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KDocsFF


Metro Vancouver’s Premier Social Justice Film Festival

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KDocsFF


Metro Vancouver’s Premier Social Justice Film Festival

New logo.
Same excellence.

As we enter our second decade as Metro Vancouver’s premier social justice film festival, KDocsFF is proud to present its new logo. While our logo may be new, the exceptional festival experience you have come to expect remains unchanged. We look forward to bringing you more outstanding documentaries, filmmakers, and opportunities for engagement and action.


A celebration of documentary film and documentary Activism


As Metro Vancouver's premier social justice documentary film festival, KDocsFF celebrates the power of documentary film and documentary activism.  Working in partnership with its Festival Partner, the Vancouver International Film Centre + Vancity Theatre, the annual KDocsFF documentary film festival showcases award-winning documentary films, filmmakers, keynote speakers, panelists, audience Q&As, exhibitors, performances, and community partners.  Participants engage in lively discussions, debates, and dialogues as they investigate today's most pressing global issues.

"I engage in dialogue not necessarily because I like the other person. I engage in dialogue because I recognize the social and not merely the individualistic character of the process of knowing. In this sense, dialogue presents itself as an indispensable component of the process of both learning and knowing."   ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

KDocsFF is proud to operate five engagement streams: our Annual Film Festival, our Year-round Program, our Community Outreach Program, our Social Justice Lab, and our YouTube Channel (“KDocs Talks”).


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Mandate


"Uniting learners through social justice, global citizenship, and creative solution-building"

Mandate


"Uniting learners through social justice, global citizenship, and creative solution-building"

There will always be a need for documentary because that’s the best gun that exists.
— Canadian documentarian Alanis Obomsawin

KDocsFF programming is all about engagement, critical thinking, and dialogue—amongst diverse viewers, speakers, and communities. KDocsFF Official Selections are self-curated based on their ability to provoke, not just superficial reactions, but deeper awareness, connections, and collaborations—of/to/with ourselves, each other, and our communities. With these connections, KDocsFF, in turn, explores issues of social justice, anti-poverty, anti-oppression, human and animal rights, equality, diversity, and environmental stewardship and sustainability, near and far, as we educate the leaders and change-makers of tomorrow. At KDocsFF, activism originates in the power of the individual, and the influence of the collaborative collective. Hopefully, our film and programming choices both give a voice—to filmmakers and activists—and nurture a voice—of creative solution-building.

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Hall of Fame


Hall of Fame


DAVID SUZUKI

KDocsFF 2020
special guest
Beyond Climate

Award-winning geneticist and broadcaster David Suzuki co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990. In 1975, he helped launch and host CBC Radio’s long-running Quirks and Quarks. In 1979, he became familiar to audiences around the world as host of CBC TV’s The Nature of Things, which still airs new episodes.

From 1969 to 2001, he was a faculty member at the University of British Columbia and is currently professor emeritus. He is widely recognized as a world leader in sustainable ecology and has received numerous awards for his work, including a UNESCO prize for science and a United Nations Environment Program medal. He is also a Companion of the Order of Canada.

He has 29 honourary degrees from universities in Canada, the US, and Australia. For his support of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, Suzuki has been honoured with eight names and formal adoption by two First Nations.

In 2010, the National Film Board of Canada and Legacy Lecture Productions produced Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, which won a People’s Choice documentary award at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival. The film weaves together scenes from the places and events that shaped Suzuki’s life and career with a filming of his “Last Lecture,” which he describes as “a distillation of my life and thoughts, my legacy, what I want to say before I die.”

David has written or co-authored more than 50 books, nearly 20 of which are for children! 

JOHN RALSTON SAUL

KDocsFF 2020
special guest
The corporate coup d’etat

John Ralston Saul is an award-winning essayist and novelist. His works of ideas, history and philosophy are constantly being reissued and translated for a broad readership, as well as taught around the world. A long-time champion of freedom of expression, he was the elected President of PEN International from 2009 to 2015. He is a leading voice in the international movement supporting immigrants and refugees. 

Saul has had a growing impact on political and economic thought in many countries, particularly among young people confronting what they feel is a stagnant yet walled-off society. Declared a “prophet” by TIME magazine, his 14 works have been translated into 28 languages in 37 countries. 

Saul is perhaps best known for his philosophical trilogy – Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the WestThe Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense and The Unconscious Civilization. This was followed by a meditation on the trilogy – On Equilibrium: Six Qualities of the New Humanism

In 2005 in The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, John Ralston Saul warned that, like it or not, globalism was already collapsing. If we did not act quickly, we would be caught in a crisis and limited to desperate reactions. The Collapse of Globalism has continued to spread around the world, published most recently in Greece, Turkey and for a third time in an updated and expanded form in Britain. 

In his 2008 bestseller, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada, Saul argues that Canada has been heavily influenced and shaped by Indigenous ideas, including an original approach to egalitarianism, a taste for social complexity, a constant balancing of individualism and groups, a penchant for negotiation over violence, and a focus on inclusion which has encouraged positive attitudes towards immigration. A Fair Country is part of an argument which began with Reflections of a Siamese Twin and was brought to a conclusion in his most recent book The Comeback (2015). 

Saul is the Co-Founder and Co-Chair of both 6 Degrees, the Global Forum for Inclusion, and the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), a national organization promoting the inclusion of new citizens. 6 Degrees is a movement that involves a growing coalition of people around the world who are working to create new language, policies, and actions supporting immigration and refugees, and their rapid inclusion in society through citizenship. Each year, 6 Degrees gathers thousands of people in Berlin, Calgary, Mexico City, Montreal, and Toronto as a way of building this coalition against the forces of fear, hatred and exclusion. 

He was elected to two three-year terms as President of PEN International (2009-2015), the only worldwide organization of writers and journalists. PEN is a leading force for freedom of expression, getting writers out of prison and working against the growing tendency to kill journalists. 

He has published six novels. The Birds of Prey, his first published book, sold several million copies around the world. It was followed by The Field Trilogy, which deals with the crisis of modern power and its clash with the individual. It includes Baraka or The Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor of Anthony SmithThe Next Best Thing, and The Paradise Eater. His most recent work of fiction is Dark Diversions, a picaresque novel in which he observes the life of modern nouveaux riches Americans. 

He has received many national and international awards for his writing, including: Chile’s Pablo Neruda Medal, South Korea’s Manhae Grand Prize for Literature and The Gutenberg Galaxy Award for Literature. The Unconscious Civilization won Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. His Reflections of a Siamese Twin was chosen by Maclean’s magazine as one of the ten best non-fiction books of the twentieth century. His novel, The Paradise Eater, won Italy’s Premio Lettarario Internazionale. 

He is a Companion of the Order of Canada, the Order of Ontario and a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France. His 21 honorary degrees range from McGill University and King’s College London, to Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg, Russia. 

margaret atwood

KDocsFF 2013
special guest
payback

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and two graphic novels, as well as a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including the Booker Prize (twice), Arthur C. Clarke Award, Governor General's Award, Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television, increasing her exposure.

Atwood's works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics." Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales which interested her from a very early age. Atwood is a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Writers' Trust of Canada. She is also a Senior Fellow of Massey College, Toronto.

Atwood is also the inventor of the LongPen device and associated technologies that facilitate remote robotic writing of documents.

Novels
In 2000, Atwood published her tenth novel, The Blind Assassin, to critical acclaim, winning both the Booker Prize and the Hammett Prize in 2000. The Blind Assassin was also nominated for the Governor General's Award in 2000, Orange Prize for Fiction, and the International Dublin Literary Award in 2002. In 2001, Atwood was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.

Atwood followed this success with the publication of Oryx and Crake in 2003, the first novel in a series that also includes The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013), which would collectively come to be known as the MaddAddam Trilogy. The apocalyptic vision in the MaddAddam Trilogy engages themes of genetic modification, pharmaceutical and corporate control, and man-made disaster. As a work of speculative fiction, Atwood notes of the technology in Oryx and Crake, "I think, for the first time in human history, we see where we might go. We can see far enough into the future to know that we can't go on the way we've been going forever without inventing, possibly, a lot of new and different things." She later cautions in the acknowledgements to MaddAddam, "Although MaddAddam is a work of fiction, it does not include any technologies or bio-beings that do not already exist, are not under construction or are not possible in theory."

In 2005, Atwood published the novella The Penelopiad as part of the Canongate Myth Series. The story is a retelling of The Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope and a chorus of the twelve maids murdered at the end of the original tale. The Penelopiad was given a theatrical production in 2007.

In 2016, Atwood published the novel Hag-Seed, a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest, as part of Penguin Random House's Hogarth Shakespeare Series.

On November 28, 2018, Atwood announced that she would publish The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, in September 2019. The novel features three female narrators and takes place fifteen years after the character Offred's final scene in The Handmaid's Tale. The book was announced as the joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize on October 14, 2019.

Non-fiction
In 2008, Atwood published Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, a collection of five lectures delivered as part of the Massey Lectures from October 12 to November 1, 2008. The book was released in anticipation of the lectures, which were also recorded and broadcast on CBC Radio One's Ideas.