Adrianne & the Castle will open this year’s DOXA Documentary Festival. The film directed by Governor General’s Award winner Shannon Walsh (The Gig Is Up) and produced by Oscar nominee Ina Fichman (Fire of Love) will have its B.C. premiere after debuting at SXSW and Hot Docs. Adrianne & the Castle offers a lively and imaginative portrait of enduring love as it whisks audiences to the castle in Savanna, Illinois that Alan St-Georges built his now-late wife Adrianne as a living museum of their love. The film kicks off DOXA on May 4.
Other films in DOXA’s slate, announced today via a release, include the Mid-Week and Closing Night Galas of nanekawâsis and Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, respectively. Directed by Conor McNally, the former profiles Two Spirit Cree artist George Littlechild. The latter, a co-production between Banger Films and the NFB, offers a portrait from directors Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee of the late Black trans singer Jackie Shane, who blazed a trail on the Toronto music scene. Any Other Way premiered at SXSW and Hot Docs, while nanekawâsis has its world premiere at DOXA.
Canadian docs making their first appearance at DOXA include Ryan Dickie’s Tea Creek. The portrait of activist Jacob Beaton tackles the issue of Indigenous food sovereignty. Meanwhile, directors Niall Patrick McNeil and Mike McKinlay will launch The Originals, which profiles B.C.’s outdoor Caravan Farm Theatre. North American premieres include A Man Imagined from directors Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky. The sobering portrait of an unhoused man in Montreal previously screened at Rotterdam.
Other Canadian feature documentaries at the festival include, but are not limited to, Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong’s Plastic People, produced by White Pine Pictures, which tackles the growing environmental consequences of micro-plastics and their effects on the human body. Lisa Jackson’s Wilfred Buck, about the titular Cree researcher with vast knowledge of the stars, makes its West Coast showing after playing CPH:DOX and Hot Docs. The film will open the Yorkton Film Festival in May as well. Also continuing its run on the circuit after playing True/False and Hot Docs is Yintah, a vérité capsule of Wet’suwet’en resistance and the fight to preserve traditional land amid plans for the Coastal GasLink pipeline. The doc comes from directors Michael Toledano, Jennifer Wickam, and Brenda Michell.
This year, DOXA offers two special retrospectives. One welcomes guest curator Dennis Lim, film critic and artistic director of the New York Film Festival, who will has selected a screening of the rarely-seen 1975 Italian film Anna by Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli. The film received a 2011 restoration and is a “mythical tinder box of militancy, rage, repression, paranoia, and nihilism that was Italy in the 1970s,” Lim notes in a release. DOXA also spotlights the work of acclaimed French director and cinematographer Cédric Dupire, including his 2023 film The Real Superstar about Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan.
DOXA 2024 runs May 2 to 12.
