While many documentary films are available at your fingertips via streaming in this day and age, Sudbury Indie Cinema’s Junction North International Documentary Film Festival screens films that can’t be accessed that way.
“Nothing we’re showing is streaming,” said Sudbury Indie Cinema lead programmer Beth Mairs of the April 18-21 festival, which first started as an offshoot of Hot Docs out of Toronto in 2013, and became an independent festival in 2017.
She said she actually weeds out films that are streaming online or are being broadcast on television in finalizing the festival’s lineup.
“It’s a very unique chance if you’re into non-fiction film,” she added.
Junction North has actually doubled its offerings this year and is showing films at three venues to accommodate the added movies — at Indie Cinema’s home on MacKenzie Street, at the Downtown Movie Lounge in Elm Place and at Place des Arts on Durham Street.
A third of the 35 films screening are curated by Mairs, and are films that have already received accolades at top festivals.
“Some of these will be world premieres, Ontario premieres, North American premieres or Northern Ontario premieres,” Mairs said.
The balance of the films were submitted by filmmakers from around the world to Junction North via FilmFreeway, an online platform that film festivals use for submissions.
Choosing from these submissions and curating content is a massive amount of work split between Mairs and associate programmer Simone Widdifield.
Junction North is also a juried festival, with those submitting vying for a chance for awards, and it’s a qualifier for the Canadian Screen Awards.
The lineup is “very dynamic,” Mairs said. “There’s tons of Q&As, and we have filmmakers coming.”
She tells the story of Hollie Macgowan, a filmmaker out of British Columbia who is screening a film called “Calling All People” at Junction North.
“She has made the earth move to come to Sudbury,” Mairs said. “She's flying into Toronto, she's got a friend she’s driving up with. She's really, really excited. This will be her first chance to have an audience.”
Junction North’s opening feature is called Boil Alert, and tackles the issue of the lack of drinkable water in First Nations across Canada.
“They interweave this with a story of an Indigenous woman who is going around with the film crew talking with people in different First Nations communities around this issue and what they're doing about it,” Mairs said.
“Documentary film, it's an art form, but it's also a means of understanding issues in the world, and this is such a critical one.”
Another pick by Mairs is “500 Days in the Wild,” about a journey by filmmaker Dianne Whelan, who walked, hiked and cycled across Canada on the Trans Canada Trail, starting out in St. John's, Nfld. in 2015 and ending in Victoria, BC in 2021.
“The way she travels the land is a very kind of sensitive reconciliation kind of journey, as well as an adventure of a 50-year-old woman who was not a jock, and she's mostly travelling solo,” she said. “So it’s a pretty compelling documentary.”
If you’d like to take in Junction North, festival passes and tickets are available online here.
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.
