KDocsFF celebrates its 10th annual festival with new film lineup

🔊 Listen to Post

Editor’s Note: The article briefly mentions a film revolving around sexual assault. If you or someone you know needs support, reach out to VictimLinkBC at 1-800-563-0808 or the Crisis Centre of BC at 1-800-784-2433. Help is available, please reach out.

Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s annual social justice documentary film festival KDocsFF is returning once again to the Vancouver International Film Centre (VIFF) — this time for its 10th anniversary as a festival.

This year’s screenings and talks, which are from Feb. 21 to 25, highlight 19 films on the theme “Journeys in Solidarity.” Each of the films depict individuals’ and communities’ ongoing journeys to social justice, with solidarity being the allyship and pathway for that fight, says Janice Morris, KDocsFF’s founder and festival director.

“To be in solidarity with someone or a group means you have to join the journey, you have to take action. Solidarity is more than just a word. To be in solidarity means to be in it,” says Morris, who is also a KPU English instructor.

“This year’s theme, on our 10th anniversary, perhaps consolidates all previous themes we’ve had and really encapsulates what it means to pursue social justice as an ongoing, perhaps never-ending journey with and toward others.”

KDocsFF considered more than 600 films as possibilities for this year’s festival. Besides searching for films that tell specific stories on subjects like anti-racism, gender, and politics, the festival also looked for ones that are broadly accessible and understandable to the global citizenry, Morris says.

The festival also considers films that will spark conversations in the theatre, as there are panel discussions and question-and-answer periods following each of the screenings.

“Our Q-and-A’s are 45 to 60 minutes, which is much longer than you get at a typical film festival. And all of our Q-and-A’s have a full panel of five or six individuals that are carefully researched and curated over many months,” Morris says.

“That is a very specific and very purposeful task that I undertake to create panel discussions where the audience can engage. That is the first step to solidarity. [It] is awareness and engagement.”

For the first time, KDocsFF is dedicating a different theme to each of the five days, a stark difference from the first full festival in 2015 that only lasted one day and screened three films.

Making this change allows for a program that is both deep and broad at the same time. So if someone has a particular interest but is unsure of which films to check out, they can watch screenings on the common area they like, while also recognizing the uniqueness of each day’s documentaries, Morris says.

The festival begins with the theme “Liberating the Body Politic” and closes with “Preserving Democracy.”

Julia Scotti: Funny That Way is the opening-night film. Scotti, who is a comedian and star of the 2021 film, will lead a standup routine following the screening, which is a first for KDocsFF. 

The festival closes with 2023’s The Price of Truth, which is about the fight for press freedom in Russia, followed by Section 16, a documentary on harassment towards female journalists in South Africa.

Those who purchase tickets for the opening or closing-night films also get into receptions that follow the screenings on the first or last day. There, attendees will receive free food and a drink ticket, Morris says.

The second day of KDocsFF has the theme “Radical Humanity,” which is when writer and director Henna Mann’s film Rails, Jails and Trolleys will be screened and discussed. The documentary is from 2022 and covers the Indian farmers’ movement and its response throughout the Indo-Canadian diaspora.

Produced by the South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, the documentary looks into the impacts of three agriculture bills passed in September 2020 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

The blowback from the bills, which would have opened the sector to private buyers, led to one of the largest protests in human history, with more than 250 million people demonstrating around the subcontinent in solidarity with thousands of farmers in New Delhi in November 2020, Nitish Pahwa reported in Slate.

The film features 20 interviews with Indian and Canadian activists, including scholars, historians, and artists.

“The Canadian ones were based in Ontario, Alberta, or B.C. A lot of the responses I got were that people felt like they could relate to the farmers’ protests because they saw their own grandparents in some of the people that were protesting at the protest site in Delhi. Even though their families live here, they could feel like they resonated with these issues,” Mann says.

“I think it was the same for me as well because my grandparents come from a lineage of farmers from Punjab. So seeing the protests, I felt like I had a personal connection while I was making this documentary because, in a way, I felt like I was making the film for my family as well, who [have] sacrificed so much leaving their farmlands and their ancestral roots behind.”

The documentary serves as an extensive study on the events before and during the movement, along with after the bills were repealed and farmers began returning to the poor conditions they were living through previously, Mann says.

The film, which took a year to create, is divided into 16 chapters, such as “The Sikh Practice of Sewa/Selfless Service at the Protest Sites” and “The Involvement of Female Protesters and Celebration of Women’s Day.”

The documentary also explores news stories that came out while Mann was directing the film, including one on Toronto’s Indian consulate writing a complaint about teachers giving lessons on the protest.

“I just feel sometimes these types of things can be like, it’s a news story one day and then people forget about it, but the fact that it’s documented in this documentary, we have a record of it, and that record will live on,” Mann says.

She says she hopes the film will be educational for everyone, bring clarity to the movement, and encourage viewers to keep an eye on India and the ongoing issues the farmers’ protest raised.

The second day of the festival also includes the 2022 documentary To Kill a Tiger, which is about an Indian farmer’s fight for justice for his 13-year-old daughter — the victim of sexual assault. This year, the film is nominated for the Oscars’ “Best Documentary Feature.”

“Decolonizing Power” is the third day’s theme and will begin with The Klabona Keepers from 2022.

The documentary is about the Tahltan people who successfully fought against resource extraction from companies like Fortune Minerals and Shell Canada for almost a decade in the remote Sacred Headwaters of northern B.C., also known as the Klabona. The film explores forced displacement and residential school trauma.

“One of the themes I hope this film would capture is to humanize the people behind those blockades, to show the human face and the stories and really contextualize those blockades into a larger history of colonization and extraction on Indigenous lands,” says Tamo Campos, who co-directed the film with Jasper Snow Rosen.

“I hope the film captures that and captures the people and communities behind what’s just covered [in the media] as a blockade rather than almost these beautiful pockets of freedom and of families standing up for each other and for the places that they hold dear.”

The film engages with topics like the infringement of Indigenous Peoples’ rights, access to and destruction of their homeland, as well as their resurgence, resilience, and determination to keep fighting amidst centuries of colonization, Campos says.

“As you’ll see in the film, the same land the Klabona keepers are fighting for is also what brought them a lot of healing in the past,” he says. “I think the part of the story [that’s] really important to share is, when we lose it, we don’t just lose these great environments, we lose these spiritual places to actually heal as humanity.”

Another aspect of the film that stands out for Campos is the intergenerational side of the resistance, as there were people ranging from Elders to children who learned how to walk while out on the blockades. He says one of the first families who were on the frontlines in setting up the blockade will be at the festival to share their stories.

Campos hopes viewers will feel the inspiration in the documentary’s story, reflect on their own lives, and look at Indigenous blockades with possibly a different lens and form of compassion.

The fourth day of the festival has the theme “Resisting Erasure” and will feature filmmaker Karen Cho’s Big Fight in Little Chinatown from 2022. The documentary is about the threat of disappearing Chinatowns across North America and was filmed amid the COVID-19 pandemic and rise in anti-Asian racism. Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, and New York’s Chinatowns are among the cities covered in the film.

Cho was inspired to tell this story after filming her first documentary In the Shadow of Gold Mountain, which was released in 2004. This film covered the Chinese head tax and Chinese Exclusion Act, and took place in Vancouver and Montreal’s Chinatowns. She went on to screen the film in Chinatowns across the country, making these communities familiar and close to her heart.

“Fast forwarding almost 20 years into the future, when I saw the state of the Chinatowns and this moment of active erasure that so many of them are facing, as a filmmaker, I really felt a responsibility to come back in a way to the community to talk about the story of Chinatown,” Cho says. 

“Because, literally, the Chinese-Canadian community and Chinatown itself gave me my voice as a filmmaker.”

Cho says she wanted Big Fight in Little Chinatown to be told by people from within the communities instead of an outsider looking in because when she was a child, she experienced Montreal’s Chinatown with her grandmother as more than just a tourist would. The film also highlights communities’ resiliency and fight to preserve Chinatowns, as they are often portrayed as dying places in the media.

“It is an endangered space, but the idea to write it off that it’s dying, while there’s still a living community there, really dismisses the agency of the community,” Cho says.

The documentary also explores gentrification and the historic intersection between urban planning and racism, she adds.

Since a large part of the film takes place in Vancouver’s Chinatown, Cho hopes viewers will rediscover the neighbourhood and see it as a historic place in the city over a tourist or foreign one. She also hopes people critically look at why certain developments were planned, what losing Chinatown could mean for diversity and vibrancy in Vancouver, and who can have a future in these areas that are becoming increasingly unaffordable.

“I think Chinatown is an amazing place where marginalized people have always lived, continue to live, it’s part of the Downtown Eastside, and … a space where people with little means, low income can exist in a human-scale neighbourhood and find a place to be in the city,” Cho says.

The discussion following the screening will include community members affected by displacement and erasure. The panel will have people from Vancouver’s Punjabi Market, Hogan’s Alley Society, and Chinatown, Cho says.

Tickets for individual screenings cost $7. A festival pass costs $50, but VIFF+ members get a $5 discount. Tickets and passes can be purchased online.

For the KPU community, Morris hopes they will not only be more aware of the issues presented in the films, but feel inspired to take action themselves. She also hopes people develop a broader understanding of the importance of getting involved, whether it is at the dinner table, in the community, or at the workplace.

“It doesn’t have to be grand. You don’t have to organize a film festival, … but what is one thing [you] can do today that is truly an act of solidarity?”

For more information about KDocsFF and their other projects, visit kdocsff.com/.