DOC NYC has announced its 2016 Short List, which has a track record of successfully predicting other awards, including the Oscars. All of the DOC NYC Short List titles will screen during the festival with the director or other special guests present for their first screening. Additionally, all the directors or other collaborators will participate on Friday, November 11 in the DOC NYC Short List Day of panel conversations. Last year, the DOC NYC Short List had ten titles overlapping the subsequent Oscar Documentary Short List, and all five titles that were Oscar nominated. For the last five years, DOC NYC screened […]

DOC NYC, billed as America’s largest documentary film festival, will expand its industry-focused programs for the seventh edition of the film festival. The New York-based festival will run from November 10-17, with the Visionaries Tribute luncheon taking place on November 10. “For six years, we’ve carefully nurtured our industry offerings to establish a must-attend gathering,” said DOC NYC artistic director Thom Powers in a statement. “Last year saw major growth under the new banner of DOC NYC PRO, the new conference location at Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas and its new lounge. This is a vital networking hub for doc makers to get their future films […]

With more than 200 films and events, DOC NYC has become the largest documentary film festival in the United States. It has also become a must-stop for emerging and established filmmakers who want to deepen their craft through DOC NYC PRO, a series of panels and master classes with industry leaders. I attended the festival this week and my colleague Cheree Dillon and I live-blogged every panel for The D-Word, the worldwide online community for documentary filmmakers. What I came away with were four important things emerging documentary filmmaker should learn (and every veteran should remind themselves of as well!) in […]

An added feature of the 2015 DOC NYC festival was the DOC NYC PRO Conference, which included a weekend of masterclasses dedicated to the work process in cinematography, animation, editing, and building your film’s sound with the composer. Over 20 professionals touched upon the nuts and bolts of each craft while dialing into the importance of building the relationship with their director as a key element in serving the story. Below are some of the highlights the professionals shared with the audience. Use Your Camera with Intention. Mira Chang of Half The Sky said she always has a checklist of […]

It was a little over half a decade ago that I read at one of Audacia Ray’s intimate Red Umbrella Diaries events on the Lower East Side. Since then this sex worker storytelling series founder – whose resume also includes stints as a bodyworker, escort, and executive editor of $pread magazine – has become one of the foremost voices of sex work advocacy through her Red Umbrella Project (RedUP), harnessing the media to de-stigmatize the oldest profession in the world. Now, after waging battle against violence and for the public health of those in a long-marginalized industry, she’s executive produced The Red […]

DOC NYC, “America’s largest documentary festival,” certainly lives up to its billing. With a whopping 153 films and events, there’s quite a bit to navigate, from critically acclaimed historic revivals to Toronto darlings to fresh premieres. For this fifth edition several sections have been broadened, and a few themes even added. There’s now “Centerstage” (performance focused films), “Jock Docs” (sports-centric flicks), “Fight the Power” (activist docs) and, perhaps most stimulating for nonfiction geeks, “Docs Redux.” That would be a sidebar of seven oldies but goodies, most with their legendary directors – Chris Hegedus, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles, all three receiving […]

This year’s edition of CineKink NYC, now in the final day of its Kickstarter fundraising drive, wastes no time heating up, opening on February 26 with a cinematic bang in the form of Wiktor Ericsson’s The Sarnos: A Life in Dirty Movies, a stellar pic about softcore pornographers with a love story at its heart. (The festival’s gala kickoff party is the day before, February 25.) The titular elderly couple at the center of this doc are the legendary porn director Joe — the “Ingmar Bergman of 42nd Street” — and his longtime wife and support system (and sometime actress) […]

Tomas Leach’s In No Great Hurry – 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter was one of my few true discoveries of 2013. While covering the Thin Line Film Fest in Denton, Texas, I pretty much stumbled upon Leach’s poignant portrait of the legendary NYC photographer in his final years — Leiter died this past November — without knowing much about the man who ushered in the use of color photography. Since that February fest Leach’s film has gone on to screen DOC NYC and now premieres theatrically at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on January 3rd. Filmmaker spoke […]

Two highly unique minds converge in Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, the latest from whimsical visionary Michel Gondry, who aptly subtitles his film, “An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky.” In the works for four years, this self-explanatory project from the artist behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dave Chapelle’s Block Party, and a veritable library of music videos is a charming and markedly low-tech doc that literally illustrates the insights of Chomsky, one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Ever-fascinated by the depths of the human brain, and ever-faithful in dressing his films with cartoon-like touches, […]

“I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit,” says activist icon Grace Lee Boggs, as she stands before a dilapidated cityscape in the opening sequence of American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs. A Marxist and lifelong Hegel disciple, the Chinese-American Lee Boggs gained notoriety in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, alongside her husband Jimmy Boggs, in the mid-20th Century.  Today, she is still ardently devoted to her adopted hometown of more than half a century, galvanizing the local communities in her effort to revive the industrial wasteland that has become of Detroit. […]