Awards

The DOXA award winners are selected on the basis of three major criteria: success and innovation in the realization of the project’s concept; originality and relevance of subject matter and approach; and overall artistic and technical proficiency.

DOXA is very happy to welcome an outstanding group of filmmakers, film critics and industry professionals to the Award Juries this year. Jury members meet during the course of the festival to choose the winning films, as well as award honourable mentions to selected films.

Feature Documentary Award

$1500 Award 

Films In Competition

Colin Low Award for Best Canadian Director

$5000 Award presented by the Directors Guild of Canada (DGC)

Director's Guild of Canada

In Competition

DOXA Short Documentary Award

$500 Award 

Films In Competition

Nigel Moore Award for Youth Programming

$1500 Award 

DOXA is extremely proud to present the Nigel Moore Award for Youth Programming, first launched in 2013. Named in memory of Nigel Moore, a young man whose passion for knowledge, exploration and advocacy found a home in his love for documentary film.

For younger audiences, documentary has particular relevance. The world in which they’re growing up is an increasingly complex place. Documentary not only captures this complexity, but also has the capacity to act as a catalyst for social change, and fundamentally alter people’s behaviour.

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Nigel Moore

Films in Competition

The award will be adjudicated by a youth jury, who will choose the film that best exemplifies the qualities of compassion, social engagement and spirit in which Nigel lived.

 

Elevate Award

$2,500 award presented by Elevate Inclusion Strategies

 

Elevate Inclusion Strategies

The Elevate Award celebrates outstanding work by a filmmaker from an equity-deserving community. Filmmakers with lived experience outside the white, cis-hetero, neurotypical and able-bodied “norm” face barriers to success in the documentary industry—the Elevate Award amplifies their excellence.

In competition:

2023 Nigel Moore Award for Youth Programming Jury

Olivia Moore

Olivia Moore

Olivia Moore is a 4th year student at UBC, majoring in International Relations. Olivia is passionate about social justice, environmental politics, and learning about other people’s life experiences. As Nigel’s younger sister, she is very proud to follow in his footsteps, with a love of documentary film and storytelling. This is the first year Olivia will be joining the jury. 

Anna Hetherington

Anna Hetherington

Anna Hetherington is a business professional who recently earned her Chartered Professional Accountant designation. She has been a juror for the Nigel Moore Award since its inception and grew up with Nigel from the time they were born. Anna is an avid traveller and has volunteered and studied all over the world. She enjoys spending time on the ocean, reading memoirs and watching documentary films.

Teagan Dobson

Teagan Dobson

Teagan Dobson is the owner of The Pending Approval, a branding and design company located in Vancouver, focusing on creating brands that look as beautiful as they make you feel. When not working on art, Teagan spends most of her time writing, reading and watching documentary films”

Maya Biderman

Maya Biderman

Maya Biderman is a third year medical student at the University of Toronto. She is an advocate for social justice with a strong focus on Indigenous wellness and ways of knowing. She is also an arts enthusiast, having worked in musical theatre and entertainment, and has a love for documentary film. She is an avid traveller and an enthusiastic amateur rock climber. Maya also knew Nigel from birth.

Feature Documentary Award Jurors

Dina Al-Kassim

Dr. Dina Al-Kassim is a critical theorist, who works on political subjectivation, sexuality and aesthetics in transnational modernist and contemporary postcolonial cultures, including the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the United States. She is the author of On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant (University of California Press, 2010), which examines parrhesia and the politics of address in the practice of literary ranting. Al-Kassim’s publications have appeared in Grey Room, International Journal of Middle East Women’s StudiesPublic CultureCultural Dynamics, and the volume Islamicate Sexualities. Her current project, entitled Exposures: Biopolitics and New Precarity under Globalization asks why and how exposure has come to be a condition of contemporary truth through selective soundings in literature, arts practice, protest and politics from Lebanon, South Africa, and the United States. Other projects include discrepant histories of colonial psychoanalysis and theories of anti-colonial solidarity.

Formerly a professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at UC Irvine, Al-Kassim now teaches in the Department of English and The Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where she is also an Associate at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.  Al-Kassim has been a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, a Senior Seminar Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, and a Sawyer Seminar, Residency Fellow at the UCHRI. A much invited speaker here and abroad, Al-Kassim now divides her time between Vancouver and Los Angeles.

Kent Donguines

Kent Donguines

Kent Donguines is a Filipino-Canadian narrative and documentary filmmaker based in Vancouver, BC. He is the CEO of Aimer Films Inc. and has produced the award-winning CBC short documentary, This Ink Runs Deep, which premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. He also wrote, directed, and produced the Telus Storyhive short film Kalinga (Care), a documentary about the sacrifices Filipina nannies make to work in Canada. The short documentary had its World Premiere at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival and won the Kathleen Shannon Award from Yorkton Film Festival. Kent has worked for production companies in Canada and the Philippines, including Cedar Island Films Inc., Black Cap Pictures (Ten17p), Viva Entertainment, and Star Cinema. His latest short film, funded by Harold Greenberg Fund, BC Arts Council, Canadian Film Centre, CreativeBC, and the National Film Board of Canada, PACO received the Grand Prize in Stage32 Annual Film Contest and has secured a broadcast license with CRAVE. He’s currently developing the feature film, Cross-Country Baby, and his feature documentaries, Treasure of the Rice Terraces and Canadian Adobo.

Nadia Shihab

Nadia Shihab

Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker and artist whose work draws on her interest in the relational, the sonic and the diasporic. Her films include Sister Mother Lover Child, Echolocation, Amal's Garden and the feature documentary Jaddoland, which was awarded 5 festival jury awards including the Independent Spirit "Truer than Fiction" Award in 2020 and went on to broadcast for three seasons on US public television. Her work has shown in festivals which include Cinema du Réel, Images Festival, DOXA, BlackStar, Camden, Mimesis, Kassel Dokfest, New Orleans Film Festival and Cairo International Film Festival, among others. She was a Fulbright Scholar to Turkey, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and her work as an artist is preceded by a decade of work as a community practitioner and affordable housing advocate in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was raised in west Texas by immigrant parents from Iraq and Yemen and is currently an Assistant Professor in Film in the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

Colin Low Award for Best Canadian Director Jurors

Nisha Platzer

Nisha Platzer

Nisha Platzer (she/her) is a queer artist and filmmaker from Vancouver, Canada. Her films meld sounds and imagery that you can dream and drown in. Her short film, Vaivén (2020) won the best film award at aluCine Latin Film & Media Arts Festival and competed at festivals worldwide including Raindance, Festival Nouveau Cinéma, FIDBA, and Ji.hlava. Nisha studied at the renowned Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) in Cuba. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council and the National Film Board of Canada. She teaches handmade film workshops and is a member of Iris Film Collective. An alumnus of IDFAcademy, the VIFF mentorship program, and the Hot Docs Doc Accelerator Lab, her work can be found in music videos, narrative, and experimental films. Nisha’s first feature documentary back home is supported by Telefilm Talent to Watch and was presented at the Docs-in-Progress Canadian Showcase at Cannes Film Festival 2022.

Elad Tzadok

Elad Tzadok

Elad is an Israeli-born Director, producer and award winning editor based in Vancouver, BC. He’s an alumni of the 2018 TIFF Filmmaker Lab and the 2021 WFF Doc Lab. His directorial work includes the feature documentary Unarchived for the NFB which examines historical erasure and the portrayal of diverse histories in our archives and museums, the award winning short Run as well as a multitude of commercial projects. As an editor, recent work includes: Corrective Measures featuring Bruce Willis and Michael Rooker, Portraits from a Fire which garnered him a Leo for Best Feature Editing, All Joking Aside, Broil and The Shipment as well as She Who Must Burn for Canadian director Larry Kent.

Lindsay McIntyre

Lindsay McIntyre

Lindsay McIntyre (she/her) is a filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist of Inuk and settler descent working primarily with analogue film. Her multiple award-winning short documentaries, experimental films and expanded cinema performances are often process-based and for some she also makes her own 16mm film with handmade silver gelatin emulsion. Using experimental and handmade techniques, her short films circle themes of portraiture, place, form and personal histories. She was named the 2021 Women in the Director’s Chair Feature Film Award winner, the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton recipient for Excellence in Media Arts by the Canada Council (2013), was honoured with the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award (Hnatyshyn Foundation, 2017) and her personal documentary Her Silent Life won Best Experimental Film at imagineNATIVE (2012). She has been a member of several artist-run film labs including the Double Negative Collective, EMO Collective, Iris Collective, and an international consortium of emulsioneers. She has made over 40 short films and is in development on her first feature The Words We Can’t Speak. She is an Associate Professor of Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design on unceded Coast Salish territories and she teaches film anywhere else that people will listen.

 

DOXA Short Documentary Awards Jurors

Eva Anandi Brownstein

Eva Anandi Brownstein

Eva Anandi Brownstein is a Documentary Filmmaker living and working on Coast Salish territory in Vancouver, BC. Raised between the mountains of Northern India and British Columbia, her diverse interests have led her through a wide range of media landscapes – from lensing feature documentaries to schlepping gear for ski films to directing film campaigns for advocacy in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Her work as cinematographer & director has screened at VIFF, TIFF, DOXA and other festivals worldwide. She finds inspiration in giving voice to underrepresented peoples and issues, and communicating stories of resilience. 

Kinga

Kinga Binkowska

Kinga is the Talks & Industry Programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival as well as Senior Programmer at the Available Light Film Festival.

Before joining VIFF, she served at the Victoria Film Festival as Head of Programming. Binkowska also helped establish the Queen of the Square, an arthouse cinema in Stratford, Ontario, and has been part of the programming team at the Zurich Film Festival since 2012. She holds an MFA in Media and Film Production from École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris and MFA in Media & American Studies from the University of Lodz.

Rylan Friday

Rylan Friday

Rylan Friday is multi-faceted award-winning filmmaker and curator from Cote First Nation, Saskatchewan. His focus is to bring honest representations to the LGBTQ2+ & Indigenous communities. He produced Trevor Mack’s debut feature Portraits From a Fire and implemented a peer to peer mentorship. He recently won the Kevin Tierney Emerging Producer Award, CMPA Indie Screen Awards, Prime Time Ottawa 2022 and the Leo Award for Best Motion Picture for his efforts on Mack’s debut feature. Rylan works include: Terror/Forming (2022) with hopes of turning this project into his debut feature film, The Sound of You Collapsing (2023) which is slated to be an immersive art installation in Summer 2023, and Musk. (2023). Rylan has programmed for VIFF's Catalyst Mentorship Program, establish and curate the highly successful #Indigeneity series for Reel Causes. He was also the lead curator for the "Who We Are Indigenous Film Series," a collaboration with VIFF and the Museum of Vancouver.

Elevate Award Jurors

Shasha McArthur

Shasha McArthur

A ̨́ba wašte, my name is Shasha McArthur. I’m a Nakota and Nehiyaw filmmaker based here in Vancouver, BC on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam people. I joined the film industry to contribute to changing the under-representation and often misrepresentation of Indigenous crew, talent and creatives within the film industry. Sharing Indigenous narratives and traditional stories whether they’re fiction, or nonfiction often requires protocols and respect for the nation from which the story came. A respectful and mindful preservation of tradition is what I want to achieve with each project I undertake. I would like to say Thank You to the amazing Indigenous creatives that came before me, their tenacity and passion is what has created the path we all walk today.

“Nothing about us, without us.”

 Soloman Chiniquay

Soloman Chiniquay

Sol is a documentary photographer and filmmaker living between xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səl̓ilwətaɁɬ territory and his homelands of Treaty 7 territory. His lens-based work explores the ways he is welcomed to witness expressions of Indigeneity, creating imagery that attempts to show, in sometimes raw ways, the land and the people on it, the ways people use and connect to the land, and the artifacts they leave on it. 

Jaewoo Kang

Jaewoo Kang

Jaewoo is a queer Korean-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist who experiments with and interweaves different art forms to create rich creative experiences. Born in Busan, Korea, currently living and working in the stolen and unceded land of xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His training in art started with visual art, which allowed me to be interested in moving images. Since graduated from Simon Fraser University Film Program, he has been working as an interdisciplinary artist. A major theme in his work is queer eroticism and how intimate moments with others can allow the self to have an introspective experience. In 2020, he has received Canada Council and BC Arts Council to make his first animated short, Lover, Come Back to Me, which is in post-production at the moment. Through making films, he began to work on costumes, which allowed him to explore textiles, silhouettes and gender.