May 6 marks opening day of the 20th annual DOXA Festival! As with every annual event over the last fourteen months, the folks behind DOXA have had to make a few changes to its delivery.
This year, all 86 films will be made available online with the purchase of a festival pass (there’s even a low income/student/senior rate available!).
https://twitter.com/DOXAFestival/status/1390338203639586822?s=20
In addition to on-demand access to all participating films in this year’s festival, passholders get to attend livestreamed events like Q&A sessions with filmmakers, a movie trivia night, and many, many more.
A selection of seven documentaries will be also screened in a drive-in setting at the PNE Amphitheatre between May 13 and May 15. These screenings are rain-or-shine events, and tickets can be purchased here. With the postponed opening of Playland, and the outright cancellation of the Pacific Northwest Exhibition fair this year, it’s awesome to see the PNE Amphitheatre getting put to good, safe use.
Just one of the films available for streaming is FIX: The Story of an Addicted City (dir. Nettie Wild). The addicted city in question is our very own Vancouver. Released in 2002, the film documents the fraught journey to opening North America’s first safe injection site.
This film remains just as poignant and important today, as even twenty years after filming, we remain in an opioid crisis with overdose deaths having skyrocketed last year.
(@DoxaFestival / Twitter)
Personally, I’m looking forward to catching Love: The Last Chapter (dir. Dominique Keller). The director actually moved into a seniors’ home in Calgary, and profiled six residents who found love in that seniors’ home. The coolest thing about streaming that one at home is that nobody will be around to see me ugly-cry while I watch it.
The DOXA Festival is brought to us by The Documentary Media Society, a Vancouver-based non-profit organization that champions education of the public both through and about documentary films.
A fun fact about DOXA: it’s actually a Greek word (pronounced DOCKS-ah) that means ‘commonly-held belief’, or ‘popular opinion’.