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 […]

Having rolled out its inaugural edition in the wake of 9/11, Doc Fortnight will now be celebrating its 20th anniversary virtually (from March 18-April 5), the result of another world-upending tragedy (politically and personally dissected in Nanfu Wang’s compelling, opening night feature In the Same Breath). And yet the full-steam-ahead spirit of MoMA’s Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media remains. The 2021 lineup, both eclectic and ambitious, spotlights 18 features and four shorts – another 10 films screen in the “Non/Fiction 20 Years of Doc Fortnight” sidebar – alongside a revival of Moroccan director Mostafa Derkaoui’s banned/lost/found doc-fiction from […]

Low and high art come to fruitful blows in the 14th edition of one of New York’s most substantive — and absurdly unsung — cinema exhibitions, the International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media, aka Documentary Fortnight (February 13-27). Low? For 120 years, film has been on the short end of the cultural totem pole, and host venue Museum of Modern Art has never made any bones about the distinction. In this case, however, the medium is infused with accomplished elements from other art forms ranking among the cognoscenti. Long before complementary fora like DOC NYC and the Film Society’s […]

Most doc venues and festivals serve up collections, films more alike than dissimilar. In fact, the principal variable tends to be content. Now in its 13th edition, Documentary Fortnight: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media (February 14-28) is breaking new ground in doc exhibition. I’m not certain that the museum’s honchos recognize what a coup they have in situ (P.S. 1 is another story), a boundary-pushing program where many of those who follow and determine artsy trending might not think to look. It’s taken far too long for documentaries to be considered hip, but to think of them […]

Just in the nick of time for Black History Month, and debuting at the 2013 Documentary Fortnight: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film, is Christine Turner’s Homegoings, a poetically crafted exploration of the history of African-American funeral traditions. Told via the Harlem neighborhood’s legendary funeral director Isaiah Owens – who found his calling as a small child, burying all deceased animals he stumbled across in his South Carolina surroundings – the doc manages to be poignant, inspirational, and unexpectedly uplifting. In other words, as one subject says about black burials themselves, a “sad good time.” Filmmaker spoke with the doc’s […]