DOXA is just a few weeks away, and i’m chipping away at advertising deadlines and collateral pieces. but since the heavy lifting of the design and production of the DOXA Program Book is done, let’s have a closer look, yes?

like most festival guides, the bulk of the content is meticulously crafted film descriptions and advertising, along with sections for general info, special programs, credits and acknowledgements, plus go-to pages like the index and schedule.

what makes the DOXA book unique (among the festivals i’ve worked on, at least) is that it devotes an entire section to guest curatorial essays. what started out as a thoughtful editorial offering five years ago by the festival directors has become standard issue. and hooray, because it makes sense.

after promoting art house films for 10 years, just let me say that filling two weeks with cool, important, radical, entertaining, challenging and/or “good for you” films is one thing — but it’s a whole other deal to get people to actually buy into any of it. festivals and film orgs are not only responsible for curating films; they are also responsible for curating an audience. something as simple as sharing the process or inspiration behind programming choices can help a typical film goer have a better-informed, more engaging experience.

read these pieces, see what i mean: Arab Spring/Arab Fall by Zeina Zahreddine, Black Life Is, Ain’t and Still Rises by Rebecca Carroll, and Claire Simon: The (French) Woman with a Movie Camera, by Thierry Garrel.

 

design, ironically.

having just supplied links to the curatorial essays, i’ll just pretend that print isn’t really dying, and that you still appreciate holding physical objects made of paper and inks. even though you’re reading this on a screen.

in line with DOXA’s visual language, the essays use Brandon Grotesque exclusively, and are laid out in quite straight-forward fashion. this is a film festival guide, after all. that said, these pages do afford a more flexible use of image and space than the rest of the book. in terms of flow, this magazine-y section is a nice break between the sometimes densely packed openers, and the remaining 50-60 pages of film notes and advertisements.