The Castlemaine Documentary Festival (C-Doc) kicks off its annual event from 4 July through to 6 July 2025, housed in Castlemaine, Victoria’s stunning Theatre Royal. The festival takes over the streets of Castlemaine with an array of workshops, pop-up screenings and a lot more, ensuring that the documentary festival keeps the minds of attendees racing throughout the weekend.
Andrew caught up with Festival Director Claire Jager ahead of the festival to talk about this years line-up which features stunning slices of cinema from all around the globe, including the Academy Award nominated Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, the haunting and captivating psychic film Look into My Eyes, and Gabrielle Brady’s collaborative masterwork, The Wolves Always Come at Night, among many others.
Claire commented about Gabrielle’s connection with the festival: “We screened Island of the Hungry Ghosts back in 2019 and with this film, it just fitted the program so well. It's a fabulous film to screen.”
Complementing the visual impact of Wolves is Stelarc Suspending Disbelief, a phenomenal film about body artist Stelarc and his – excuse the pun – body of work. It’s a visceral experience that features everything from the surgical implant of an ear onto an arm, to hanging from trees with hooks, and more. Yet, that extreme tone supports a rather wholesome narrative. Stelarc Suspending Disbelief has its world debut at the festival on the opening night, an audacious decision if ever there were one.
“This year our tagline is ‘Truth. You couldn't make this stuff up.’ This film, along with Human Algorithm, is a very provocative and controversial opener. I find it incredibly curious, and I'm intrigued by it. I don't personally find it confronting. We do have a warning on it, of course we do, because I think some people will find it confronting. It is an audacious, provocative conversation starter for the weekend.”
C-Doc is a festival that continually provokes conversation and engagement from audience members. Claire continues, “The festival is bookended with Lana Wilson's Look into My Eyes, a film about seven psychics in New York. There are provocations, but as are so many of the best nonfiction films.”
While Stelarc Suspending Disbelief and Look into My Eyes are modern conversation starters, so is the enduring silent film classic The Man with a Movie Camera, which is presented at C-Doc with a live score by Underground Lovers Moda Discoteca, an electronic offshoot of Aussie band Underground Lovers.
“Obviously I love this film and I've thoroughly enjoyed all the versions of soundtracks and interpretations that go with it. Vertov’s film was never intended to be watched silently, and he had copious notes for what he intended the orchestration to be. I wanted to screen the film, so I commissioned Moda Discoteca, which is the electronic version of a Melbourne band, very popular, Underground Lovers. Vincent Giarrusso is the is one of the band members, and he knows this film inside out.
“These things have to be planned well in advance. They need time to rehearse and to work on how they're going to approach it. In 2023, we did Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, the silent film with ZÖJ doing a live score. That was a sell-out. We took that to the Astor, and it sold out the Astor. The Man with a Movie Camera fits for opening night, and it'll be interesting, because they're very different films. Man with a Movie Camera is all about rhythm and pace, so what they're going to be doing with the music around that is an entirely different experience. I can't wait.”
Returning to C-Doc for 2025 is Locals, the festivals exclusive showcase of short films. Attending C-Doc in 2025 is previous Locals filmmaker, Mitch Nivalis, who will be helping facilitate one of the many great workshops running over the weekend. Locals is a continuous filmmaking endeavour with the festival, tapping into the creative possibilities of the region and given, as the name suggests, locals the chance to engage in the filmmaking process.
“It’s what keeps you energised about the possibilities that are within the region and what it offers. Everybody knows that Castlemaine is a cultural hotspot and that it's full of so many creatives and media makers, directors, composers, editors, writers. There’s lots of newbies and a lot of very experienced practitioners as well. During Covid, we set up club C-Doc as a way for people to connect. Our community needed to connect, and this was our way to ensure that happened.
“I knew that there was work being made in this region, because people would send me emails saying, ‘Can you look at a cut?’ ‘Where can I find this?’ So, I thought this is a way to bring them together. From those club C-Doc meetings, and as soon as we could get back in the cinema, we launched the first Locals, and it was fantastic. Each of the filmmakers has the chance to hop up on the stage. For the first time this year, there's an audience favourite voting award on the night.
“This is now Locals fourth year and they keep coming. We found that we needed to not only do the monthly meets with filmmakers, but we also needed workshops. These are development workshops from concept through the creation, then sound and vision and then editing, and looking at rough cuts. This is all to make sure that we had enough programs to keep Locals going. It hasn't been a problem this year. It's literally just selling out tonight and we’re able to announce Locals Redux, which is the encore screening in a couple of weeks’ time. It's fabulous.
“We instigated a thing called ‘legals and ethics 101’, which was to ensure that filmmakers were prepped in how they engage with their participants and with community groups. It's very grassroots cultural and community development, which is quite unique, but particular to this region. It's where the heart comes from. It's really palpable on the night.”
This creative cohesion that comes from Locals and club C-Doc is a form of community building. But, the legal framework for filmmakers to tell stories safely is something that underpins creatives storytelling. Claire expands on the importance of giving creatives the right tools to tell their stories on screen:
“Participation, trust, consent, all of those things are absolutely critical. These are the things that are negotiated relationships. They're not granted. Participants involvement needs to be transparent and involved and discussed and negotiated. It doesn't just happen. There are many different forms of relationships and approaches to filmmaking, just as many as there are with how the final product and the film and the tone and the balance and approach of the film ends up. It's through those relationships and that research that you find the way to tell their story, the point of view, the character, all of those things. Each one is its own story.”
That connection to story is equally as important as the connection to the local area. This is something that Claire enthusiastically expands upon saying, “We do believe in this synergy between filmmakers, filmmaking and our audience and these programs. Club C-Doc and Locals is that conduit to keep that alive and to keep those threads continuous. They’re built upon and they expand. We call it ‘Locals’ but it's really regional.
“We have a networking lunch now during the festival, which is by invitation, but it has a mix of people coming from Metro, interstate, Castlemaine and its surrounds, and also further out from Victoria. It's a great connector. I think the audience feels that when they come and it's why we've got this support. But the way that we connect into the community, we don't directly go to a community group and say, ‘We're making a film about your program.’ It comes from the filmmaker’s connection within the community. They are the ones who meet someone and connect.”
As is made extremely clear, community doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and one of the best ways of building that community is over a bowl of hot soup at the community house pop-up kitchen, and at the Theatre Royal with hot pizza.
“Castlemaine community house, houses a lot of workshops, and we run some workshops there as well. They do a lunch every Tuesday in the Town Hall, which is massive, and it’s where all the food is contributed from the surrounding area. Volunteers make lunch, and people can go in and have a very cheap, fabulous several courses. During the festival we have it in the Theatre Royal courtyard where there are warm heaters out there too. Castlemaine community house come and put on several different fabulous soups across the festival weekend. It's our way of giving back to them as they keep all the proceeds. The Theatre Royal is also there and has fabulous pizza and wine, and next door is Love Shack.”
That dance and flow from one screen to the next is why film festivals have such an immense buzz to them where you have to pinch yourself to remember that you’re stepping back into the world around you. Adding to that is the connection with a fellow filmgoer is a treat and it’s what makes the festival going experience the joy that it is. Claire talks about that communal vibe, “In some ways, it feels an easy place to do it. Castlemaine is made for this kind of thing. It's a pleasure to do. We have a small, tight team, with some highly skilled people who have been with us for a number of years. There's this constant engagement with what we do and we want to keep over a weekend in mid-winter. That is what works about it. You can come and just literally spend your weekend in and out of that cinema. The curation is designed to flow you through the weekend. You don't feel that, ‘Oh, I can't see another film’, because you know that with our program, you're actually going to be taken somewhere else entirely, and you're going to probably have to remind yourself what you saw before, because the one that you've just seen is the one you're going to talk about.
“The other thing is that because it's a single screening of each film and in one venue, it means that whoever you bump into, they've seen what you've seen. People come back every year too. I always remember that opposite the cinema is an IGA. One Saturday morning, a couple of shoppers came over and asked what was happening. They came from Harcourt, 15 kilometres up the road, and they came in and they stayed for the whole day and then came back the next day. That's wonderful.
“Last year we had a big increase in our audience. Thirty per cent of the people had not been before, so the increase was newcomers. But over COVID, we connected with people who still come, they come from further away in Victoria, and they know that this is the weekend for documentaries, and they plan to do travel for them which is terrific. We love that.”
Attendees at the 2025 festival are in for a huge treat, with arguably C-Doc’s finest line-up yet. Alongside silent classics revisited to cross-nation collaborative experiences to music extravaganzas and body changing experiences, there’s also a few more unique titles in the mix.
“Reas is a knockout, it’s kind of a hybrid musical. This is another unique approach to telling a story. The director comes from the theatre and was workshopping a piece in the prison and that changed what she did. She was very involved with the characters for a long period of time, and the people that she'd been involved with in the prison were no longer in prison, but the experience had affected them in deep ways. There was a way to work through that experience through a recreation of the dreams and fantasies and reenactments. And it’s a musical, which is pretty wild.
“That's why I our tagline, ‘Truth. You couldn't make this stuff up.’ Real conversations, real films, real stories, real characters; it's what we like to play with. We love blurring these lines and seeing these fabulous inventions that people come up with and how they pull these stories together.”
Castlemaine Documentary Festival runs from 4 July to 6 July 2025. Visit cdocff.com.au for more details.