Where it all began...
The Castlemaine Documentary Festival — A Short History
The annual Castlemaine Documentary Festival (“C-Doc”) is held over 3 nights and 2 days, always in midwinter and remains the centrepiece of a number of CDoc events run throughout the year, including Club CDoc, workshops, the ever-popular ‘LOCALS’ short films, and pop-up screenings.
In our Castlemaine community and beyond, we each share many of the same hopes and dreams. Our way of bringing these to you is through an annual documentary festival. Year-on-year, new and interesting conversations are had, and new connections forged through our Festival and Club CDoc’s activities.
So where did it all begin?
Back in 2015, Maggie Fooke, together with John Wardie and Geoffrey Smith, hosted the first Castlemaine Documentary Film Festival at the historic and much-loved Theatre Royal. Herself a filmmaker with a longstanding interest in documentaries, Maggie was the then co-owner of the Theatre Royal, which had been screening documentaries for some time. When Geoffrey and John approached her with an idea, a new festival focused solely on the documentary genre in the Theatre Royal was not a difficult decision. And so, C-Doc was born!
Geoffrey Smith, a double Emmy award-winning director, was soon joined by Denise Button, and together they continued to deliver the annual festival over a weekend, every winter. Each year, the Festival was very well-received with encouraging audience numbers and local support growing, so they continued to deliver it until 2019. The current Festival Director, Claire Jager, took over from Geoffrey Smith at the end of 2019. In 2018, the Festival was formally established as a not-for-profit organisation, and has received the invaluable support of various local volunteer board members since its incorporation.
Today, the iconic Theatre Royal is owned by Tim Heath and Felicity Cripps, who have been fabulous supporters of C-Doc over the years. It continues to be our celebrated screening home for the festival and other screening events throughout the year.
In 2020, the Castlemaine Documentary Festival responded to the COVID-19 shutdown restrictions by mounting a smaller hybrid-online event, running conventional screenings which were also delivered online. C-Doc IN THE CLOUDS, screened ‘appointment-viewing’ films over 3 nights with live-broadcast discussion panels streaming from the Theatre Royal providing a shared virtual experience.
Fortuitously, we also took advantage of a brief window of opportunity between lockdowns to allow 40 attendees in-cinema. There was wonderful regional and intrastate support and goodwill extended to our Festival’s experimentation, which enabled us to survive 2020 and, crucially, remain motivated for 2021.
In 2022, the Festival was BACK ON TERRA FIRMA until yet another lock down, only a matter of days before the Opening Night, that had us activating “Plan B”, which we had hoped would not have to happen! We became “the festival to go to when you couldn’t go anywhere else”, until the messaging switched to “if you can’t come to us, let us come to you”. The Festival was hybrid once more, offering both in-cinema and online viewing.
Around the same time, we established Club CDoc to support lovers and enthusiasts of documentaries in our community and, importantly, our creative film practitioners. This region has filmmaking talent in abundance, and we already knew there were people making short non-fiction films. Club C-Doc continues to be the way our filmmakers and film enthusiasts come together. Launching Club CDoc, and then LOCALS, has been an important way to showcase and celebrate their work, building on the connections and collaborations between the Festival and practitioners, and their engagement and collaborations with our community through media making.
At the end of the two-year COVID period we re-emerged undaunted, with increased capability, capacity, renewed vigour and optimism. The return to the Theatre Royal in 2022 was both liberating and exciting. We were all so ready to rediscover that intimacy, that special ‘feel-the-room’ cinema experience, along with ample opportunities for attendees hankering to party and hang-out.
With the 2022 theme — REALISE THE POSSIBLE, we launched the inaugural LOCALS screenings, taking advantage of what our region has to offer — an abundance of local regional talent working in cross-disciplinary ways. We screened a collection of imaginative, authentic, short films which helped us to remember the visions and feelings that inspired and occupied us through Covid-19.
In 2023, marking the first full return to the Theatre Royal, we lead with a theme proclaiming — NO ONE HAS THE LAST WORD.
In 2024, the Castlemaine Documentary Festival celebrated its 10th Anniversary. This milestone, also marked the first year of LOCALS Redux — the encore session of the LOCALS short films, which regularly sells out.
Over those years, we have continued to evolve and roll on, adapting to the ever-changing media landscape and our community, and each year we continue to showcase the Festival’s spirit of innovation and bold storytelling.
This year, the Festival programming is again a discovery. There’s always something of an alchemy in the way it comes together. The final program is always more than the sum of its parts, and 2025 will be no exception.
Our program selections are best-known for blurring the lines between fact & fiction. This is a program to explore the truth, and discover just how truly unbelievable the real world can be.
Our 2025 theme is TRUTH — YOU COULDN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP.
It’s a program for our times.
This is a weekend for you to savour. Take in as much as your viewing appetite allows, and come back for a refill! We fully encourage you to stay for the weekend and enjoy all the best that Castlemaine has to offer.