that it stops short of a deeper cultural reckoning.