Adrianne & the Castle set to open DOXA Documentary Film Festival, as it releases 2024 lineup
Running May 2 to 12, fest also features nanekawâsis, Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, Tea Creek, and Caravan Farm Theatre doc The Originals
Fest opener Adrianne & the Castle.
Closing film Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story.
DOXA DOCUMENTARY FILM Festival has announced it will officially open with Shannon Walsh’s Adrianne & the Castle, at the Vancouver Playhouse on May 4. With whimsical flourish, the film tells the story of Alan St. George and the ornate, 63-room, fairy-tale castle he built by hand with his beloved late wife Adrianne in Illinois—a “temple” to their transcendent love.
The 23rd annual fest, running May 2 to 12, today unveiled a lineup of 48 features and mid-lengths, plus 34 short films. Screenings will take place at the Playhouse, The Cinematheque, VIFF Centre, and SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, with industry events held at SFU’s World Art Centre and The Post at 750.
Amid the other headlining features is the Mid-Week Gala documentary nanekawâsis, directed by Conor McNally and chronicling the life and work of celebrated Nêhiyaw (Cree), Two-Spirit artist George Littlechild. The world premiere takes place May 8 at VIFF Centre.
Closing DOXA is Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee’s Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, following the titular trailblazing transgender performer from the R&B scene of 1950s Nashville to the nightlife of 1960s Toronto. It screens May 11 at SFU Woodward’s Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema.
DOXA has also announced a guest-curated program by Dennis Lim, a New York City-based film curator and writer, artistic director of the New York Film Festival, and author of Tale of Cinema about filmmaker Hong Sang-soo and The Man from Another Place about David Lynch. His program includes the restored 1975 film Anna, by Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli, which he’s described as a “mythical tinder box of militancy, rage, repression, paranoia, and nihilism that was Italy in the 1970s”.
The festival will also present a retrospective of the sensorial, performative documentaries of Cédric Dupire and Gaspard Kuentz: The Real Superstar (2023), about the famed Indian film star Amitabh Bachchan; Prends, Seigneur, Prends (2017), a portrait of the temple of Panchwa in India, the site of celebration by crowds from Rajasthan’s Kalbeliya tribe each year; Journal Afghan (2015), a short built from mid-century travel footage; Kings of the Wind & Electric Queens (2014), depicting India’s carnivalesque Sonepur Cattle Fair; and We Don’t Care About Music Anyway… (2009), exploring Tokyo’s avant-garde underground music scene.
DOXA’s cornerstone Justice Forum and Rated Y for Youth programs also return. Elsewhere there will be four Spotlight programming streams: Paint Me a Film, featuring works that engage critically with “the camera’s role as both disruptor and co-creator”, examining the mediums of film and photography; True Lies, a selection of experimental and hybrid films that blur the lines between narrative and documentary forms; The Devil Stole Our Laughter, which takes its name from a quote by Mexican land defender Isela González Díaz and features films that follow individuals and communities living in the aftermath of change and disruption; and Children of the Sun, named for the late Lebanese painter and poet Etel Adnan’s work and gathering films from both Lebanon and Palestine. Films in these four Spotlights include: Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias, Saber Zammouri’s The Wasp and the Orchid, Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s A Man Imagined, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa’s La Laguna del Soldado, Anand Patwardhan’s The World is Family, and Lisa Jackson’s Wilfred Buck, among others.
Canadian filmmakers seeing world premieres at DOXA 2024 include Ryan Dickie, whose Tea Creek chronicles the Indigenous food-sovereignty work of activist Jacob Beaton; and Niall Patrick McNeil and Mike McKinlay’s The Originals, about the history of B.C.’s legendary Caravan Farm Theatre. The short docs Cake and Death (William Brown), Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying (Natalie Baird and Toby Gillies), and Twig (Claire Sanford) also enjoy world premieres.
Find tickets and more info at www.doxafestival.ca. 
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