Story published in the Vancouver Sun on May 5, 2011.
BY AMANDA ASH, VANCOUVER SUN
With Vancouver’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, programmer Dorothy Woodend is taking the opportunity to raise a glass to one “tough, feisty little festival.”
Woodend, a longtime DOXA film critic and board member, leapt in feet-first this year as the new programmer. Her mission was to ensure each film guarded the soul of the festival by promoting fearlessness, a love for discussion and a fiery disposition for telling a smart story.
“DOXA is a curious creature, because we don’t want to become necessarily the Hot Docs of the West,” Woodend says. “I think the spirit of DOXA, and that feisty underdog activist thing that it came out of, was something that was really precious and something that I was committed to.
“[DOXA is] very audience driven. It’s not an industry event, which gives it a level of intimacy more than something like Hot Docs or TIFF or a lot of those bigger events, where it’s for the industry people who are there to make deals. DOXA, because it’s an audience festival, it’s for the filmmakers first and foremost.”
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