Nine Best of the Fests Must-Sees at DOC NYC

This year’s DOC NYC is actually two consecutive fests. From November 10-18, vaxxed and masked fans of nonfiction cinema will be able to gather in person for the 200-plus films and events at IFC Center, SVA Theatre and Cinépolis Chelsea. And for those outside NYC (but still in the US) or pandemic hesitant, most of the more than 120 features will be available virtually from November 19-28. In other words, “America’s largest documentary festival” is also now one of its most accessible. And while both US and world premieres abound at this 12th edition (60-plus by my last count), DOC NYC has also selected a number of films that rocked my world on the 2020-2021 festival circuit. So for those looking for foolproof viewing chockfull of cinematic risk-taking, with the following you can’t go wrong.

To read my recommendations visit Filmmaker magazine.

Doc Star of the Month: Al Victory, 'Attica'

Fifty years ago, an uprising at a prison facility in upstate New York changed the course of history. And yet today the word "Attica" might more easily bring to mind Al Pacino’s infamous line from Dog Day Afternoon. Which is a shame — although also perhaps inevitable. For what turned out to be the largest prison rebellion in US history — culminating in "the deadliest violence Americans had inflicted on each other in a single day since the Civil War" — was also a media spectacle that played out for five days across TV screens around the world. But for the incarcerated — and all the families on the outside — who experienced the cataclysmic event in real time, "Attica" is not a meme. And one of those formerly imprisoned men is Al Victory, who was only 27 in September 1971. Shot twice, then later beaten and thrown down a set of stairs (and ultimately threatened in an attempt to get him to cooperate with authorities and "lie against fellow inmates"), Victory has for decades been on a righteous mission to ensure that the lessons of Attica not be relegated to some dustbin of fictional Hollywood history. He sees parallels to the protests sparked in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, as well as to today’s calls for racial justice and police accountability. And notably, he’s also one of the few white faces to appear in Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry’s Attica, a masterful revisitation of the uprising and its aftermath. The film premieres November 6 on Showtime. Documentary is thrilled Victory found time to chat with us about the doc, what’s changed over the past half-century and what has not — and to agree to take the spotlight as our November Doc Star of the Month.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

Transformations in Non-fiction Filmmaking: The SCAD Savannah Film Festival presents the 8th Annual Docs to Watch Roundtable

This year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival – the “largest university-run film festival in the world,” which ran from October 23-30 – was a conveniently hybrid event that also marked my own return to the in-person festival circuit. Admittedly, as someone residing in a blue state with a strict mask mandate in place, traveling to the Deep South was a somewhat disorienting experience. And a stark reminder that the U.S.’s politicization of a global pandemic really is a war within – and specifically within the states themselves. On the one hand, Georgia’s Republican Governor Kemp issued an executive order back in August that banned local jurisdictions from imposing mask mandates. On the other hand, the liberal college city of Savannah has a mandatory mask mandate. Which, like elsewhere in our exasperatingly dysfunctional country, seemed to result in a disturbing hodgepodge of mask-less red tourists mixing it up both indoors and out with the masked up blue locals. Fortunately, this southern fest doesn’t play when it comes to health protocols (as at the Savannah College of Art and Design itself, proof of vaccination and masks were both required and strictly enforced), giving the 24th edition the air of an all-inclusive Covid bubble. And this sentiment was made all the more palpable at the 8th annual – first return-to-in-person – Docs to Watch Roundtable on October 24. Taking place once again at the Lucas Theatre for the Arts (and also virtually for pass-holders), the annual Docs to Watch roundtable, hosted as always by The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg, featured a who’s who of likely upcoming Oscar nominees. Taking the stage one by one, there was Evgeny Afineevsky (Francesco), Julie Cohen (Julia), Liz Garbus (Becoming Cousteau), Robert Greene (Procession), Todd Haynes (The Velvet Underground), Matthew Heineman (The First Wave), Amanda Lipitz (Found), Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Flee), Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)), and E. Chai Vasarhelyi (The Rescue).

To read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.

“It’s Also a Story of the Power of the Media to Shape a Narrative in Ways That Do Disservice to the Truth”: Traci A. Curry on Attica

Attica (releasing in theaters on October 29 and on Showtime November 6) is the latest from nonfiction national treasure Stanley Nelson. Along with his co-director and producer Traci A. Curry, a longtime MSNBC producer, the Firelight Media co-founder and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, who has previously chronicled organizations from The Peoples Temple to The Black Panthers, has now chosen to tackle a very different kind of institution: The prison industrial complex that was captured in one word and broadcast round the globe on September 9, 1971. The titular uprising that occurred at that correctional facility in Attica, NY a half century back was a five-day, real-life, made-for-TV event meticulously covered — from the seizing of the yard by 1200 inmates to its bloody end that left 29 inmates and 10 hostages dead — by cameras both inside and outside the prison walls. And Nelson and Curry certainly make deft use of that footage (right down to the CCTV). But the team then delves remarkably further, interviewing not only the formerly incarcerated whose act was a cry for basic humane treatment, but also the families of the corrections officers that were left to grieve without any straight answers from the government to this very day. Indeed, when it comes to the largest prison rebellion in US history, which resulted in “the deadliest violence Americans had inflicted on each other in a single day since the Civil War,” only one thing is crystal clear. All the cameras in the world can never tell the full story if the bigger picture remains nefariously obscured. A few weeks after the doc’s opening night premiere at TIFF, Filmmaker caught up with Curry — a two-decade industry vet who’s also the founder and owner of production company B.Free Media — to learn how the duo went about bringing fresh sunlight to a still sordid tale.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Sabaya: He said, she said, she said

I first encountered Sabaya, Hogir Hirori‘s riveting feature centred on the Yazidi Home Center – a threadbare organisation dedicated to saving the «Sabaya», the Yazidi women and girls held as sex slaves by ISIS – during this year’s Sundance, where Hirori would go on to take the Directing Award: World Cinema Documentary. At the time, the doc had me captivated with its array of heroic characters, including male volunteers Mahmud and Ziyad and the many anonymous female «infiltrators» who risk everything on clandestine rescue missions into Al-Hol in Syria, the Middle East’s most dangerous camp. I even interviewed Hirori, who struck me as equal parts professionally candid and personally empathetic in his emailed answers. The director – who fled his native Kurdistan in 1999 and now resides in Stockholm – wrote eloquently of building trust with those he filmed and prioritising his subjects’ safety above all else. When I inquired as to whether he provided the women with hidden cameras for the harrowing sequences set inside the camp, he surprised me by revealing that it was he who’d shot that footage – tossing on a niqab to go undercover. «I would never risk the lives of the infiltrators by asking them to film scenes themselves or to use hidden cameras,» the director explained. Thus it came as an even bigger surprise when the New York Times broke a story about the doc at the end of September titled «Women Enslaved by ISIS Say They Did Not Consent to a Film About Them.»

To read the rest visit Modern Times Review.

Doc Star of the Month: Vivian Anderson, 'On These Grounds'

Though abolishing the police is still viewed as a fringe idea here in America, what happened to a Black female student in South Carolina is exhibit A for doing just that, in at least one public institution. Pulled from her desk and dragged across the floor by a white officer, the shocking act was immortalized in a viral video back in 2015. Which in turn sparked outrage, but also changed lives. And one life in particular - that of healer-activist Vivian Anderson, who subsequently left New York City for Columbia, South Carolina. And there she stayed, single-handedly taking on the Herculean task of supporting not just the survivor of that particular police brutality but all Black girls in the community, while also facing the deputy and attempting to take down the system behind him with the same unrelenting force he’d used on a traumatized teen. Documentary is honored to shine a spotlight on the protagonist of Garrett Zevgetis’ SXSW-premiering On These Grounds, which follows Anderson on her quest to just say no to the status quo. On These Grounds, an IDA Fiscal Sponsoree, hit virtual and physical theaters on September 24, courtesy of Gravitas Ventures, and is accompanied by a juvenile justice impact campaign.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

The VOD Effect on Distribution: A Nordic-European View

"From Pre-Pandemic Flashback to Post-Pandemic Visions of Documentary Distribution" was the long and winding title of a thankfully succinct, nuts-and-bolts discussion held during this year’s edition of CPH:DOX’s all-digital CPH:CONFERENCE. Occurring on the day designated REDISTRIBUTE:ECONOMY (the other four themes were REBUILD:DEMOCRACY, REPRESENTATION:POWER, REBELLION:CLIMATE and RESILIENCE:CULTURE), this insightful, all-white and primarily Scandinavian panel nevertheless included an array of diverse perspectives. And leading the talk was moderator Karolina Lidin of Norway’s Nordisk Film & TV Fund, who was joined by her countryman Christian Falch, a producer at UpNorth Film; Ulla Simonen, director of Finland’s AVEK; Signe Byrge Sørensen, a producer at Denmark’s Final Cut for Real (and probably best known on these shores for having worked with both Joshua Oppenheimer and Yance Ford); Commissioning Editor Axel Arnö of Sweden’s SVT; and Martin Dawson, Deputy Head of Unit, Creative Europe MEDIA in Italy.

To read all about it visit Documentary magazine.