^{2023 Festival}PEOPLE. Places. POWER.

The remote island of St. Helena is best known for being where Napoleon spent his final years in exile and was ultimately buried. His grave is beautifully maintained and serves as the island’s biggest tourist attraction. To encourage tourism, the island decides to build its first commercial airport. Annina van Neel arrives from Namibia to help with the construction and is present when the remains of thousands of ‘freed slaves’ are uncovered. Heeding her increasing discomfort with how the bones are handled, Nina campaigns tirelessly to honor their legacy and integrate them into the history of the island–their fate is, after all, intertwined with that of Napoleon’s.

A Story of Bones shines a pensive light on the contrast between whom we place importance on and the legacy of colonial rule on an island still governed from Britain. The story isn’t just a local one, but radiates outward connecting to the global consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The film celebrates personal victories, and mourns collective setbacks along Nina’s journey to create a respectful burial ground. Her initially lonely quest leads to unexpected connections as she slowly finds a sense of belonging and purpose.

Two Oakland artists, Pancho Peskador, a Chilean studio painter, and Desi Mundo, a Chicago-born aerosol artist, form an unlikely partnership to tackle their most ambitious project to date, a four-story mural in the heart of downtown Oakland.

Their site is situated at a unique intersection where Chinese and Afro-Diasporic communities face the imminent threat of displacement and gentrification. Prior to painting, the mural faces numerous obstacles: complex negotiations with profit-minded property owners, satisfying a community of diverse residents, and resolving the artists’ own aesthetic conflicts. As the mural takes shape on the wall, Oakland’s unique cultural legacies come to life through historical flashbacks. Past exclusionary policies replay themselves in the present as gentrification threatens to uproot long-term residents. The mural is fraught with its own challenges. Nonetheless, Desi and Pancho conclude the mural with great fanfare and a vibrant celebration.

Three months later, news comes that another forthcoming condominium development will obscure the mural, which has become a source of neighborhood pride. Despite last-ditch opposition to the condominium, it receives city approval, effectively dooming the mural. Meanwhile, the city unveils its urban planning process for the downtown district. Ultimately displaced, the mural becomes a spark for the community to rally to protect cultural arts and coalescing the community resistance to gentrification.

In fall 2017, the MeToo hashtag shook the planet, sparking an unprecedented wave of sexual assault accusations in the Western world. Now a storm of virulent misogyny rages on, flooding our screens with harassment, defamation, lynching, sextortion, the sharing of intimate photographs, rape and deaths threats.

According to the UN, 73% of women are abused online. The feature-length documentary Backlash: Misogyny in the Digital Age follows four women and one man whose lives have been particularly affected by online violence: Laura Boldrini, the most harassed female politician in Italy; Kiah Morris, an African-American politician in the state of Vermont who resigned following severe harassment and threats from right-wing extremists; Marion Séclin, a French YouTuber who received more than 40,000 sexist messages, including rape and death threats; Laurence Gratton, a young teacher in Quebec who was harassed for more than five years by a former colleague; and Glen Canning, the father of Rehtaeh Parsons, a young girl who took her life after photos of her rape were spread online. What is it like to live with this so-called ‘virtual’ violence? That is what this important film attempts to show by closely following the victims in their daily lives. Like in a thriller, we see in real time the waves of hate they are subjected to, their resulting fear, and how they no longer feel safe in public spaces. We see lives marked by a loss of confidence and shame. Backlash: Misogyny in the Digital Age also shows how each of these women, and this man in the name of his late daughter, are fighting the same battle. They share a common cause: to refuse to be silent.

When 18-year-old South African runner Caster Semenya burst onto the world stage in 2009, her championship was not celebrated but marred by doubt, with her personal medical records leaked to international media. With some women’s naturally high androgen levels deemed a performance advantage, the International Amateur Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) ruled that, in order to compete, these female athletes must medically alter their healthy bodies. Category: Woman focuses on four athletes from the Global South who are forced out of competition by these regulations. The public scrutiny and policing of their bodies raises issues of racism, sexism and denial of their fundamental human right—who they are. Following up on her award-winning film Toxic Beauty [KDocsFF 2020], Phyllis Ellis exposes an industry controlled by men who put women’s lives at risk, while this ongoing policing of women’s bodies in sport remains, in a more nefarious way, under the guise of fair play.

The Southern Resident Orca population of the Pacific Northwest is facing extinction due to a multitude of reasons, including declining salmon stocks, climate change, dams, increasing vessel traffic, pipelines, and pollutants. For two young female filmmakers, this crisis sparks a stunning journey across the Pacific Northwest, joining activists, scientists and Indigenous leaders, to uncover corruption and stop injustice before it’s too late. In Coextinction, directors Gloria Pancrazi and Elena Jean draw on their personal fascination of the iconic orca to show its interconnectedness between its natural ecology and the human environment. They wish to show that our choices have consequences, and that perhaps the orcas are trying to warn us.

When BC Hydro built the W.A.C. Bennett Dam in 1968, it flooded the Rocky Mountain Trench, a region belonging to the Tsay Keh Dene First Nation since time immemorial. With steady, experimental rhythm, emerging Dene filmmaker Luke Gleeson tells the story of how his people’s lands were flooded, pairing archival news clips and interview footage with sweeping shots of a land(scape) now completely transformed. The events that followed the dam’s construction are recounted in visual prose and through the traditions of Dene storytelling. DƏNE YI’INJETL: The Scattering of Man serves as a wider critique of provincial Crown corporations and the marriage of industrial and government mega projects that have violently disrupted the lives and lands of Indigenous people–all without rightful consultation or any real regard for the lands themselves.

Dewayne Johnson, a Bay Area groundskeeper, suffered from rashes in 2014 and wondered if they were caused by the herbicide he’d been using for the past couple years. As his health deteriorated, Johnson became the face of a David-and-Goliath legal battle to hold a multi-national agrochemical corporation accountable for a product with allegedly misleading labelling. Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide, has been a signature product for the multinational agrochemical corporation for over four decades. Used by industrial farms, golf courses, and suburban homeowners with a grudge against dandelions, it is sold in more than 130 nations. Scientists raised concerns about its environmental impact and carcinogenic properties, but the deep-pocketed corporation’s lawyers, lobbyists, and marketers deflected numerous studies and disputed the findings. Adding to her award-winning body of work centred on our strained relationship with the natural world, acclaimed director Jennifer Baichwal’s Into the Weeds: Dewayne ‘Lee’ Johnson vs. Monsanto Company follows Johnson through his battle, setting his personal journey against a global environmental crisis.

Jean Swanson: We Need a New Map is a short documentary profiling veteran activist and first-term Vancouver city councillor Jean Swanson as she works alongside the next generation of anti-poverty activists fighting systemic inequality

When the opioid crisis in BC escalated to the heights of a public emergency in 2016, folks at the Overdose Prevention Society (OPS) set up a tent in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as a critical frontline response. Technically illegal despite its necessity, the OPS was–and continues to be–a site rooted in harm reduction, where people are able to use drugs safely with supervision. An intimate observation of the OPS over a number of years, Love in the Time of Fentanyl witnesses the exhausting but essential work required to keep the site running and the people dedicated to its continuance. We follow Sarah, a founding OPS member and activist, as well as Trey, a former heroin user who memorializes the lives lost to overdose through graffiti art. We accompany frontline workers like Ronnie (also known in the community as ‘Narcan Jesus’) as he struggles with extreme burnout; Indigenous elder Norma as she cooks meals for staff and volunteers; and Dana, an active fentanyl user whose own experiences with overdose continue to propel him in his efforts to save lives.The opioid crisis is not over. Six years after it opened its doors, the OPS is as necessary now as it was in 2016, its efforts compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Love in the Time of Fentanyl is a crucial film from director Colin Askey–one that explores, with considerable care and compassion, the frontlines of the ongoing drug-poisoning epidemic in this city.

To get to class on time, children from the Raymur Place social housing project were forced to jump shunting train cars that stood in their path. In 1971, after months of petitioning for a safe crossing, a group of mothers made their voices heard by blockading CN rail from delivering goods.

On 20 August 2020, Alexei Navalny fell severely ill on a plane coming from Siberia. He was poisoned and could only be rescued within inches of his life. The murder attempt came after years of an ever-increasing showdown between Navalny and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. In Navalny, filmmaker Daniel Roher has access to Navalny’s inner circle while he recuperates in exile in Germany, and subsequently tries to find the perpetrators with the aid of research network Bellingcat. The Bellingcat investigator manages to identify the kill team that went after Navalny. In a truly stunning scene, Navalny talks on the telephone to the men who tried to murder him. Equally thriller-like is the plane ride back from Germany to Moscow, where Navalny knows the authorities will await him. In extensive interviews, Roher dives into Navalny’s incentives and his vision for Russia, while not shying away from difficult topics–like his past alignments with extreme right nationalists. A must-see film about a charismatic leader, who is presently detained in a penal colony, and a country sliding ever more into darkness.

Rebellion brings you behind-the-scenes with Extinction Rebellion (XR), as the group confronts the climate emergency–reminding the world there is no time to wait. Emerging as action on climate change dangerously slipped from the political agenda, XR took bold steps to break through the deadlock: mass civil disobedience. It worked. In 2019, within days of XR protests and over 1,000 arrests, the UK Parliament declared a climate emergency and propelled the issue back into public consciousness. Countries around the world followed suit. Yet, just as XR became a global phenomenon, internal tensions rose within the group, with XR Youth calling out the movement for perpetuating structural and social inequalities and focusing on climate change rather than acknowledging the need for climate justice. Rebellion reminds us to question white Western environmentalism and push back against a fight that ignores structural racism and oppression.

Skilfully intertwining narratives concerning residential school survivors and Indigenous peoples’ relationship with imperiled wild Pacific salmon, Sean Stiller’s stirring documentary is a revelatory testament to strength and resilience. At the heart of the film is Phyllis Jack-Webstad, the survivor who founded the Orange Shirt Day movement. While Phyllis recounts her childhood trials to youth across the country, her relations in the Secwépemc territory near Williams Lake are contending with another outcome of colonialism: the upper Fraser River’s lowest salmon runs in Canadian history. In observing the interconnection between the Secwépemc and salmon, Stiller lays bare the impacts of overfishing on these communities. The first production by Canadian Geographic Films, Returning Home balances Stiller’s stunning cinematography with clear-eyed testimonies to the unforgivable transgressions endured by Phyllis and other survivors within the walls of residential schools. Likewise, it effectively illustrates what it means to truly be in good relationship with the land and shares how, for the Secwépemc, healing people and healing the natural world are synonymous.

On April 28, 2012, the journalist Regina Martínez was strangled to death in her home. Since then, 64 reporters have been killed in Mexico, making the country the most dangerous place in the world for the press. The documentary follows the reporters from 25 international media outlets that come together to shed light on this murder, reveal the human cost of drug cartels and their political and business connections around the world. Filmed like a journalistic thriller with exclusive access to the backstage of the investigation, the documentary follows the reporters in real-time, as they travel to the territories controlled by cartels to reveal the rampant impunity for drug traffickers and complicity of political leaders in the global drug trade. From the cemeteries of Veracruz, known as the ‘tomb’ of journalists, to the heart of the United States, where lives have been shattered by fentanyl overdoses, The Cartel Project reveals the human cost of the new drug multinationals.

The Cost of Freedom: Refugee Journalists in Canada confronts one of the most compelling human rights challenges of our day: the threat to journalists. Focusing on the lives of Abdulrahman Matar from Syria, Luis Nájera of México and Arzu Yildiz from Turkey, this documentary film investigates why they fled their countries and are seeking to rebuild their lives as refugees in Canada. All three now reside in the Greater Toronto Area, striving to re-invent themselves. Their stories and challenges illuminate the global struggle for free speech in a time of increasing threat to journalists.

And so it began, with the Papal Bull of 1493. Pope Alexander VI’s apocalyptic declaration established a free-for-all in the European conquest of Tribal lands and souls. It was their “Doctrine of Discovery.” To the First People of this land, it was a death song they had never heard, but soon enough, they would all sing. It is timely that three highly respected Indigenous women from Turtle Island, including one of Canada’s most celebrated actors, Crystle Lightning, have come together to create a documentary about the devastating impacts of the Doctrine of Discovery. The premiere of The Doctrine of Recovery will coincide with the Pope’s proposed visit to Canada. The film is a powerful reminder of how The Doctrine of Discovery is at the very foundation of systemic and institutionalized racism that First Peoples continue to be marginalized by, and how the roots of so many tragic issues impacting First Nations’ communities today, like the Murdered and Missing crisis, began with the imposition of the Inter Caetera papal bull of May 4, 1493.

John Webster explores how the workplace has transformed to the point where the very idea of productive work appears to be the last thing on people’s minds. How did we reach this point? The simple, straightforward notion of work has been hijacked by senseless jargon, endless meetings about nothing, and activities that appear to go against the possibility of a successful, satisfying workday. With commentaries by the late, great anthropologist and activist David Graeber, psychologist and pioneer of burnout research Christina Maslach, and a variety of office workers and executives, Webster not only explores an environment that results in lower productivity, but a culture of silence that accompanies it. Provocative and frequently hilarious, The Happy Worker, or How Work Was Sabotaged is a white-collar call-to-arms.

When is it legitimate for a democratic government to enact force against its own people? This is the central query posed by David Dufresne’s The Monopoly of Violence, an absorbing, shocking, and hugely timely documentary that interrogates the just limits state police powers. During the relative political stability of recent decades, that question may have seemed academic to some, but today–as protests against climate change, racial injustice, economic inequality, and pandemic restrictions roil in the street–it has assumed great urgency, with literal life and death stakes. In his pursuit of an answer, Dufresne presents raw and sometimes graphic footage of clashes between police and protestors, alongside compelling interviews with academics, police officers, and victims of police assault. The immediate context for Dufresne’s deeply thought-provoking film is France’s ‘yellow vest’ movement, but its relevance, like the police violence it documents, is wide-ranging, equally applicable to pipeline protests in British Columbia, or efforts to prevent the clearing of encampments from Toronto parks.

The Shadow of Gold takes an unflinching look at how the world’s favourite heavy metal is extracted from the earth. The film explores both sides of the industry: the big-time mining companies that dig deep and lop off mountaintops to extract gold from low-grade ore, and the small-time miners–an estimated 20 million people in the world’s poorest nations–who extract gold by hand, often producing just enough to survive. We meet back-country guides and entrepreneurs in Montana with deep suspicions about a proposed gold mine that could destroy their pristine wilderness, indigenous people in British Columbia struggling to recover from a spill of toxic mine waste, a woman miner in the Congo who is determined to keep her gold from feeding the flames of war, a brotherhood of Chinese miners, sick with silicosis, fighting a state-owned gold mine for compensation, and an artisanal miner in Peru who knows that the mercury he uses to process gold is toxic and polluting, but feels he has no other option. And at the top of the supply chain–in London, Dubai, and Toronto–we show how conflict gold reaches unaware consumers and how gold-mining corporations are allowed to damage ecosystems with impunity. The film reveals that glittering gold has a dark shadow. In the end, The Shadow of Gold isn’t all about gold, or even its shadow. The film enters the lives and tells the moving stories of hard-working people who face danger just to go to work every day, in the hope of securing a better life for their families.

Occupying the lush Amazon rainforest in what is now the Brazilian state of Rondônia, the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau people have lived in balance with the world for millennia, hunting, fishing, and developing their unique language, culture, and traditions. When the tribe made first contact with outsiders in the early 1980s, disease quickly decimated their numbers from thousands to just under 200, prompting the Brazilian government to establish the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous Territory. But now, the tribe’s land, sovereignty, and very existence is under grave attack: what was once vast territory is a dwindling island of rainforest surrounded by illegally established farms, the rich woodland turned into dry, arid land. Surrounded by illegal homesteaders eager to act out their dreams of Manifest Destiny who are protected by an increasingly authoritarian government whose rhetoric is driving the murder of indigenous peoples, the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau are driven to drastic measures to protect the tribe. Led by energetic youth Bitate, chosen at the tender age of 18 to help lead the people, and aided by the impassioned activism of longtime ally Neidiha, the community turns to modern technology to turn the tide of destruction and bring about a hard-won ray of hope in this impassioned new documentary largely filmed by the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, from director Alex Pritz and producer Darren Aronofsky.

Alex Winter’s newest documentary explores the ascension and potential fall of YouTube, the world’s most popular video-sharing website. Launched in 2005 with a video of a trip to the zoo, YouTube has built itself into an empire worth up to $300 billion dollars. In order to incentivize its creators and keep users engaged, it has created an algorithm that tries to predict what users will be most interested in. The basic idea is simple: make your content just the right way, and it will be promoted to users all over the world. However, the algorithm has created unforeseen privacy and ethical problems that could be the website’s downfall. YouTubers, reporters, and experts alike join Winter in interrogating the effects that such irregulation can result in. With sharp editing and an anxiety-inducing message about the way social media controls our lives, The YouTube Effect is a startling but necessary look at a website that has become so intertwined with our daily lives.

There’s more than dollars and yen at stake as data flows from TikTok back to Chinese server parks. A critical but tech-positive film about the invisible influence of social media, and what to do about it. With over two billion downloads, TikTok is the most downloaded app ever, knocking both Facebook and Instagram off the throne. But the success story behind the Chinese social media, which is particularly popular with children and young people, is also a story of racism, censorship, fear, and algorithms that punish you if you venture outside TikTok’s strict rules. Not least, it’s about China. Through meetings with the site’s young users and conversations with experts, tech-positive director Shalini Kantayya (Coded Bias) explores the flip side of its success and what it can tell us about the tense relationship between the West and China. The question is, what does Tiktok do with the endless amounts of data it collects from the app that looks back at you as you look at it?

For too long, the past has been the exclusive domain of the white colonial power structure. The good news is, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in consciousness when it comes to appreciating history from multiple viewpoints. In this zippy NFB documentary, Hayley Gray and Elad Tzadok survey the inspiring work of a handful of community archives across British Columbia. It’s an important and timely reminder that the model of a centralized repository of records and artifacts is highly problematic—indeed, the official version of our history as presented by the Royal Museum of BC, for example, has consciously or not served to propagate a white supremacist narrative. In contrast, Gray and Tzadok talk to curators and archivists from groups traditionally marginalized or excluded communities: Indigenous, Queer, Trans, the Chinese Canadian Museum, the Tahltan Nation, the South Asian Legacy Project, and others. Along the way, we learn the secret, neglected, and untold histories of this place we only think we know.

The many environmental, social, legal, and human perils of BC’s controversial Site C hydro dam project are explored in Heather Hatch’s must-watch doc. Pipelines tend to get all the ink in terms of environmental risks, but there are many other potential disasters in the offing.

Take, for example, the Site C Dam, a gargantuan hydro-electric project on northern British Columbia’s Peace River. The 13th longest river system on the planet, the Peace River cuts across the province in an area largely populated by Indigenous peoples–including West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations, two of the smallest bands covered under Treaty 8, the government’s century-old agreement with Indigenous people intended to last ‘as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the rivers flow.’ Those words haunt Wochiigii lo: End of the Peace by Haida filmmaker Heather Hatch, who spent five years documenting the protests and legal challenges to Site C–a project with negligible public benefit that, in addition to being an imprudent business decision (it’s already a money loser for the province), will disenfranchise Indigenous peoples, violate their legal rights, and end in environmental catastrophe.

Along the way, we meet heroic fighters like Roland Willson, Diane Abel, George Desjarlais–whose bitingly sarcastic assessments of Site C offer some of the most trenchant lines you will hear this year–and award-winning author Sarah Cox, to name a few. Hatch and her subjects expose mind-blowing ironies, shocking betrayals, and political chicanery. One of the most compelling and touching Canadian films this year, Wochiigii lo: End of the Peace is essential, righteous viewing and a timeless reminder that one should never trust a politician in a hard hat.

In a male-dominated media landscape, the women journalists of India’s all-female Khabar Lahariya (“News Wave”) newspaper risk it all, including their own safety, to cover the country’s political, social, and local news from a women-powered perspective. From underground network to independent media empire–now with 10 million views on their YouTube site—they defy the odds to redefine power.