Mira Burt-Wintonick's ode to her late father, pioneering nonfiction director Peter Wintonick, will open this year's DOXA Documentary Film Festival.

Her NFB-produced Wintopia is described as "part Utopian odyssey, part mourning ritual", as the young filmmaker traces the life of her father, who made the iconic doc Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media with Mark Achbar. There will be a live, moderated Q&A with Burt-Wintonick and special guests on June 20.

Amid pandemic restrictions, the 19th annual DOXA fest—which was originally to have run in May—will stream entirely online from June 18 through June 26. The programming, geo-blocked to B.C., boasts more than 64 films from across Canada and around the world, and includes live-streamed events. Films will be available to stream for the duration of the fest dates, and virtual tickets will be limited.

Among the highlights:

• A B.C. spotlight features several Vancouver-based filmmakers, including Greg Crompton, whose feature Eddy's Kingdom is about businessman Eddy Haymour and the extreme methods he used to construct a Middle Eastern-themed amusement park in the Okanagan Valley in the 1970s. Tony Massil will see the world premiere of The End From Here, about three reclusive men who live in the geopolitical anomaly of Hyder, Alaska (a spot that straddles the B.C. border). Short films also include Josephine Anderson’s On Falling (which recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City), a profile of three professional women mountain bikers. And in another local connection, Sky Hopinka debuts the poetic małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, spoken almost entirely the near-extinct Indigenous language of Chinuk Wawa and rooted in the origin-of-death myth from the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest.

• Renowned cinematographer Iris Ng—who's lensed everything from 2018's Shirkers and 2019's Toxic Beauty to the wildly popular Netflix docu-series Making a Murderer—hosts a master class on June 21.

• Unique views from the far corners of the world include My Darling Supermarket's musical ode to grocery store clerks in Brazil; Sankara Isn’t Dead's portrait of Burkina Faso from the perspective of a young poet named Bikontine; Softie's look at long-time political activist Boniface “Softie” Mwangi, and his decision to run for office in a regional Kenyan election; Stateless's deep dive into the complex history and present-day politics of Haiti and the Dominican Republic through a grassroots election campaign; and Landfall 's kaleidoscopic essay on Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. 

The schedule, tickets, $60 virtual fest passes, and much more are at www.doxafestival.ca. The online festival program is here.