DOXA Documentary Film Festival to bring 49 features to home screens for 20th anniversary, May 6 to 16
Curated programs include music films, Indigenous experiments, French auteurs, and fresh takes on the opioid crisis
Food for the Rest of Us
Sisters with Transistors
DOXA DOCUMENTARY Film Festival is celebrating its 20th anniversary with an ambitious program of streamed programming—bringing 49 features, plus shorts and live talks to living rooms across Canada, May 6 to 16.
Festival passes and the full lineup are now available online at www.doxafestival.ca.
Highlights include The Roots drummer-frontman Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning directorial debut Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), about the Harlem Cultural Festival that took place during the same summer as Woodstock 1969 and attracted a crowd of 300,000. It joins a strong curated program of music docs, including Lisa Rovner’s Sisters with Transistors, a history of women in electronic music, and FANNY: The Right to Rock by Bobbi Jo Hart, a testament to the 1970s Filipina-American LGBTQ+ rock band.
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Canadian filmmakers seeing world premieres include Vancouver’s Brishkay Ahmed, whose In the Rumbling Belly of Motherland looks into Zan TV, Kabul’s female-operated and -oriented news agency in Afghanistan; Caroline Cox, whose Food for the Rest of Us travels from Indigenous-owned organic farms to Arctic geodesic domes in a search for farming and harvesting activism; and Dominique Keller, whose Love, the Last Chapter follows the late-stage relationships of three couples in seniors facilities.
One of the most intriguing ways the festival is marking its 20th anniversary is its Triple Platinum program, celebrating the festival’s history, with three generations of program directors—founder Kris Anderson, Dorothy Woodend, and Selina Crammond—bringing back some of their favourite films from their respective years at the helm. Think Sara Roque’s Six Miles Deep, Claire Simon’s Mimi, and Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy.
Elsewhere, VANDU (Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users) curates a compelling program of films that look at innovative drug policies around the world, as well as the devastating effects of the global war on drugs, including Philippines director Alyx Ayn Arumpac’s Aswang, New York director Mia Donovan’s Dope is Death, and local filmmaker Nettie Wild’s seminal Downtwon Eastside doc FIX.
The FRENCH FRENCH series returns with new films from a documentary auteurs like Marie Dumora, Claire Simon, and Alain Cavalier, while the Cousin Collective curates genre-pushing, experimental docs by Indigenous filmmakers.
This is the fest’s second rendition online, after it pivoted quickly last May.
Last week it announced three special presentations that will also take place during the fest: Shannon Walsh’s The Gig is Up, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’s Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy, and Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams’s Someone Like Me.
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