Documentaries featured in this year's DOXA festival find ordinary people doing extraordinary things

As the sources of information get ever more consolidated (seriously, how many daily newspapers do we need from the same corporation?), people start looking further afield for the good stuff. At the recent Hot Docs festival in Toronto, which ended April 29, more than 40,000 people showed up to catch some truth about our world today and some of the events that made it that way.

That festival is now 12 years old, while its Vancouver counterpart, the DOXA Documentary Film + Video Festival, got its launch only at the start of this decade. In fact, it was staged only every other year until this current installment-running Tuesday through next Sunday (May 24-29)-turns it into an annual event.

Festival director Kristine Anderson, who founded DOXA in 2000, says that the time is right for nonfiction films to find a permanent showcase in Vancouver. To that end, roughly 20 new works will be on display here, mostly at the Pacific Cinémathíƒ ¨que.

"There's a huge increase in both the quality and quantity of documentaries," she says on the phone from her home in Vancouver. "We could double or triple the amount of films we show. The will is there and the films are there. But it's only six days, and we have to make sacrifices. We certainly had a tough time deciding this year, but we knew we were ready to go annual. It's more understandable for the public in general, and for sponsors, to have it annual-not that there's any more funding!"

Anderson previously taught filmmaking in Winnipeg and was an events organizer in that city's hardy cultural community. She has been on the West Coast for almost a decade, concentrating on finding a home for the doc scene. Initially, there was some effort to build the festival around current themes, but that soon gave way to eclecticism.

"We tried that, because there definitely are certain issues and approaches that stand out from time to time. But we always end up selecting what were the strongest films, regardless of what we were looking for. If I had to pick a common thread for this year's DOXA, I'd say that there are a lot of films about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I don't know if you'd call them heroic, but there are lot of people who went out on a limb to do amazing things."

A case in point is Abel Raises Caine, Jenny Abel's hugely entertaining film about her father, Alan Abel, a media hoaxer who started tweaking popular culture in the 1950s and is still at it. (In fact, both Abels will be coming to the festival for the Friday-night [May 27] show.)

Basically, this cigar-puffing New Yorker discovered in the early days of television that talk shows and local news channels would give you a platform for any statement, no matter how outrageous (the more outrageous the better, in fact), as long as you made your pronouncements with a straight face. Thus, there must still be some older Americans who truly believe that there were large organizations dedicated to the clothing of animals ("A nude horse is a rude horse" was one faux group's motto) and the banning of all breast-feeding, even in private (because "studies" proved that mothers get turned on by it).

"One of the most fascinating things about his art," Anderson adds, "is that no one seemed to notice the discord between what he was saying and the way it was being said. He was making fun of the media and its appetite for novelty. Alan found out that if you put out the right press release, you'd be instantly surrounded by cameras."

Such barbed tomfoolery can still be seen in that recent corporation-skewering documentary The Yes Men. And it's clearly the roots of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart's fake news. Of course, these techniques have also been exploited by attention-seekers like Evel Knievel and the pocket Machiavellis of the Bush administration who fabricate news and "attack" stories using actors pretending to be reporters and then farm them out to small-town outlets (themselves usually owned by corporate donors) that take them on faith-based self-interest.

Sometimes, media techniques are manipulated to tell a greater truth-one greater than ad-agency Swift Boat Veterans actually care about. In an examination of, as Anderson puts it, "people who risked their lives to change history," "Mighty Times: The Children's March" freely mixes reenactments, animation, and other suggestive techniques with newsreel footage to bring viewers back to the racially torn Alabama of 1963. The 40-minute film (which screens Thursday [May 26] alongside "Family Portrait", a short that follows up on a famous Gordon Parks Life magazine photo story) shamelessly pulls at the emotions but earns its rewards by conveying the courage of Birmingham's black children in the face of police dogs, fire hoses, and jail.

If most Americans came to see, that spring, that Birmingham police Chief Bull Connors was a serious bad guy, other films here show people standing up to institutions that are perhaps still unprepared to acknowledge their own limitations. Ali Kazimi's Continuous Journey, which gets a gala opening-night screening at the Vogue on Tuesday (May 24), takes on Canada's checkered history of vaguely drawn and arbitrarily applied immigration policies.

The feature focuses on the events surrounding the 1914 arrival of the Komagata Maru, a Japanese ship carrying 376 Indians, mostly Sikhs, to what they thought would be a better life in another part of the British Empire. What followed was a disgraceful and ultimately tragic game of footsy between Ottawa and local officials unwilling to observe British Law at the time-although Kazimi's unearthing of the song "White Canada", a popular beer-hall anthem of the time, makes their sentiments clear enough.

In his extensive research, the Toronto-based filmmaker (who will likewise be on hand), also discovered some previously unknown images of the vessel in question.

"Ali Kazimi was pouring through footage in the National Archives," Anderson explains, "and stuck in the middle of something else was some footage of this boat coming into the harbour. That must have been really spine-tingling to find.

"Also, the film debuted at Hot Docs last year but hasn't played here until now, so now families directly connected with the story can see it here, where it happened."

The fest features some provocations on the lighter side, as well. For instance, Amanda Micheli's Double Dare is a fascinating twofer portrait of an aging stuntwoman and a much younger gal from New Zealand who head to L.A. (after the end of the Xena series) to give Hollywood a spin.

Along with a strong aboriginal component, with veteran filmmaker Barb Cranmer in the house, there are some public forums and other, more freeform chats during the festival. And DOXA hosts some one-off events throughout the year, usually in cahoots with entities such as Out on Screen, the Jewish Film Festival, and the VIFF.

"Our profile is much greater now," Anderson concludes. "Attendance has gone up, with more sellouts at each festival. Our dreams and our plans are still greater than our resources, so we're growing at a gradual pace.

"The general public is much more interested in documentaries than it was even five years ago, when these things were seen by filmmakers and a few buffs. Since the ascent of Michael Moore, you could say, people see it as a form of entertainment and to get real information that you can't get from TV. There's a huge amount of stuff out there now, and we have to take the bad with the good. But what we see more than anything else is the incredible number of first-time filmmakers with something strong to say. It gives us hope for the future."