The Gig Is Up and Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché among first films announced for 20th-anniversary DOXA Festival

Vancouver-shot Someone Like Me looks at Rainbow Refugee, while Elle-Maija Tailfeathers heads to the Kainai First Nation

Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché looks at the frontwoman of 1970s British punk band X-Ray Spex. — *Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché* looks at the frontwoman of 1970s British punk band X-Ray Spex.

The Gig Is Up looks at the darker impliocations of odd jobs around the world. — *The Gig Is Up* looks at the darker impliocations of odd jobs around the world.

A CLOSE LOOK at the gig economy and a portrait of a feminist punk icon are among the first announced features at the 20th-anniversary DOXA Documentary Film Festival. The event is back streaming online from May 6 to May 16.

Today, DOXA unveiled its lineup of Special Presentations, featuring both Canadian and international selections—each to be accompanied by live online Q&A sessions. Details of its full program are to come April 14.

Amid the early highlights is Shannon Walsh’s The Gig is Up, which takes a close look at gig labour around the world—the growing wave of people who live off delivering food, driving people in their cars, tagging images online, and more. It digs into the darker ramifications of the new economy that sells independence and flexible hours.

In a relaunch of DOXA’s Justice Forum programming, the fest also streams Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy, directed by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, whose fictional, Vancouver-shot The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open earned awards in 2019. The filmmaker takes a deeply human look at the substance-use crisis and drug-poisoning epidemic on the Kainai First Nation in southern Alberta, and the healing that is happening despite the odds.

Vancouver is the setting for Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams’s Someone Like Me, which follows a group of strangers from this city’s queer community who unite under the banner of Rainbow Refugee. The screening is part of the eighth edition of DOXA’s Rated Y for Youth program.

And watch for Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché, which retraces the life of Poly Styrene, frontwoman of legendary 1970s British punk band X-Ray Spex. The Anglo-Somali musician was also a key inspiration for the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements.

You can find more information at the DOXA website.

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Janet Smith

Janet Smith is an award-winning arts journalist who has spent more than two decades immersed in Vancouver’s dance, screen, design, theatre, music, opera, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.

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