The name Candida Royalle will forever conjure two loaded words: feminist porn.

Her story is now the stuff of legend. After starring in X-rated classics like Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls in the 1970s, she rebelled against the misogyny she experienced on and off camera. In her 30s, Royalle cut her hair short and took a seat behind the camera, blazing a trail as the director-producer of female-friendly erotica—and pushing sex-positive messages that still resonate today.

But behind that narrative lay a much more complex woman, whose real name was Candice Vadala. Battling ovarian cancer in her early 60s, she approached Vancouver filmmaker Sheona McDonald to tell her full story, in her own words.

The result is the intimate portrait Candice, which premieres at this year’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival. For McDonald, it’s the culmination of an intense project that lingered with her for years after Vadala’s death in 2015, at 64.

“We were two strangers, thrust into this personal journey,” McDonald begins, speaking to the Straight over the phone. “I didn’t really realize how hard it was going to be. I really struggled, to be honest. There were a lot of threads to pull together.”

McDonald first met Vadala when she was making Inside Her Sex, a 2014 documentary about porn, female sexuality, and shame. As they became better acquainted, Vadala asked McDonald if she’d be interested in filming her personal story. Vadala was facing another round of treatment for her cancer, and wanted to search out the story of her mother, who had abandoned her when she was just 18 months old. As McDonald captures in candid interviews, that act had left Vadala with lifelong doubts about her own worth, and nagging questions about what would drive a woman to leave her child.

“The weight of her childhood was so heavy,” McDonald recounts. “And she was facing her own mortality. She did not want to die. She was very vibrant and youthful and still had a lot she wanted to do. So the end of her life was quite tragic.”

McDonald, who had three young children here in Vancouver, dropped everything and took her camera to New York.

“I was living in her house—we were making dinners together,” she recalls. “She was a really interesting woman because she was complex and compassionate, and she loved her cats.”

McDonald travelled with Vadala to some of the places she’d lived in, from Brooklyn to San Francisco. But when a private investigator finally uncovered details about Vadala’s mother, and the possibility of a surviving half-sibling, filming took the director and Vadala to a sad corner of Missouri they could never have predicted. Suffice it to say, as McDonald puts it, “It wasn’t a happy story.”

McDonald’s own relationship with Vadala ended on similarly unresolved terms. Her last shoot with her subject opens the movie. It took place five months before Vadala’s death. McDonald was called back to Vancouver to direct the second season of the Knowledge Network’s Emergency Room: Life and Death at VGH, and never got the chance to return to see Vadala again before she died.

From there, the director says, she “felt Candice’s presence” when she later strove to complete the project—financing a good chunk of it herself. That involved carefully weaving together the wide-ranging pieces of Vadala’s life. Along with the hours of footage she shot, McDonald juggled black-and-white childhood photos, sometimes disturbing porn clips (like the infamous laundromat rape scene in 1976’s Easy Alice), and video of appearances on The Phil Donahue Show and other talk shows, as Royalle rose to fame outside of porn. All the while, McDonald felt a heavy responsibility not just to the late Vadala, but to her living relatives.

The result is a portrait as fascinatingly conflicted as its subject. McDonald says feminist pornographers are directly following the path that Vadala paved for them, but in the film, Vadala talks about forever wearing the “scarlet letter” for her work.

“I think you might say she did the best she could and managed to build a career—but I think she really would have loved to make it to the mainstream,” McDonald comments.

McDonald clearly feels a weight has been lifted off her now that she’s completed the documentary, which was years in the making.

There’s just one more lingering thing that needs to be taken care of.

“I have this big box of porn in my home,” McDonald says. “What am I going to do with all this now?”

The DOXA Documentary Film Festival presents Candice on May 4 at SFU Woodward’s and on May 12 at the Vancity Theatre.