DOXA Documentary Film Festival unveils full programming for hybrid event, May 5 to 15
Offerings include series devoted to landscapes and resistance, archival materials, and grandmother figures
Thelonius Monk in Rewind & Play
1970
FROM ODES TO two French filmmakers to a series devoted to archival footage, DOXA Documentary Film Festival has announced its full hybrid programming for in-theatre screenings and online streaming, May 5 to May 15.
The 21st annual fest will showcase 55 features and mid-lengths, 24 short films, both pre-recorded and live Q+As, as well as industry events. Films will be available to stream Canada-wide, through DOXA’s Eventive online platform, while in-person screenings will take place at the Vancouver Playhouse, The Cinematheque, VIFF Centre, and SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. In-person Industry events will be held at SFU’s World Arts Centre.
Amid the offerings, DOXA will feature two guest-curated programs. One is the return of French French, overseen by Thierry Garrel, featuring retrospectives on French directors Mariana Otero and François Caillat.
The other finds guest curator Laurence Reymond putting together a selection of films called Grand-Mère. Grandmother. Babushka., all focused on the grandma figure.
The fest’s Justice Forum and Rated Y for Youth programs return. In addition, DOXA is adding two Spotlight programming streams.
The first is Memory and Archives, focusing on the potential of found footage and the questionable reliability of memory. Watch for Tomasz Wolski’s historical 1970, chronicling a violent era of Polish unrest with era-specific marionettes, stop motion animation, and archival audio; Vancouver director Sara Wylie’s A More Radiant Sphere, reviving the life and writings of Canadian poet and socialist Joe Wallace; Alain Gomis’s Rewind & Play, deconstructing the systemic racism that met jazz icon Thelonious Monk’s visit to a Parisian television studio in 1968; and Courtney Stephens’s essay film Terra Femme, scored by former Vancouver-based musician Sarah Davachi, and featuring a tapestry of amateur travel footage shot by women from the 1920s to 1940s.
DƏNE YI'INJETL - The Scattering of Man, tells the story of lands transformed after the flooding of BC Hydro’s W.A.C. Bennett Dam in 1968.
The second stream is called Landscapes of Resistance, a series of films rooted in stewardship and political freedom. Among the highlights: Ali Kazimi’s Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence, a first-hand account of the Sinixt Nation’s battle for recognition; Luke Gleeson’s DƏNE YI'INJETL - The Scattering of Man, telling the story of how his people’s lands were transformed after the flooding of BC Hydro’s W.A.C. Bennett Dam in 1968; and Marta Popivoda’s Landscapes of Resistance, an intimate portrait of 97-year-old Sonja, who fought against Nazism in the 1940s.
Among the special presentations DOXA had announced last week are the Canadian world premieres of Teresa Alfeld’s Doug and the Slugs and Me, DOXA’s closing film, and Colin Askey’s Love in the Time of Fentanyl (the Justice Forum Special Presentation). Other Canadian premieres include Simon Plouffe’s immersive short about a flooded forest on unceded Innu territory, titled Forests; My Friend Jim, Aaron Zeghers’s short about his friend’s kinship with pop star Britney Spears; And Ingrid by Hannah Dubois, a short profile of the conceptual artist Ingrid Baxter; Alixandra Buck’s Beckwoman’s Hippie Emporium, about the legendary Commercial Drive shop owner; and Cypher, directed by Miriam Ingrid Barry and Eva Anandi Brownstein, following three Black artists creating safe spaces for youth of African descent in Vancouver.
The full roster, tickets, and information are at doxafestival.ca.
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