When Dorothy Woodend first screened Kurt Walker’s 2014 documentary Hit 2 Pass, she just about fell off her chair.
And that’s really saying something. As director of programming for DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Woodend waded through more than 1200 submissions to piece together the 2015 edition alone.
She thought she’d seen it all – and then she screened Hit 2 Pass.
The homegrown documentary delves deep into an annual full-contact demolition derby car race in Prince George called Hit to Pass.
What Woodend found compelling was not just the subject matter (in the aptly titled race, drivers literally crash into each other to get ahead), but also the way in which Walker – an emerging filmmaker – chose to tell his story.
The film employs a catchy 16-bit soundtrack, video game interludes, and a shaky cam recorded from a child’s point of view, before taking a turn for the more reflective.
“[Hit 2 Pass] really is upending conventional ideas about what documentary and non-fiction is, in an inventive and playful way,” says Woodend in a recent phone interview. “I think its greatest charm is that it does away with all of these conventions about, ‘this is the way you tell a story,’ and wipes the board clean and creates this new type of storytelling.”
Hit 2 Pass is but one of 90 films that will screen as part of the 2015 DOXA Documentary Film Festival.
The films span the globe and the gamut of POVs. Some, like GTFO: Get the F&#% Out (about the harassment faced by women in gaming), seem pulled from the headlines, while others, like On the Trail of the Far Fur Country (about Canada’s early cinematic history and its representation of First Nations people) pull audiences back to forgotten places and eras.
The magic of DOXA is in its diversity, according to its programming director. Anyone can make a documentary about anything at all.
“Documentary, not necessarily more than narrative, is far less driven by financial agendas, so people can pick up a camera and just make this crazy film in their backyard or with their buddies in Prince George, and it’s great,” says Woodend. “And documentary films have, in the last several years, moved into the mainstream in an amazing way.”
DOXA’s Special Programs include returning series like the Justice Forum, Satire & Subversion, and Rated Y for Youth. New additions for 2015: a focus on new French documentaries (French French), and Wild Grass: New Chinese Images, in which the spotlight is on cinematic trends in China.
It’s difficult for Woodend to single out her favourites from among DOXA’s 90 films, but when pressed, she offers up Deep Web (about Ross William Ulbricht, the 30-year-old entrepreneur accused of being the creator and operator of the online black market, Silk Road), Le Paradis (“The filmmaker, he’s 83 at the moment, and he’s doing something quite similar to what much, much younger filmmakers are doing where he does his own thing”), and Greenpeace origin story How to Change the World, as particularly close to her heart.
“My son is 14 and he says to me, ‘you’re trying to save the world one documentary at a time,’” laughs Woodend. “It’s like, ‘yeah, we are.’ We’re just going to keep on trucking.”
DOXA Documentary Film Festival runs April 30-May 10.
