Wedged between international documentary mega-fests CPH:DOX and IDFA on the festival calendar, this country’s largest documentary film fest DOC NYC might seem a humble affair. (Indeed, the four-year-old DOC NYC is downright cozy and laidback compared to Amsterdam’s industry-driven shindig where making sales often eclipses enjoying the sheer pleasure of cinema.) This year’s lineup features 131 films and events, including 11 world premieres and 9 US premieres – not to mention high-caliber attendees from Noam Chomsky to Michel Gondry, to Sarah Polley and Oliver Stone. Yet several small gems that I’ve written about at prior fests are every bit as […]

Competition in the performing arts is a staple of non-fiction television and documentary at the moment, but few works step back from the American Idol-style face-off to depict the literal beginnings of their performer subjects. One film that does is Judd Ehrlich’s Magic Camp, a documentary about Tannen’s Magic Camp, a week-long event for budding young magicians where kids learn both stagecraft and sleight-of-hand from an illustrious group of visiting professionals. Ehrlich attended Magic Camp when he was young, and when he became a documentary filmmaker — his previous credits include Mayor of the West Side and Run for Your Life — he knew he had to return to […]

With their Stranger than Fiction series at New York City’s IFC Center, Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen have been curating, programming and advocating for documentary film going on eight years now. Their Tuesday-night events are typically packed, drawing audiences with not only great films but human interaction — Q&A’s with directors, collaborators, and even the film’s subjects. Three years ago, when Powers and Neihausen wondered why there wasn’t a major, all-doc festival in New York, they realized that the challenge of launching one was a natural fit for them. The resulting DOC NYC is now in its third year (November […]

Nara Garber & Betsy Nagler’s Flat Daddy is released on VOD on November 6. The following was originally published on the eve of its Doc NYC premiere in 2011. In the corpus of documentaries that have come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve seen a gradual progression from the outward to the inward — immersive forays into the battlefield giving way to subtler studies of the wartime psyche. Yet the majority of them have focused on the soldier’s experience of war. Flat Daddy sets itself apart by focusing on the people who feel war perhaps the deepest: military families put on […]

The titular tattooed protagonist of Dominic Allan’s Calvet is Jean Marc Calvet (pictured), who went from being a hustling, drug-addicted street kid in the south of France to an NYC art world darling. But the path he took to get there is equal parts winding, fascinating and downright insane. After being discovered in a shooting competition by a guy who ran a security firm, Calvet joined the “world of bodyguards,” taking care of the likes of Mel Gibson, Forest Whitaker and Tim Robbins at Cannes. But he was soon enticed to leave his young family and “disappear” to America with […]

Putting a human face on the criminality of the financial crisis, Unraveled explores the downfall of Marc Dreier, a prominent Manhattan attorney who was arrested in 2009 for embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from hedge funds. The documentary places us in the “guilded prison” of Dreier’s upper East Side apartment during his 60-day house arrest. In that time, he is interviewed by none other than one of his victims, Marc Simon, who, in addition to being an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, formerly worked as a lawyer at Dreier’s law firm, Dreier L.L.P. You wouldn’t know that from the film, however, as […]

The living room-sized lobby of the IFC Center was teeming with people over the past two weeks as DOC NYC concluded its second year. With more days, more films, more panels and more filmmakers in attendance, the festival was a veritable feast of documentaries. Among the faces passing through the crowd — including Albert Maysles, Werner Herzog, D.A. Pennebaker and Barbara Kopple — were those of festival directors Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen. Wearing the titles of artistic director and executive director, respectively, the husband and wife team conceived DOC NYC from their Manhattan apartment. Though involved in their own […]

In the corpus of documentaries that have come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve seen a gradual progression from the outward to the inward — immersive forays into the battlefield giving way to subtler studies of the wartime psyche. Yet the majority of them have focused on the soldier’s experience of war. Flat Daddy, premiering at DOC NYC this Sunday at 4PM and screening again on Nov. 8th at 1:30, sets itself apart by focusing on the people who feel war perhaps the deepest: military families put on hold or torn apart by the absence of their […]

Since I’ve never attended the Toronto International Film Festival, or the long-running doc series Stranger Than Fiction, I was shamefully late to discover the curatorial wizard behind-the-curtain by the name of Thom Powers. But ever since Powers’s programming became, for me, the highlight of this year’s Miami International Film Festival he’s been firmly on my cine-radar. So when I noticed he’d be returning as artistic director of DOC NYC (which runs Nov. 2-10) I thought, “Oh, no.” I didn’t have time to cover DOC NYC right before I flew to Amsterdam to tackle the mother of all nonfiction fests IDFA! […]

That was the question asked a group of about 40 filmmakers and members of the filmmaking community at an IFC Center Friday breakfast by Thom Powers (artistic director), John Vanco (managing director) and Raphaela Neihausen (executive director) about their new event, DOC NYC. Powers, Vanco and Neihausen are teaming to present the inaugural edition of this new Gotham doc fest this November, and their first step has been to reach out to the community for opinions on what’s needed to distinguish their festival. From their initial release: “DOC NYC will fill an important void in New York City and will […]