DOC NYC Opens Wednesday
Special 10 for $10 Flash Sale on Now
 

DOC NYC is celebrating its 10th year with our biggest edition yet. Make the most of the festival and check out 10 DOC NYC titles for only $10 per ticket.

Get your tickets now!

This sale will only run until  noon on Tuesday, November 5th.

HEADLINES
 

Archives as Alter Ego: Kim Longinotto's SHOOTING THE MAFIA
In an in-depth piece for Documentary Magazine, Patricia Thompson took a deep dive into Kim Longinotto's use of archival footage in SHOOTING THE MAFIA (making its NY premiere Saturday, November 9 at DOC NYC): “Imagine this: You’ve got a great subject who’s now in her 80s. You want to tell her life story—how she left her stifling marriage at age 40 and defiantly set out on a career. Not just any career: Newspaper photographer, a man’s job. In Palermo, Italy, no less, at a time when women stayed home, Mafia mayhem went unchecked, and a photojournalist’s job was to document the corpses piling up in the streets. You’ve got her images to work with, as powerful as anything by Weegee. But you have a problem: There’s virtually no photographic record of her. A few snapshots. Maybe 90 minutes of home movies that are mostly unusable. What do you do? How do you relate 60 years of adult life without it? That was veteran filmmaker Kim Longinotto’s conundrum when faced with Letizia Battaglia, photographer for the Palermo newspaper L’Ora in the 1970s and ’80s, during the Mafia’s heyday. Adored at home, but unknown abroad, Battaglia’s story was ripe for the picking. Except for that troubling gap.”

Caveh Zahedi Bared His Soul. It Ruined His Life.
Christine Smallwood took a deep dive into the life and work of documentary filmmaker Caveh Zahedi for The New York Times: “Zahedi’s effort in his work to be seen, to show himself as he is, is also an effort, no matter how complicated or flawed, for him to see the world as it is. Earlier in the summer, before our first interview, Zahedi invited me to a performance lecture about his history with psychedelics. He showed clips of himself flapping and shouting and growling, channeling God while tripping, looking absolutely deranged, like someone you would walk several blocks out of your way to avoid. But they were images of a man in transcendence. In his head, Zahedi was meeting God, learning that we are all one, we are all God. But that inner world, that convulsing consciousness, can’t be put onscreen. What we see is the flailing mess, and what we feel is the gap between what is visible and what can’t be made visible. ‘The central trope of all my films, I think, is: ‘You want this. You don’t get it. The thing you get instead is better,’ ” he said. ‘And that’s the central trope of life.’ In place of what you want — a subject you know what to do with, an art hero or an art monster, a genius or a villain — this is what you get: a human being, here and now, cracking jokes to the camera while pleading with you to accept his reality as your reality. A man in baggy clothes writhing on an unmade bed, hoping someone will watch.”

“There’s Some Leisure in It, Too”: Kevin Jerome Everson on Labor, Art & Film
Dessane Lopez Cassell spoke with the recent recipient of the prestigious Heinz Award winner Kevin Jerome Everson for an extensive piece at Hyperallergic: “Earlier this year, the ICA Philadelphia presented ‘Mundane Futures,’ the first chapter of a three-part exhibition called ‘Colored People Time,’ organized by Meg Onli. Featuring the work of Kevin Jerome Everson, the exhibition’s title, in its simple elegance, offers one of the more fitting frameworks for discussing the practice of an artist and filmmaker whose work defies easy categorization. Often focused on the ordinary and everyday of working-class Black people, Everson’s films weave together myriad forms. Archival, scripted, and documentary footage, and other studies of movement all appear in his works, which have ranged in scale from one-minute bursts to the eight-hour PARK LANES. (Since the late ’90s he’s produced 170 films, including nine features.) Through his lens, the banal realities of Black people become compelling means for examining the intricacies of labor, class, language, and time — which makes sense, given that he grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, and spent his first years in the workforce as a factory employee. Currently a professor at the University of Virginia, Everson has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and has screened his films at countless festivals. In addition to inspiring legions of young Black filmmakers (something he’d likely deny or roll his eyes at me for mentioning), he was recently awarded the prestigious Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities. To mark the occasion, I sat down with Everson to discuss his process, proclivity for painting,  and the importance of seeing art-making as a form of labor.”

“The World Is, of Course, Insane”: A Conversation with Errol Morris
Daniel A. Gross spoke with the renowned filmmaker for a profile in The New Yorker: “Since releasing his first movie, GATES OF HEAVEN, in 1978, about two pet cemeteries in California, Errol Morris has directed eleven feature-length documentaries, one unhappy collaboration with Robert Redford called THE DARK WIND, and several short films and TV series, including the recent Netflix show WORMWOOD, a hybrid of documentary and fiction, about the suspicious death of a C.I.A. scientist. He has also directed more than a thousand commercials. THE THIN BLUE LINE, his investigation into the killing of a Texas police officer, which was released in 1988, led to the release from prison of a man named Randall Adams, who had been wrongly convicted of the crime. This week, theatres will start showing AMERICAN DHARMA, Morris’s movie about Steve Bannon, the former political strategist for Donald Trump. It premièred at festivals more than a year ago and quickly became the subject of contentious debate. ‘When the Bannon film first came out, I thought that was going to be the end of me, that this was my swan song,’ Morris told me.”

UK Doc Firm Dogwoof Unveils Six New Projects
Reporting for Deadline, Tom Grater note Dogwoof’s announcement: “London-based doc specialist Dogwoof, which has a pipeline deal with Nat Geo, is expanding further into production and financing as it eyes bigger plays in an increasingly crowded and lucrative factual market. The film and TV distribution company, a regular at major European film and TV markets, has had a banner year with Oscar-winner FREE SOLO and APOLLO 11 returning strong grosses at the UK box office, taking $2.7m and $1.8m, respectively. The firm’s sales wing has also done good recent business on the likes of CUNNINGHAM, which went to Magnolia Pictures, and MAIDEN, which sold to Sony Pictures Classics. Now, we can reveal the six titles (five films, one series) that will comprise the outfit’s next wave of productions.”

Change In Leadership at Docs In Progress
In an announcement from Docs In Progress Executive Director Erica Ginsberg it is revealed that she is leaving the organization: “With mixed emotions, I want to let you all know that I have stepped down as Executive Director of Docs In Progress. Fifteen years ago, Adele Schmidt and I were independent documentary filmmakers, looking for a way to help documentary filmmakers support each other in endeavors that can often make one feel very alone. We held the very first work-in-progress screening that Docs In Progress is named for in May 2004 in a space that, like so much else in our ever-changing region, no longer exists. Change is inevitable. We were not the first film organization in the region. Nor were we the first institution anywhere to hold work in progress screenings. But we were steadfast in our belief that there needed to be a space for the documentary community – particularly in the Washington DC Metro area – to be able to share, support and evolve together.” In a follow-up message, the Docs in Progress Board of Directors addressed the change: “A search for a new executive director is forthcoming.  In the meantime, our board chair Barbara Valentino will temporarily step down from the board to serve as Interim Executive Director, board member Erin Essenmacher will serve as interim Board Chair with Andrea Passafiume continuing to serve as Program Director.”

DOC BOOKS
 

DOCUMENTARY ACROSS PLATFORMS:
REVERSE ENGINEERING MEDIA, PLACE, AND POLITICS
By Patricia R. Zimmermann

"In Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the ever-evolving constellation of practices known as 'documentary' and the way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world.Collected here for the first time are her celebrated essays and speculations about documentary, experimental, and new media published outside of traditional scholarly venues. These essays envision documentary as a complex ecology composed of different technologies, sets of practices, and specific relationships to communities, engagement, politics, and social struggles. Through the lens of reverse engineering—the concept that ideas just like objects can be disassembled to learn how they work and then rebuilt into something new and better—Zimmermann explores how numerous small-scale documentary works present strategies of intervention into existing power structures. Adaptive to their context, modular, and unfixed, the documentary practices she explores exploit both sophisticated high-end professional and consumer-grade amateur technologies, moving through different political terrains, different platforms, and different exhibition contexts. Together these essays demonstrate documentary’s role as a conceptual practice to think through how the world is organized and to imagine ways that it might be reorganized with actions, communities, and ideas."

ON THE FESTIVAL CIRCUIT
 

23rd Ji.hlava: Award Winners
Will Tizard noted Ji.hlava Film Festival 2019 award winners for Variety: “Stories of transcendence in the face of adversity dominated the Ji.hlava docu fest in the Czech Republic Monday, with a precedent-setting award for best film shared among 10 imprisoned juveniles in Madagascar. The Opus Bonum main competition award, granted by a sole juror, Romanian director Cristi Puiu, went to FONJA by German filmmaker Lina Zacher, the story of 10 juvenile delinquents in the largest detention facility on the island nation. The boys joined a four-month workshop to be trained in filming, editing, creating simple cinematic tricks and telling their own stories. Puiu, who said the film ‘kept me awake’ and gave him ‘a dumb smile of genuine satisfaction,’ praised Zacher for ‘the warmth, the intuition, the trust, the courage and generosity that are holding together a film.’”

How Below-the-Radar Film Festivals Prey on Struggling Moviemakers
Katie Kilkenny and Alex Ritman investigated how some smaller film festivals have been taking advantage of filmmakers for The Hollywood Reporter: "Though some obscure festivals haven't lasted long, others are flourishing thanks to filmmakers who are happy to shell out $40, $60, $80 or more in individual submission fees. But the costs often don't stop there. Alongside travel and accommodation expenses, many of these events serve up an increasing array of costs that are rarely mentioned in the application: to promote your film, to take part in workshops, go to awards dinners and sometimes even just to see films besides your own. While this world of low-profile events includes many entirely legit affairs, it also features some that run the gamut from merely disorganized to potentially exploitative — all marketing themselves to inexperienced filmmakers desperate to build their names and careers. Exposure to this potentially damaging festival circuit usually begins with sites like FilmFreeway, which allows filmmakers to submit their work and pay the necessary fees involved. Though filmmakers can receive refunds after applying to a seemingly fake festival on FilmFreeway, they have little recourse when it comes to 'pseudo festivals' — a name coined by film bloggers — or real events attended primarily by filmmakers but rarely by industry gatekeepers or members of the press."