Doc Fortnight
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Doc Fortnight 2024: The Axis of Big Data, Preemptive Listening, Small Hours of the Night, Silence of Reason
MoMA’s annual Doc Fortnight begins as the Berlinale winds down, allowing the fest to grab freshly premiered titles from there, Rotterdam and Sundance (from the latter, opening night selection Realm of Satan, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat and Black Box Diaries). This year’s 23rd edition has 13 features, six shorts and three “evenings with”; I was able to sample about half of the work one way or another. Days after Zhou Tao’s The Periphery of the Base Berlinale premiere, his conceptually immaculate The Axis of Big Data makes its North American premiere here. The milky grey background of the opening […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 22, 2024 -
“The Power Was in the Conversations, So I Knew I Had to Help the Viewer to Hear Them”: Tomasz Wolski on his Doc Fortnight-Debuting 1970
Tomasz Wolski’s 1970 is a riveting work of ingenious artistry. (And one of the highlights of last November’s IDFA, where it screened in the Best of Fests section.) It was during that chaotic titular year that food prices skyrocketed, and Gdansk’s striking shipyard workers would spark nationwide protests across Poland, which would culminate in the triumphal Solidarity movement a decade later — but not before the Communist leaders at the time decided to quash the threatening uprising with lethal force, calling in army units, tanks, and militiamen with guns. None of which we actually see in 1970. Indeed, the veteran Polish documentarian has […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 27, 2022 -
Wreckers of Civilization : Marcus Werner Hed and Dan Fox on their Doc Fortnight-premiering Other, Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle
Marcus Werner Hed and Dan Fox’s Other, Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, which NY-premiered February 24 as part of this year’s hybrid Doc Fortnight, certainly lives up to its billing as “a unique portrait of living for art’s sake.” The story began in the UK’s pre-punk days in Hull — a port city never to be remembered for its music scene — when a group of resident weirdos rebranded themselves as COUM Transmissions and began staging colorful happenings on the city’s grey streets. Artists and musicians came and went (and moved to London); the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 27, 2022 -
“The Pandemic was Raging but the People I was Filming were Unfazed”: Jenny Perlin on her Doc Fortnight-Opening Bunker
Multimedia artist Jenny Perlin, whose work includes 16mm hand-drawn animated films, videos, installations, and drawings (some of which are in MoMA’s collection), opens this year’s hybrid Doc Fortnight with Bunker, a literal underground film. Beginning back in pre-pandemic 2018 Perlin took a cross-country road trip, hoping to explore the lives of men (almost all straight, white and middle-aged) who call decommissioned nuclear silos and military bunkers home. Along the way, she also meets the (demographically similar) businessmen building, selling and sometimes even living the fear-driven American dream. Filmmaker caught up with Perlin a few days before the doc’s February 23rd […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 22, 2022 -
“I’ve Always Been Very Frustrated with Sports Films”: Julien Faraut on The Witches of the Orient, Learning from Chris Marker and Volleyball Anime
In his extraordinary portrait of American tennis champ John McEnroe, In the Realm of Perfection (2018), French filmmaker Julien Faraut engineered a hypnotizing meditation on the intersection between sports, performance and the creation of images—not at all the conventional retread of history one might expect from anything with the “sports movie” label. In his latest, The Witches of the Orient, Faraut returns to the arena of athletic competition in similarly idiosyncratic fashion, profiling the women of Japan’s most famous volleyball team. Made up of former textile workers, team “Nichibo Kaizuka” nabbed gold at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and inspired a […]
by Beatrice Loayza on Mar 31, 2021
