Hello World, Love in the Time of Fentanyl, and more winners announced for 2022 DOXA Festival

Galb’Echaouf and Children of the Mist also earn juried prizes

DOXA DOCUMENTARY FILM Festival announced the winners of its 2022 competitions at a gala last night.

Kenneth Elvebakk’s Hello World, featuring four queer characters between the ages of 12 and 16 who go to the same secondary school in Norway, earned this year’s Nigel Moore Award for Youth Programming. Jurors Maya Biderman, Teagan Dobson, Steven Hawkins, Anna Hetherington, and Jacob Saltzberg stated: “The film captures the world in which youth are growing up in an increasingly complex place. Hello World not only captures this complexity, but also has the capacity to act as a catalyst for social change, and fundamentally alter people’s behavior.”

The Short Documentary Award went to Abdessamad El Montassir’s Galb’Echaouf, “an intimate immersive portrait of a landscape and its connection to human memory and trauma,” said jurors Jocelyne Chaput, Amar Chebib, and Lyana Patrick. Honourable mention was given to Siku Allooloo’s Spirit Emulsion.

The Directors Guild of Canada presented the Colin Low Award for Best Canadian Director to Colin Askey’s locally made Love in the Time of Fentanyl, “a film that depicts an urgent crisis with compassion, empathy and most importantly centers the strength and care of the community of the DTES, said jurors Elisa Gonzalez, Elfred Matining, and Sophy Romvari. The jury also gave an honourable mention to Luke Gleeson’s DƏNE YI'INJETL - The Scattering of Man.

And Hà Lệ Diễm’s Children of the Mist unanimously won over jurors Igor Drljaca, Arman Kazemi, and Mila Zuo for the DOXA Feature Documentary Award. “Children of the Mist is a riveting film about a quarrelsome yet loving mother-daughter relationship amidst the normalization of bride kidnapping within the Hmong community in Vietnam,” the jury commented. “Intimate, domestic scenes are visceral and haunting, but the film’s explorations of gender, sexuality, and childhood resonate universally.” Honourable mention went to Stefanos Tai’s We Don’t Dance for Nothing.

DOXA's online offerings wrap today, with jury statements and more info on the award winners here.

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