What to Stream at Doc Fortnight 2021 (The 20th Anniversary Edition)

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 1975, About Some Meaningless Events. (Portions of which, in a meta twist, are heavily incorporated into Ali Essafi’s Before the Dying of the Light, which premiered at last year’s IDFA and is also included in the Doc Fortnight program.) And while I’ve been sifting through my screener queue, searching for a thread to connect all the docs I can’t stop thinking about, it’s the utter lack of a common theme that I keep coming back to. But a handful of films have managed to take me out of myself, into worlds starkly different from one another, as well as from my own. Though perhaps cinema as travel is exactly the collective antidote we pandemic-weary need right now, at least until the arthouses fill up once again.

To read more about my must-sees visit Filmmaker magazine.