From November 8 to 10, DOXA will be holding its inaugural Vancouver Podcast Festival. The festival will include live podcast presentations, workshops and panels, featuring Canadian podcasts Someone Knows Something and Uncover: Escaping NXIVM from CBC, and American podcasts In The Dark and You Must Remember This.
The theme of this festival is “True Crime, True Justice,” where the popular true crime genre of podcasts will be looked at through the social justice approach. Selina Crammond, DOXA director of programming, said the theme felt natural for kicking off the event.
“One of the nights is going to be focused on comedy, so putting a satirical spin on the true crime genre, another night’s going to be focusing more on investigative journalism in crime, and then the other night is sort of looking critically at Hollywood and crime stories,” Crammond said.
Andrea Gin, chair of the board of directors for the Documentary and Media Society and member of the festival’s organizing committee, noted the rise in popularity of podcasting as a medium.
“CBC’s been telling lots of these kinds of audience stories on the air for a long, long time,” said Gin. “Now people are able to tell their own stories and put podcasts together at home on their computers ... it’s enabled regular people to tell their stories in an audio format.”
Gin believes this event will help local podcasters connect and grow.
“We hope that this is going to be an event that pulls together all [of] the local podcasting community, and enables people to network and get to know other creators, and share ideas and share production tips,” Gin said.
Crammond hopes that the worlds of documentary media and podcasting can connect together through this event, and that creators in these spheres have the opportunity to network and explore different formats of storytelling.
“... We’re really hoping to build up an audience ... and look at the intersections [between podcasting and documentary film], how stories are being told in audio and film, and what’s similar about them, what’s different, and sort of expand on our community [of] documentary film fans,” said Crammond.