New York plays host to dozens of film festivals great and small, so it’s hard to make room—psychic or practical—for yet another. And considering a climate of prolonged recession that has led other festivals to shut down, scale back, or rethink their mission in a movie culture that’s deathly afraid of risk and desperately grasping at 3-D straws, expansion seems more than a little unwise. “Our attitude was: Those cautions be damned,” says Thom Powers, the artistic director of DOC NYC, a new documentary festival that opens on Wednesday and runs through November 9. “There’s so much vital filmmaking happening that, culturally, we can’t afford to contract.”
Lars Skree
Armadillo
Joseph Birdman Astor
Lost Bohemia
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It’s the first local festival to focus exclusively on documentary film since the short-lived DocFest fizzled 10 years ago, restoring to the epicenter of independent filmmaking what other cities have in the Hot Docs (Toronto), SilverDocs (Silver Spring), and Full Frame (Durham) surveys. The festival is an ambitious extension of Powers’s weekly film series “Stranger Than Fiction,” which began as a class at NYU and has grown into a popular movie club at the IFC Center. Those two institutions have partnered for DOC NYC, and will split hosting duties, keeping the fest within an intimate three-block radius.
Powers is a programmer for the Toronto Film Festival, where several of the films in DOC NYC premiered, but this fledgling event is actually more reminiscent of the recently wrapped New York Film Festival, where selectivity is privileged over girth. There are only eight films in DOC NYC’s main Viewfinders competition, and only six in the NYC-centric Metropolis competition. In contrast to more inclusive festivals, where it’s impossible for patrons to see all films in competition, Powers, the festival’s sole programmer, wanted “to create some sections that would give viewers who have the appetite an opportunity to look at this work as a spectrum,” he says. “You gain more out of the experience of watching several films alongside each other. It opens your mind to what documentary filmmaking can be.”
There’s no unifying statement made by these selections, other than that unifying statements about documentary filmmaking will find little traction here (in fact, even photographers and cartoonists are invited under the documentary umbrella for a “Doc Convergence” seminar on Friday). It’s almost unfair to pit a homemade, shaggy dog confessional like Josh Freed’s Five Weddings and a Felony against Cannes winner Armadillo’s virtuosic, aesthetically rigorous reportage, but such dissonance is what makes the festival so intriguing. Selective but eclectic, DOC NYC is like an early FM rock radio station, shuffling from Captain Beefheart to the Beach Boys in order to promote and celebrate a culture of possibility. A first-person video diary gives way to a tone poem, which is contrasted by a work of sober cinema verité, while formats range from 8mm film to HD video to Flip camera footage.
Documentarians deal in facts, but they’re still working within an art form; they tell true stories, but can let them slant. So the strongest of the films here rely less on the objective power of a particular subject than on the abilities of individual raconteurs. Choosing the latest films by Werner Herzog and Errol Morris for opening- and closing-night gala screenings (while also showcasing a selection of their greatest hits) is practically a thesis in itself. These are filmmakers who push against the boundaries of the form with every project, calling evident truths into question even as they mine for deeper ones, using fiction techniques to depict documented reality. Which is old news for those who’ve followed the careers of these mercurial masters—what’s headline-worthy is that these latest films are their best in years.
For Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog gained access to the recently discovered Chauvet caves of Southern France, where 32,000-year-old frescoes—mankind’s oldest known pictorial creations—have been preserved among the stalactites and animal bones. This presents an ideal canvas for Herzogian ruminations on humanity and mortality, but even our stentorian knight of doom is relatively cowed by the marvels his camera records, inviting the audience to discover and dwell on the art rather than subjecting it to too much purple prophesy (though the 3-D presentation is a distracting ostentation). Meanwhile, in Tabloid, Morris shifts away from the overtly political subject matter of Standard Operating Procedure and Fog of War to terrain better suited to his freewheeling, caustically comedic view of people and culture. Piecing together highly subjective accounts of the salacious sex-and-chains story of onetime beauty-queen-turned-alleged-kidnapper Joyce McKinney and her hapless “manacled Mormon” prisoner, Morris embeds a sharp, runaway Rashomon parable inside one of the most thoroughly entertaining films of the year.
Within the Viewfinders competition, Armadillo is an astonishing leap forward for nonfiction storytelling. Janus Metz’s film follows a Danish combat troop to the flat farmlands and Taliban snipers of Afghanistan, where it marries the poetic cinematography of Iraq in Fragments to Restrepo’s harrowing embedded war reporting. The closest thing to an issue film in the fest is Laura Israel’s Windfall, about the surprisingly contentious development of wind energy in Upstate New York. But the film is more interested in (and does a far better job at) exploring the modern fractures of small-town community than in providing a cost-benefit analysis of windmill proliferation.
