This Year’s DocuWest Film Festival to Feature the Work of North High Students

The DocuWest Film Festival is returning for its 16th year and, alongside professional documentaries, will feature a package of five short films by students of Denver Public Schools’ North High School around the theme of “Actions and Outcomes.”

Festival founder Wade Gardner has long been committed to documentary work, often focusing on themes related to social justice in his projects. He’s also committed to elevating young artists: As a substitute teacher with DPS, he saw an opportunity to help foster the next generation of Colorado filmmakers after covering a class for a film teacher at North High.

The students explored a wide range of topics in their films, from child abuse to mental health, and have been excited to have their work shown in an official festival.

Vanessa Vega, an 11th grader taking an Audio-Video course, centered her documentary short on the case of Gabriel Hernandez, an eight-year-old whose death resulted from a profound case of child abuse at the hands of his mother and her then boyfriend.

Vega says that while it’s intimidating to share her work with a larger audience, she’s looking forward to the festival. “It would feel pretty cool to have my work showcased at the festival and also kind of terrifying for reactions, but that can also be good. It’s just like a mix of emotions,” Vega says.

Another student, Noah Navarrete, worked with David Alonzi to create a self-documentary about North High School’s Unified flag football team and the impact the Unified program has had on them and the school. Navarette adds that having a platform for his work was invaluable. “I have a really good feeling about the fact that I can see my work in a showcase at a festival,” he says. 

Their teacher, Tim Boyles, says he thought that DocuWest was a great opportunity for students to experience a wider audience. “It is fantastic for students to see their work and their perspective on screen,” Boyles says. “We are missing that perspective that many of these young filmmakers are bringing to the table. Talking about what affects them and letting them share it is an invaluable tool. Wade and all of DocuWest really allow young voices and new filmmakers the opportunity to shine and be seen. North is privileged to have created such a partnership for our young student filmmakers.”

Gardner says that it’s important for him to give a platform to new artists because that’s the kind of support that fosters a thriving community. “My background, growing up broke since the age of 16, has really prompted me to want to give back to new artists,” Gardner adds. “This festival lets the audience see different stories and perspectives and it exposes the students to professional work. The students can learn from people who have been working for years and, in turn, we learn from them.”

DocuWest returned three years ago after shuttering during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Gardner first waded into the film festival circuit over two decades ago. “When I started at the CU Denver film school back in the ’90s, a friend of mine and I started a film festival for college students called the First Look Student Film Festival,” Gardner says. “We wound up doing that for 17 years. It became part of the Denver Film Festival. Then, in 2008, I quit my corporate job, and I wanted to stay in Colorado and continue my work in film. I didn’t want to move away.” 

Gardner pivoted and immersed himself in Denver’s film community. He sold his house, cashed out his 401k, took out an SBA loan, bought a small art teaching business and started DocuWest with his friend Josh Weinberg.

“We sold an animation series to the STARZ Movie Channel during the Denver Film Festival, and they wound up buying twenty episodes from us,” Gardner says. “I started a relationship with the Foothills Art Center, and the executive director at the time asked me, ‘If you could do a film festival, what would you do?’ We were standing at the Art Center at the top of the hill, looking out into Golden, and I said, ‘I would love to do a documentary film festival.’”

And like that, DocuWest was born. For the first five years, the documentary film festival operated out of the Foothills Art Center. It built an audience, and several years later, Gardner moved the festival to the Sie Film Center and then to the Alamo Drafthouse at Sloan’s Lake in 2017. But 2020 changed the event’s trajectory. 

“Moving back to that location allowed us to find our audience that we had sort of lost when we moved out of Golden. We were having real success, and then COVID happened,” Gardner says. “We went dark for two years. But coming out of the pandemic, our organization earned a grant from the city of Denver to start our non-profit, the Denver Documentary Society. From there, we built our own website and put a lot into all of the operational aspects of this new place.  We’ve been running the Denver Documentary Society since coming out of COVID in 2020.”

Now, DocuWest is showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Holiday Theatre in northwest Denver. Gardner says that the partnership with the MCA has been a godsend.

“We have an awesome relationship; they’ve been fantastic,” he says. “They’ve assisted us in many ways. One of the biggest things that we’re proud of is that, even before COVID, we had been very successful with programming. The majority of our lineup was with works that were submitted.”

This year, all but one film in DocuWest’s lineup is from direct submissions. Gardner says that, on average, DocuWest receives around 300 submissions. 

“We have a great programming team,” Gardner adds. “Our programming director, Alexander Elmore, oversees the programming for features. Emma Peterson, our shorts programmer, has been fantastic at attracting film artists.”

Gardner says that DocuWest’s philosophy on programming is to “take people on a ride.” DocuWest entries have gone on to be nominated for Academy Awards. 

“We really want folks to get a grassroots feeling of not only what the story is about, but what the filmmakers are about… we want to have people engage with the films, the filmmakers, if they want to get involved with an issue, if they want to get involved with the story in any possible way,” he says. “That’s what we strive for.”

DocuWest has built a “worldwide” reputation and has curated films from all over the globe, Gardner says. But he’s pleased that local filmmakers are still receiving a spotlight. 

DocuWest seeks to curate stories about civil rights, music, the environment, LGBTQ+, democracy and more. Other films screening at DocuWest Film Festival include Outlaws & Outliers, a look at the lesbian community in Eugene, Oregon from the 1960s-90s; Legacy, a documentary of the changing challenges of farming as climate change alters the agricultural landscape; Initial Dose of Reality: Valve Turners, a portrait of climate activists along the US-Canadian border; and more. 

The 16th Annual DocuWest Film Festival is October 16-18 at the Holiday Theater,  2644 W 32nd Avenue. The students’ shorts package will be playing on Saturday, October 18. You can find tickets for the short package here.