DOXA Documentary Film Festival announces 2023 lineup
The 22nd edition includes 39 thought-provoking feature- and mid-length releases and 25 shorts
Big Fight in Little Chinatown. Photo by Nathaniel Brown
DOXA DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL returns for 2023, screening from May 4 to 14 at The Cinematheque, VIFF Centre, and SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. The 22nd edition of Western Canada’s largest documentary film festival will also offer virtual streaming of select titles across Canada from May 15 to 24 via its Eventive online platform.
This year’s fest includes 39 feature- and mid-length films along with 25 short films for a total of 64 titles. Industry events and other opportunities for filmmakers, audiences, and professionals to connect will be held in person at SFU’s World Arts Centre.
Opening the 2023 fest is Karen Cho’s Big Fight in Little Chinatown, screening on May 4 at SFU’s Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema. Chinatowns all over the world are under threat of disappearing—and along with them, the rich history of so many communities that fought for their right to belong. The film follows communities across North America that are working to end perpetual gentrification and displacement.
Other special presentations include: director by D. Smith’s Kokomo City, which documents the stories of four Black transgender sex workers in New York and Georgia as they share their thoughts on desires, taboos, and gender’s many meanings (Justice Forum); and Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s King Coal, which witnesses the daily rituals of life in Appalachia as the cultural roots of the coal industry continue to permeate even as its economic power wanes (Rated Y for Youth). Playing at the closing gala is Kaveh Nabatian’s Kite Zo A (Leave the Bones), which weaves together ancestral veneration, choreographed dance, and interviews to tell a story of fighting back against colonial oppression in Haiti.
DOXA is also featuring three guest-curated programs this year.
Nya Lewis, Vancouver-based curator, writer, and Artspeak Gallery director, has selected the film Beba (Rebeca Huntt, 2021) for their program, A Radical Pluriverse: Reflections on Black Womanhood on Both Sides of the Lens. “I consider it a privilege to access a spiritual legacy of mothers, sisters and daughters—a lineage or genealogy of Black women(hood) that is defined by collective self-awareness, shared political consciousness, love, magic, quests for liberation and futurism,” Lewis says in a release.
Farah Clémentine Dramani-Issifou, whose research and curatorial work focuses on Afro-diasporic cinema and visual arts, has curated a program of short films called I AM A (WO)MAN: Transatlantic Perspectives on Political Struggles in the 1960s–1970s in Guinea-Bissau, Morocco, the USA and France. The shorts highlight the cross-cultural and -continental “struggles for the emancipation of colonized peoples” and display the collaborative work of filmmakers and labour activists in the fight.
NORITA: The Mother of All Struggles is the title of Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis’s program, which will feature Jayson McNamara’s work-in-progress doc, Norita. The film looks at the life and revolutionary work of Nora Cortiñas, the most famous of the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo—Argentina’s movement of women fighting for justice amid the country’s rampant political oppression.
Beyond the festival’s cornerstone Justice Forum and Rated Y for Youth programs, DOXA 2023 will include two Spotlight programming streams: Dance, Dance Otherwise We are Lost and Thin Places. The former’s title comes from words once uttered by German dancer Pina Bausch. The films in this program meld the disciplines of dance and filmmaking, strengthening relationships between ancestors, culture, and community in the process, all in an effort to make sense of the world. Titles include: Paloma Zapata’s La Singla, which follows the mysterious career of Deaf flamenco dancer Anotnia Singla; A Way To B, directed by Jos de Putter and Clara van Gool, about Barcelona’s Liant la Troca dance collective made up of artists with diverse physical disabilities; Andreas Antonopoulos’s film about sugar’s role in the forced relocation of thousands of Indians to the Caribbean, titled Cheenee; and Closing Presentation Kite Zo A (Leave the Bones).
Thin Places presents a collection of films exploring liminal and precarious zones. “There are places both hollowed and hallowed, all in one,” says Irish writer Kerri ní Dochartaigh. Thin places, as they are known in the Celtic tradition, are locales where a sense of heaven and Earth meet. But in this dense collection of films, hell is present too. The releases in this spotlight include Theo Montoya’s Anhell69: part queer ghost story, part ode to Colombian cinema, it follows a group of friends in the streets of Medellín; Khoa Lê’s Má Sài Gon (Mother Saigon), which constructs a dynamic ode to Saigon’s Queer and Trans communities through a series of intimate character portraits; Mstyslav Chernov’s journalistic and heavy-hitting 20 Days in Mariupol; the debut feature of Canadian filmmaker Terra Long, called Feet in Water, Head on Fire, which beautifully traces the communities and vegetation shaping the Coachella Valley region; and Veranada, Dominique Chaumont’s study of a lone herder migrating his flock in the Argentinian Andes as the landscape withers from unprecedented drought.
Several Canadian filmmakers will have their world premiere at DOXA 2023. Amy Miller’s latest film, Manufacturing the Threat, is a festival highlight: After the arrest and imprisonment of a young Surrey couple, their plot to commit acts of terrorism was revealed to be the work of government agent provocateurs aiming to entrap and create their own “threats”. Miller will also be giving a masterclass, co-presented by DOC BC | YT | NWT, as part of DOXA’s Industry program.
Ali Grant’s Not Quite That champions an affecting local story; after finding out she is predisposed to breast cancer, Sarah White—a Jewish woman, mother, and butch lesbian—must decide whether to wait and see what happens or act swiftly and have a preventative double mastectomy.
Festival tickets and passes are now on sale. Full details are at www.doxafestival.ca.
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