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DC/DOX 2025: So Many Reality Checks
Amy Goodman in Steal This Story, Please! “Well, we really needed that,” the woman in front of me said to her companion as we all left the opening night screening, Steal This Story, Please! at DC/DOX Film Festival. Co-founders Sky Sitney and Jamie Shor in fact seem to have offered up a timely slate, designed to inspire us in dark times and to provide examples of democratic action. And Washington, D.C. audiences embraced it. Their timing couldn’t have been better—the festival, in downtown D.C., occurred around the “No Kings” demonstrations accompanying Pres. Trump’s military parade.
Steal This Story, Please!, by longtime Michael Moore collaborators Tia Lessen and Carl Deal, featured the lifelong struggle of Amy Goodman and her program Democracy Now! to tell the story of grassroots opposition to repression and injustice. The film tracks her approach—go where the protests are and tell the protesters’ story—from 1990s East Timor to Trump 2.0, leveraging Goodman’s own archives. Goodman herself was onstage after the film with advice: “Dissent will make us safer. We have to go where the silence is. We can’t forget–those who care about war and peace and human rights and inequality are not a small group, they are a silenced majority.” Another world premiere celebrating the power of journalism was Bill Banowsky’s A Savage Art, about the extraordinary political cartoonist Pat Oliphant.
Education as activism.
Other well-crafted narratives featuring inspiring examples of leadership dotted the festival, which generally did not try to compete for world premieres with other fests. While Goodman was learning her craft at WBAI in New York, English teacher Fred Isseks was teaching alienated, angry high schoolers in the Hudson Valley how to do investigative journalism. Their success is captured in all its grainy 1990s VHS glory in Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Middletown (which premiered at Sundance). They not only helped unravel a Mafia-run waste business (“garbage is gold!”) but also learned the power of having a voice—something alums come back to say changed their lives. Watch it if you’d like to strip a layer of your cynicism away, even for a little while. And if you want to meet more young people who give you hope, then two films about high schoolers—Jennifer Tiexiera and Guy Mossman’s Speak., about oratory competitions, and Charlie Sadoff, and Gabriel London’s Immutable, about high school debaters in D.C.—are there for you. (And the young people also dazzled in their Q&As after the films.) Elliot Kirschner’s The Last Class (a world premiere) tracks Robert Reich–once Clinton’s labor secretary–as he winds up a teaching career at Berkeley. His course “Wealth and Poverty” is an introduction to what’s at stake in democratic process, and his way of teaching it has inspired generations. But the film also captures the poignancy of aging and endings.
Leadership matters.
Angela Tucker’s The Inquisitor, which showed up fresh from a Tribeca filmfest debut, is a scarily relevant portrait of Barbara Jordan, the barrier-crashing Black legislator who knew that the Constitution’s defense was directly linked to civil rights organizing. The storytelling is brilliant and it’s exciting to see re-imagining of collage, creative use of stock footage and witty animation.
Tommy Gulliksen’s Facing War (a U.S. premiere) features the seemingly mild-mannered NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. With extraordinary intimate access to world leaders negotiating the most sensitive issues of the moment, the film travels with Stoltenberg as he finds ways to win NATO support for Ukraine without plunging the world into World War III. “When you get that close to the process, the mystique falls away and you see it’s like high school all over again,” Gulliksen said. But this is high school with the highest stakes, and what Stoltenberg offers is a master class in diplomacy.
We also got to meet LGBT+ leaders past and present. One of my favorite films of the festival was I Was Born This Way, Daniel Junge and Sam Pollard’s joyful portrait of an evangelist for love. Carl Bean, a Black gay man who survived poverty and shaming to become a Motown hitmaker, left it all to minister to Black gay AIDS victims and eventually founded an alternative Christian denomination, embracing BIPOC celebrants of all genders. Billy Porter and Questlove are among those who celebrate his spirit and his music. State of Firsts is Chase Joynt’s fan letter to the funny, serious and successful trans politician Sarah McBride, who is under relentless right-wing assault and seems, miraculously, undaunted. Sam Feder’s Heightened Scrutiny follows trans ACLU attorney Chase Strangio as he prepares for his Supreme Court arguments supporting gender-affirming care for trans youth. The film was a cliffhanger, as the case was still pending.
Unlikely activism.
Docs profiled people making a difference in untraditional settings. Internationally, Zippy Kimundu’s Widow Champion follows Rodah Nafula, who is not only fighting for her own right to land after her husband’s death but helps other widows demand their legal rights and fight the dispossession that has become custom. Kimundu wins access to remarkable scenes of traditional village mediators intervening—successfully!–in bitter family feuds. In Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting through Rocks, a delightfully obstreperous 43-year-old woman decides to run for office in rural Iran, against all tradition. Her early victories lead to political sabotage, and she must figure out how to negotiate her future.
And I was grateful to learn more in Toby Perl Freilich’s The Maintenance Artist about Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a New York artist who came of age during 1970s feisty feminist art movements. She focused on finding art in daily work, especially women’s work, and remarkably became the artist in residence for the New York Sanitation Department. Her work, including entrancing choreography of waste disposal techniques and machinery, was incompatible with the art market, and this film recovers her legacy.
Big issues, personal journeys.
How do you raise important issues in ways that don’t reduce them to documentary essays, and that invite conversation? Suzannah Herbert’s Natchez, which showed immediately after it won the top documentary award at Tribeca, like The Order of Myths and The Neutral Ground before it, engages viewers across racial divides about American racism. Natchez, once the second-largest slave market in the U.S., has revived its economy with nostalgia tourism. White women in hoop skirts mouth Southern-belle pieties; a black pastor conducts reality-tours focusing on the brutal economics of slavery and its all-too-contemporary Jim Crow aftermath; a Black woman buys her dream mansion and discovers it is haunted. The yawning chasm between Lost Cause mythology and historical fact opens horrifyingly before the viewer, as the film builds to a revelatory climax.
Two films dared to address Palestinian-Israeli conflict, differently. In Amber Fares’ Coexistence, My Ass!, which has been having a robust festival run, comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi—raised in a fully integrated Israeli-Palestinian village with the hope of co-existence–wrestles with today’s toughest questions there and how to make humor leverage a survivable future. Brandon Kramer’s Holding Liat, an Israeli family (Kramer’s own relatives) fights for release of its loved ones, abducted by Hamas; the family and political tensions of their struggle are a microcosm of the crisis.
And should disabled people have the right to die if they want to? Disabled filmmaker and activist Reid Davenport goes behind that question in Life After. He asks, Why do they want to die? Davenport’s personal and insistent investigation keeps coming up with the same answer: They don’t. They just can’t find the proper support, from medical or social services. He wants us to ask instead: Why can’t disabled people get the support they need for the quality of life they deserve? And then he wants us to fight to get it.
Elaine Epstein’s Arrest the Midwife takes us inside a Mennonite community in upstate New York, to explore the paucity of midwives in the U.S. Like many states, New York law deliberately throws obstacles in the way, which midwives argue has to do with how much money hospitals (which have worse medical outcomes) can make on birthing. Mennonites usually retire from the world, out of religious belief. Seeing the women of the Mennonite community, eventually joined by their men, organize to demand home birthing from legislators is to watch the emergence of new democratic publics.
As always, shorts programs yielded small delights. My favorite was Marshall Granger’s Your Opinion, Please, which plays long, meditative images of Montana landscape over audio snippets of a Montana public radio’s call-in show over the years. Shorts filmmakers got travel stipends from DC/DOX, which turned the shorts screenings into special events. Among those who treasured the chance to connect with other shorts filmmakers were Jay Rosenblatt and Stephanie Rapp (Heartbeat) and Fiona Otway (Into the Dark). “DC/DOX really respects short films and shorts filmmakers,” Otway said. “I felt both nourished and energized by this immersion in our documentary community.”
Reality check.
The Reality Check Forum had that effect for members of the regional documentary community, who gathered to discuss everything from public TV distribution to generative AI to impact campaigns and who rolled up their sleeves in editing and funding workshops. Kartemquin Films founder Gordon Quinn opened it with reflections on six decades of making films to support democratic participation. “You have to take people inside the emotional reality of people they have never met,” he said.
Some takeaways from a “state of the industry” panel, where panelists agreed that the streamers’ bubble had burst, public TV was in crisis, and indies were in search of survival:
- Filmmaker Yance Ford on his experience with his Netflix doc Power: “I will only do independent filmmaking from now on; I cannot work any longer for someone who puts their profits over what I have to say.”
- Entrepreneur Brian Newman: “Branded doc work can offer one revenue stream, but it can’t save democracy.”
- Ex-NYT and Substacker Kathleen Lingo: “Right-wing influencers are flooding the zone with disinformation from the LA protests, and they are all funded to go there by right-wing organizations. Why can’t funders for accuracy and truth provide timely funding for urgent documentary work?”
- POV’s Erika Dilday: “Our strength is in numbers. We need to build a new ecosystem out of collaboration.”
Ethics and the public’s need to know.
The Forum also featured useable resources. The Documentary Producers Alliance launched its Ethics Resource Library, a collection ranging from book recommendations to guidelines (interviewing after trauma; the filmmaker-participant relationship) to trade magazine articles and filmmaker case studies.
As well, on several panels, attendees were reminded to go to protectmypublicmedia.org to register their support for public broadcasting in the face of a rescission vote in the Senate. Rescission (cancelling the federal funding Congress already appropriated for the next two years) would devastate public TV. Several of the notable docs at DC/DOX are scheduled for public TV airing, for instance the ITVS-funded Natchez, The Inquisitor, and Life After. They and other films with public broadcasting support demonstrate the importance for independent documentarians of public investment that goes beyond the bottom line, to ask about what the public needs to know.
