Five can’t-miss films at 2021 DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Empathy is sorely lacking in our pandemic-battered world, but it can be found in abundance in many of the films screening this month at the 2021 DOXA Documentary Film Festival.

Empathy is central in Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy, a feature-length documentary about the Kainai First Nations’ kindness-centered approach to drug addiction, and in Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor’s Someone Like Me, a documentary feature that follows the parallel journeys of a gay asylum seeker from Uganda, and a group of strangers from Vancouver’s queer community who are tasked with supporting his resettlement in Canada. (You can listen to our interview with Tailfeathers here, and our interview with Adams and Horlor here.)

(Empathy is also central in Sheona McDonald’s Into Light and Kent Donguines’ Kalinga (Care), both of which are phenomenal locally produced documentary shorts and will be featured in upcoming episodes of the YVR Screen Scene Podcast.)

And empathy is central in films that, on the surface, seem wholly unrelated to each other: films like Wuhan Wuhan, about the early days of Wuhan’s response to COVID-19, and P.S. Burn This Letter Please, about drag queens in 1950s New York City. These films (along with a few others, listed below) top our can’t-miss list for 2021 DOXA Documentary Film Festival. In this turbulent age, it’s astonishing to see how far a little empathy can go.

Wuhan Wuhan

Still from Wuhan Wuhan. Image courtesy of DOXA

Wuhan is a modern, mid-sized city like any other modern, mid-sized city on Earth, save for the fact that it’s where COVID-19 was first detected, and where authorities came down hard in order to crush the virus. Wuhan Wuhan begins in February 2020, two months into Wuhan’s historic lockdown. The streets of Wuhan are eerily quiet: closed shops; piles of discarded bikes; police checkpoints; roads blocked off with barricades and demarcated as containment zones for COVID patients; garbage-truck-sized vehicles spraying empty streets and buildings with disinfectant; loudspeakers blaring stay-at-home orders. They’re also entirely devoid of people. Wuhan Wuhan pulls us into the lives of the people of Wuhan under lockdown. We meet medical professionals fighting the virus with everything they’ve got, and ordinary citizens trying to make it through physically, emotionally, and mentally unscathed. Executive produced by international action star Donnie Yen (Ip Man 2) and directed by Yung Chang, Wuhan Wuhan offers an honest and stark glimpse into the darkest days of the pandemic, and reveals the compassion, despair, determination, grief, ingenuity, and heart of the people of Wuhan.
Directed by Yung Chang

FIX: The Story of An Addicted City

Still from FIX: The Story of An Addicted City. Courtesy of DOXA

FIX: The Story of An Addicted City won the Genie Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2004, and watching it now through a 2021 lens reveals how little the situation has changed for vulnerable drug users. Nettie Wild’s documentary focuses on the years of emotional and physical labour that went into getting Vancouver’s first safe injection site opened in 2003. The film includes an array of voices, but mainly focuses on three people – drug user and activist Dean Wilson, community organizer Ann Livingston, and Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen – as they push the police, Downtown Eastside and Chinatown business owners, council members, and the public at large to embrace safe-injection sites. The activists’ pleas for help – and the disdain and lack of empathy from police and business owners – are eerily reminiscent of conversations that are happening right now around Safe Supply. Wild expertly captures the humanity of people who rely on drugs to get them through their days, and the ways in which an abstinence approach to drug addiction doesn’t work in the majority of cases.
Directed by Nettie Wild

P.S. Burn This Letter Please

Still from P.S. Burn This Letter Please. Image Courtesy of DOXA

In 2014, a box containing hundreds of letters was discovered in a Los Angeles storage unit. The letters dated back to the 1950s and were addressed to a man named Reno Martin. Reno was a confidante for a diverse community of New York City drag queens (most of whom preferred to be called female impressionists and female mimics) who trusted him with their personal stories. These female impressionists were born in the 1920s and 1930s and came of age in an era that deemed their lifestyle, passions, and art illegal. Through letters, faded photos, and grainy videos, we see these female impressionists partying together at mostly private events or illicit bars, supporting each other, and finding identity, love, and safety in their secret community.
Directed by Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera

Aswang

Still from Aswang. Image courtesy of DOXA

Aswang is an indictment of Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent war on drugs, and in particular the more than 31,000 extrajudicial killings of drug addicts by government-sanctioned motorcycle gangs that are a cornerstone of Duterte’s policy to “kill the drug user. Kill everyone involved in drugs.” Aswang tells the story of citizen journalists and funeral workers who put themselves in harm’s way to document the killings, as well as the collateral damage: the troubled kids and grieving parents of imprisoned or murdered addicts. The heart of the film is a young boy named Jomari, who finds himself homeless when both of his parents are jailed for drug offences. We see Jomari and his fellow street kids playing on a carpet of garbage, recreating the murder of a drug user. We see a woman attempting to clean blood off of a sidewalk after an extrajudicial murder with a simple straw brush, and the unceremonious burial of two bodies in an overcrowded cemetery under the watchful gaze of mouthy street kids. Filmed with empathy, Aswang leaves the viewers with the distinct impression that Duterte’s war on drugs is in fact a war on the most vulnerable people in the Philippines.
Directed by Alyx Ayn Arumpac

The Tomahawk

Still from The Tomahawk. Image courtesy of DOXA

The Tomahawk packs a lot into its three-minute runtime. The film focuses on the oldest family-run restaurant in British Columbia (North Vancouver’s The Tomahawk), which was opened by Chick Chamberlain, an immigrant from England, in 1926. However you measure it, the restaurant’s name, décor, and existence are problematic: the restaurant isn’t owned or operated by Indigenous people, and looks and feels like the colonial throwback it is. But as we hear from current owner Chuck Chamberlain and Robert Yelton, a master carver from the Squamish Nation, The Tomahawk Restaurant can also be viewed as an important repository of hundreds of carvings that Chick purchased from the Squamish Nation over the decades. The Tomahawk masterfully provides nuance and historical context while still highlighting all of the kitsch that keeps the popular restaurant problematic.
Directed by Lyana Patrick

The 2021 DOXA Documentary Film Festival is online now until May 16; streaming is available for British Columbia audiences only. (Also: check out the drive-in option at the Pacific National Exhibition Amphitheatre, new this year). Purchase screenings at www.doxafestival.ca.

Top image: Dean Wilson in ‘FIX: The Story of An Addicted City.’ Photo courtesy of DOXA