Through COVID our lives turned inward. At C-Doc, we lifted our game, and expanded our way to reach you by combining online and in-cinema options. As we emerge from isolation documentary helps to satisfy our deep need to connect, to belong, to share our feelings and celebrate our differences.
With a renewed sense of purpose we will make the Theatre Royal sing with true stories and bring them to audiences across Australia. Having sharpened our online skills to create wonderful conversations, we are able to share our absorbing panel discussions and Q&As following the screenings.
We went on an intense, wonderful hunt for films which turn the lens of human experience on to the themes and issues at the heart of what we do and why we do it. We were determined to make each program offering distinct in order to create a broad gathering together of creative and invigorating storytelling – and finally bring to fruition the additional screen-based surprises we’ve been planning.
Many of the films this year tackle the big, hefty ideas that consume us and are told through the distinctive and intimate lens of each film maker’s vision. True stories about people who create change, who are driven to rebel. They help us to see what is possible, telling us real stories with all the drama and complexity that we humans face.
We are calling this 2022 edition of the Castlemaine Documentary Festival, “Realise The Possible”.
On Opening Night, we’re launching our inaugural LOCALS session, taking advantage of what our region has on offer – an abundance of local regional talent working in cross-disciplinary ways. A night of imaginative, authentic, short films which help us to remember the visions and feelings that inspired and occupied us through Covid. It will be presented by local legend, musician and auteur Lifon Henderson. This is a night for all of us.
Bridging our past and present are two superb and absorbing films, Television Event and Letters from Baghdad. Using never-seen-before archive footage, they take us to times and places that feel distant and yet, both eerily prescient in their concerns, confront this very moment.
Writing with Fire, Rebellion and I Am Samuel speak to humanity’s acts of steadfast defiance as their characters challenge and redefine traditional notions of power, love, freedom and the fulfilment of self, from our domestic lives to our biggest issues. They may be loud, wild and excessive or quiet and meditative – but all reflect our own emotions and struggle to connect.
Saturday night’s musical experience, Rumba Kings, is a powerful tale of music’s entanglement with politics, and the freedom of nations. There’s no better way to take us into dancing with the rhythms of rumba after the screening.
Sunday 3rd July coincides with NAIDOC Week and we are proud to have The Lake Of Scars, a ground-breaking Australian documentary dealing with the challenges of reconciliation. As Special Festival Guests, we have Uncle Jack Charles and Ngarra Murray, together with the film’s director Bill Code.
Lastly, immerse yourselves in the closing night film, River, an audacious work of mind-bending beauty by Jennifer Peedom, the director of Mountain and Sherpa.
In 2021, we were the festival to go to when you couldn’t go anywhere else. We said, “if you can’t come to us, let us come to you”.
This year. Realise The Possible. Come to us.
