DOC NYC 2022
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“The Complexity of a Disorder”: Svetislav Dragomirovic on I’m People, I Am Nobody
Svetislav Dragomirovic’s debut feature I’m People, I Am Nobody is a film I wasn’t prepared to watch. From its coy DOC NYC synopsis, we learn it’s the story of a 60-year-old retired porn performer from Serbia named Stevan who’s found himself stuck, Kafka-style, in a Maltese jail, accused of indecent exposure. What we don’t learn from that brief description is that Stevan is actually Dragomirovic’s father-in-law, and that the filmmaker received a series of “audio-letters” that Stevan had sent from prison, which form the basis of I’m People, I Am Nobody, an experimental collage that takes us on a shocking […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 18, 2022 -
“The Consequences of Putin’s Playbook”: Marusya Syroechkovskaya on How to Save a Dead Friend
“Russia is for Russians!” goes the far-right rallying cry. To which Marusya replies, “Bullshit. Russia is for depressed people.” She should know: Moscow-born Marusya Syroechkovskaya spent a dozen years turning her camera (multiple cameras, really) on herself and her co-credited cameraperson and best friend (turned lover, turned husband, turned ex) Kimi Morev. The two met as suicidal teenagers in their nation’s capital in the aughts, both part of the spiraling “silenced generation” under Putin. They shocked one another by deciding to stick around for a spell to see how their—and perhaps their antiauthoritarian compatriots’s—story would end. (That said, the soulmates […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 17, 2022 -
“This Myth Has Plagued the World for Centuries”: Maxim Pozdorovkin on His DOC NYC Closing Night Film The Conspiracy
From robot-inflicted deaths (2018’s The Truth About Killer Robots) to the rise of Donald Trump through Russian state-sponsored media (2018’s Our New President), Maxim Pozdorovkin recently has taken some unconventional routes down the darkest of rabbit holes. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the Russian-American filmmaker’s latest, The Conspiracy, closing this year’s DOC NYC, is both artistically inventive (featuring evocative animation seamlessly wed with archival imagery) and downright chilling. With a powerful score and big names such as Liev Schreiber (Trotsky) and Jason Alexander (Max Warburg) added to the mix, Pozdorovkin weaves together the interwar stories of three prominent Jewish families: […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 17, 2022 -
“Stories That Need to Be Told”: Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski on Ukrainian Documentary The Hamlet Syndrome
One of the more unusual projects to play this year’s DOC NYC (also concurrently screening at IDFA in the Best of Fests section), Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski’s The Hamlet Syndrome follows five young men and women as they develop an experimental stage piece based on Shakespeare’s tragedy—as well as their own. The quintet questioning “to be or not to be” are all Ukrainians who have been engaged, to varying degrees, in the war Russia launched back in 2014. (This theater-as-therapy session even predated Putin’s full-scale invasion by several months.) Soldiers Slavik and Katya, along with paramedic Roman, all saw […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 15, 2022 -
“Each Second Meant the Difference Between Life or Death”: Rory Kennedy on The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari
Forget social and political issues—in documentaries, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the volcano. There was Sara Dosa’s exquisite Fire of Love (which I fell in love with back at CPH:DOX in March, also screening at DOC NYC), in which a pair of lovestruck vulcanologists are quite literally consumed by their passion. Now we have not one, but two volcano-centric films debuting at this year’s DOC NYC. While I’ve not seen Herzog’s (pre-festival premiering) The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, its title naming Dosa’s aforementioned protagonists, I’m guessing it’s likely the polar opposite of […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 15, 2022 -
“The Film Is Full of Ghosts”: Diana Bustamante on Her DOC NYC-debuting Our Movie (Nuestra película)
Diana Bustamante’s Our Movie (Nuestra película) feels like both a departure and a homecoming for the Latin American producer credited on numerous Cannes winners, most recently Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Jury Prize-awarded (and Tilda Swinton-starring) Memoria. Comprised entirely of news footage from the Medellín-born Bustamante’s childhood—who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s when kidnappings, political assassinations and blood-soaked streets were as common as choir practice—the “essay documentary” is, as the producer/director puts it, “a collage of images, repetitions and memories, built through the intervention of the Colombian news archive.” And what a visceral collage it is—from closeups of bullet holes to a […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 14, 2022 -
DOC NYC Announces the Main Slate for Its 2022 Edition
DOC NYC, the largest documentary film festival in the U.S., has announced its main programming slate. The festival will run in-person from November 9-17 at the IFC Center, SVA Theatre and Cinépolis Chelsea. The festival will continue online through November 27 after the in-person portion concludes. The 2022 lineup features 101 feature-length documentaries, including 15 Short List titles that have yet to be announced. The thirteenth edition of the festival features more than 200 films in total—29 world premieres at 27 U.S. premieres among them —as well as several events, with filmmakers regularly in attendance. Many popular competition categories and […]
by Natalia Keogan on Oct 14, 2022
