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18 Recommended Titles at 2024’s DOC NYC
Yalla Parkour Returning for its 15th edition, DOC NYC presents yet another robust lineup of over 200 non-fiction short and feature-length films. Taking place in-person from November 13-21 and online through December 1, the largest documentary film festival in the country features buzzy future Oscar contenders, hidden gems from this year’s global festival circuit and even a handful of world premieres amid its 2024 program.
Screenings will be held at several Manhattan theaters (namely IFC Center, SVA Theater and Village East) and via the festival’s own streaming platform. Below, from Filmmaker‘s writers, find a selection of recommended titles to seek out, which range from the personal to the political (and often feature a healthy dose of both). Links to previous Filmmaker coverage, from which some of these capsules are excerpted from, are included.
There Was, There Was Not. Taking its title from the opening line from most Armenian fairy tales, Emily Mkrtichian’s feature documentary debut focuses on a land that is, sadly, just as ephemeral as the magic of childhood. Originally set to profile the lives of several women in the Republic of Artsakh 30 years after the region was ravaged by war, the film takes a shocking turn when Mkrtichian and her subjects find themselves in the unexpected crosshairs of armed conflict once again. All of these women react in vastly different ways—some join the front lines, others are effectively displaced, few tenaciously refuse to abandon their homes—which allows the parallels between past and present, perseverance and persecution, to become achingly obvious. — Natalia Keogan
Yalla Parkour. World premiering at DOC NYC is Palestinian filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter’s feature debut, which examines her own relationship to Gaza as well as the artistic resistance demonstrated by its civilians in the face of violent oppression. In the wake of her mother’s death, the director reflects on her severed ties to the land she once called home, particularly as her childhood residence—and the tangible memory objects it contained—has since been destroyed. When she encounters videos of young Palestinians performing parkour amid the rubble of Gaza, Zuaiter is able to reignite the connection to her homeland that she once considered “lost.” — NK
Under a Blue Sun. Though it also promises to be a scathing indictment of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, Daniel Mann’s investigation is filtered through a rather perplexing pop cultural lens. Discovering that the 1998 Sylvester Stallone vehicle Rambo III was shot in the Negev Desert, the director decides to delve into the circumstances surrounding this production. He reaches out to the famous action star and forges contact with Bashir, a displaced Palestinian artist who was hired to work on the film. As the U.S. continues to supply Israel with military supplies during their genocidal campaign in Palestine, this reflection on the intertwining cultural interest between the two countries will likely prove as fascinating as it is enraging. — NK
Sudan, Remember Us. As a brutal civil war rages on in the North African country, Hind Meddeb’s portrait of young activists during the Sudanese 2019 revolution carries a relevance that is both devastating and hopeful. The French-Tunisian-Moroccan journalist follows the downfall of Omar Al-Bashir’s 30-year dictatorship, overthrown by a popular revolution that emphasized the liberatory qualities of artmaking. Though the film opens with anxious audio recordings of the subjects as the civil war broke out in 2023, its hopeful focus on the power of collective action lends a much-needed air of optimism to a populace currently besieged by violence. — NK
Surveilled. Co-directors Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz’s doc may clock in at only 60 minutes long, but its findings on the disturbingly panopticoninc nature of our digital lives appear to be anything but paltry. In front of the camera is Pulitzer-winning journalist Ronan Farrow, who the audience follows as he embarks on a global quest to uncover the scandalous truth behind how our personal information is hacked, bought and sold—and how this injustice dovetails with authoritarian persecution of journalists and whistleblowers. — NK
Looking for Simone. 75 years after the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal feminist text, The Second Sex, it would appear that women’s status as second class citizens is on the brink of being fortified anew, at least in the U.S. As filmmakers Nathalie Masduraud and Valérie Urréa look back on the French author and philosopher’s extensive research during the crafting of her arguable opus, insight is gained on de Beauvoir’s intricate, if at times flawed, process—as well as the long journey ahead to advance and preserve women’s rights across the world. — NK
Architecton. Programmed as a Special Presentation at the festival, the latest from Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky (director of the Joaquin Phoenix-produced, pro-vegan 2020 doc Gunda) explores the role of architecture and its aesthetics throughout human history. Centering on the perspective of Italian architect and designer Michele De Lucchi, the film questions the limitations of beauty, the environmental consequences of construction and the complex physical legacies of ancient and modern civilizations alike. — NK
Twice Into Oblivion. A theater troupe grapples with the legacy of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s state-sanctioned genocide of Haitians in Pierre Michel Jean’s latest film. Bringing together actors from both sides of the divided island, the film’s goal is to honestly reckon with a defining moment in this shared history through physical performance. This goes far beyond staging reenactments of the persecution of 20,000 civilians, necessitating an honest confrontation of prejudice and resentment that lingers to this very day. — NK
A Photographic Memory. Filmmaker Rachel Seed’s photographer mother Sheila Turner Seed died when she was just 18 months old, before specific memories could take hold — an absence that structures doc producer-turned-director Seed’s True/False and Hot Docs playing A Photographic Memory. The film works as both an archive-based biographical detective movie of sorts, as Seed goes back through the work of her mom while reconstructing her professional journey, which includes hosting an interview series in which she spoke to celebrated colleagues such as Henri Cartier-Bresson. The journey is also a very personal one, as Seed looks into her mom’s relationships leading up to her decision to give birth to the younger Seed herself and considers her own life both in parallel and counterpoint. It’s a lovely film, one energized by Seed’s heartfelt epistemic desire, a search for which she’s found inventive and quite moving visual and editorial strategies that truly make it a dialogue across decades. — Scott Macaulay
Janice Ian: Breaking Silence. A DOC NYC world premiere is director, producer and writer Varda Bar-Kar’s documentary on the legendary singer-songwriter, the “other Janice,” who, as the film’s website reminds, “used to jam with Jimi Hendrix in Greenwich Village bars and partied with Janis Joplin.” According to the filmmakers, the film traces Ian’s career alongside her song’s, and personal life’s, intersection with social issues of the day, including interracial relationships and gay marriage. “With access to Janis Ian’s incredible body of music, her vast archive, family, friends, famed collaborators, and music journalists, we’re creating an in-depth musical film, told in three acts, with the intimacy of a home movie set against a sweeping historical context–all visioned through a contemporary lens,” they say on the website. — SM
Black Box Diaries. Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries is a film the Japanese journalist should never have had to make. Based on her international bestseller, the Sundance-premiering doc is a dogged investigation into a rape perpetrated by another Japanese journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a longtime friend of the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose biography the offender penned as well. It’s also a somewhat surreal journey, given that the brave survivor in the purposely stalled case is Ito herself. Through an engaging mix of secret recordings, vérité shooting and confessional video, we’re invited along on an increasingly maddening odyssey through the shockingly antiquated Japanese judicial system; exposing a hidden world where, prior to production, rape laws hadn’t been changed for 110 years. (Excerpted from an interview with Shiori Ito.) — Lauren Wissot
Daughters. Filmed over a remarkable eight years, Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s Sundance-premiering Daughters is an on-the-ground (and behind the bars) look at the preparations — physical, mental and above all emotional — leading up to the DC-jail-based Daddy Daughter Dance, the culmination of a fatherhood program for the incarcerated. Following Aubrey, Santana, Raziah, and Ja’Ana — four “at-promise” girls ranging from tiny to teenage — and the respective dads who are desperate to bond with them (and are serving sentences that likewise range in years) the doc is every bit as inspiring as one would expect from a co-director (Patton) who is also the CEO of a nonprofit called Girls For A Change. But also heartbreaking, infuriating, and downright revelatory in its characters’ trajectories. As vérité as life itself. (Excerpted from an interview with Natalie Rae and Angela Patton.) — LW
Frida. How does a filmmaker go about capturing and confining such an ethereal figure — the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo — to the screen? If you’re the multi-award-winning editor Carla Gutiérrez (Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s RBG and Julia) you compile and compose as much Frida-generated material as seemingly possible: letters, essays, her personal diary (and sketches and paintings from that diary); and also nearly 50 original paintings and sketches (and around half a dozen Rivera murals). Then you add in first-person accounts from Kahlo’s colleagues and intimates (and very intimate intimates) and arresting archival photos. Finally, you complete your topnotch, mostly Latinx team with Mexican animators and a lyrical narrator to guide us through this wonderland that was the fiery legend’s real magical world. (Excerpted from an interview with Carla Gutiérrez.) — LW
My Sweet Land. Starring a bright 11-year old citizen of Artsakh named Vrej, Sareen Hairabedian’s cinematic, Gotham-supported My Sweet Land is a coming-of-age story spanning years, always with the multigenerational war as backdrop; and it’s made all the more poignant by the Armenian-Jordanian filmmaker’s insistence on witnessing the up-and-down journey through her young protagonist’s keenly aware eyes. — LW
A New Kind of Wilderness. Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s A New Kind of Wilderness is a film structured in a way I’ve not seen before. With a title that likewise could apply to the psychic space into which the audience is thrust, the rural Norway-set doc is an intimate, first-person narrated, cinematic essay from a director whose story it is not. Indeed, straight from its bold opening, the viewer is left abruptly disoriented, forever second-guessing whose eyes we are actually looking through. It’s a deft structural feat that in turn emotionally transports us into the shoes of the free-spirited, forest-dwelling – and above all grieving – Payne family, five protagonists deeply connected both to one another and to nature; who are unexpectedly forced to find their own individual footing in a brand new dizzying world. (Excerpted from an interview with Silje Evensmo Jacobsen.) — LW
Porcelain War. Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s Porcelain War follows three Ukrainian artists, including co-director Leontyev and the film’s DP Andrey Stefanov, as they practice their delicate art in a war zone. Having lost the passion to paint — not to mention the physical touch of family since evacuating his wife and twin daughters to Poland — DP Stefanov has now turned to filming the destruction wrought by Russian troops but also the defiant beauty crafted by the hands of his dear friends Leontyev and Leontyev’s partner Anya Stasenko. The poetic doc, which picked up the US Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at Sundance in January, takes its title from the couple’s medium of choice, which Leontyev compares to his homeland as well: “Ukraine is like porcelain, easy to break, but impossible to destroy.” A pithy phrase that’s elevated to something much deeper by the artistry behind the scenes — including Ukrainian folk group DakhaBrakh’s memorably intoxicating soundtrack — and the film’s adamant connection to the natural world, a fourth character in itself. (Excerpted from Hot Docs coverage.) — LW
Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other. Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet’s Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other is as breathtakingly understated as its title is arresting. The doc, which picked up a Special Mention: DOX:AWARD when it world-premiered at CPH:DOX last March, stars the celebrated and prolific photographer Joel Meyerowitz (a two-time Guggenheim Fellow and NEA and NEH awards recipient with 50-plus books and over 350 museum and gallery exhibitions to his credit) and his less famous partner of 30 years, the British artist-musician-novelist Maggie Barrett. It’s also an up close and personal (literally – the filmmaker couple lived with their protagonists during production) encounter with the highs and lows of a long-term relationship, staged in a manner more reminiscent of a theater piece. For now that Joel, in his mid-eighties, is forced to become caregiver to his 75-year old wife after she breaks her femur, the pithy phrase “in sickness and in health” is put to the test. What unspools over the next 100 minutes is a painfully raw and refreshingly honest reckoning with both a bumpy past and an uncertain future; and in Maggie’s case, thwarted ambition as a result of decades of living in the shadow of a creative giant. Until, that is, a talented duo enter with a camera and smartly shine a spotlight on the unsung heroine at the heart of this forever love affair. — LW
Union. Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s unsurprisingly riveting Union is the one Sundance selection most assuredly not coming to Prime Video anytime soon — or ever. As its title succinctly implies, the film follows a group of very brave, and admirably unrelenting, activist-workers in their fight to unionize a Staten Island warehouse known as JFK8 back in 2021. Calling themselves the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), and led by the media-savvy Chris Smalls, it’s the classic David vs. Goliath setup. Only with Maing (whose Crime + Punishment followed the NYPD 12 whistleblowing cops) and Story (whose The Hottest August deeply embedded the Canadian director in NYC) jointly behind the lens — and on the frontlines — there’s enough street cred between the two to inspire the unwavering trust of their rightfully vigilant characters. Which, in turn, gives the critically acclaimed duo access to a tight-knit world the Blue Origin founder might try to infiltrate but could never imagine. (Excerpted from an interview with Stephen Maing and Brett Story.) — LW
