The 2010 DOXA Documentary film festival is currently underway, marking the 10th anniversary of the ten day annual event. This year’s crop of films, showing in various venues until May 16, ranges from the fun stuff (music and sex) to the socially conscious (environment and exploitation). Some screenings might be sold out, though, so check the DOXA site first.
If you missed some of the earlier screenings, encore performances of the more popular films are scheduled for the festival’s last day, May 16. Bloodied But Unbowed (directed by Susanne Tabata) and No Fun City (co-directed by Melissa James and Kate Kroll) both explore Vancouver’s underground music scene. Handily showing back-to-back, Bloodied But Unbowed chronicles the city’s thriving punk scene in the late ’70s and early ’80s, providing an interesting contrast to No Fun City which reveals the difficulties facing the folks who currently like to play loud, hard and fast music in Vancouver.
Other repeat screenings include Orgasm Inc. (directed by Liz Canner), a film about a controversial malady called Female Sexual Dysfunction and the army of folks seeking to profit from it. Billed as “shocking and hilarious,” this film has already caused many folks in the US to get their panties in a bunch, so to speak. Turning to a different type of crudeness, Lawrence Carota’s Crude Sacrifice shines a spotlight on the environmental fallout from Alberta’s oil industry, specifically the wasteland known as the tar sands.
True to DOXA tradition, human exploitation is also the focus of more than a few documentaries, including Wendy Champagne’s BAS! Beyond the Red Light and Barry Greenwald’s The Experimental Eskimos, both being shown again on May 16. The first film details the rescue and rehabilitation of 13 child prostitutes from the brothels of Mumbai, told mostly from the point of view of the children themselves. The second film exposes a social engineering experiment conducted by the Canadian government in the 1960s that entailed taking young Inuit boys from their families and placing them with white foster families, with rather unexpected results (unexpected by the government types in Ottawa, at any rate).
Other films being presented in the last few days of the festival include David Christensen’s The Mirror ((May 14) and Marko Skop’s Osadné (May 15). Both introduce us to small rural European town citizens who are fighting, through creativity and determination, to keep their populations from dwindling to nothing. Also not to be missed is Jennifer Steinman’s Motherland, winner of the Best Documentary prize at the 2009 California Independent Film Festival and showing at DOXA on May 15. The film tells the stories of six American mothers who, having lost their children to either accidents or violence, decide to travel to Africa as part of their grieving/healing process. The festival’s closing night film (shown the evening of May 15) is Michelle Esrick’s Saint Misbehavin’:The Wavy Gravy Movie, which focuses on the clown-ish hippie activist Wavy Gravy (aka Hugh Romney) and his special brand of social activism.
For more info, visit the DOXA site.
