We might as well dig right in with DOC NYC’s inaugural 40 Under 40 list, which intends to shine a light on 40 documentary talents under the age of 40 and includes familiar names like Khalik Allah, Sara Dosa, Garrett Bradley, and Nathan Truesdell. “Notable statistics from the list: 22 honorees are women, more than half are filmmakers of color, and the youngest person turns 28 in November. The final list was chosen by the DOC NYC team of Artistic Director Thom Powers, Director of Development Deborah Rudolph, Director of Programming Basil Tsiokos, and Shorts Programmer Opal H. Bennett.”
In case you haven’t noticed, we are now in the throes of award season and this past week saw two sets of nominations announced. The nominees for the the 28th Annual IFP Gotham Awards were unveiled on Thursday and BISBEE ’17, HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING, MINDING THE GAP, SHIRKERS and WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR? are each up for Best Documentary. Meanwhile, the nominees for the 3rd annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards are CRIME + PUNISHMENT, DARK MONEY, FREE SOLO, HAL, HITLER’S HOLLYWOOD, MINDING THE GAP, RBG, THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS, WILD WILD COUNTRY, and WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?.
We’ll be closing out our 2018 Fall Season of Stranger Than Fiction tomorrow night at the IFC Center with Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer and Quinn Costello’s RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE, which will feature a live Q&A with co-director and cinematographer Jeff Springer himself. Tickets for our season closer are still available here.
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Shooting of MEETING GORBACHEV. Photo: Lena Herzog
If last week seemed unusually spare, this past week’s abundance of doc news surely makes up for it. Kicking things off with an enthusiastic bang, The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey makes the case in his must read of the week that the recent financial success of various theatrical doc releases “represent, if not a major moment, then at least a meaningful boomlet for theatrical documentary filmmaking, perhaps the culmination of almost 50 years of evolution and exposure for the form, stretching back to the Maysles brothers’ SALESMAN. It has been 40 years since Martin Scorsese’s THE LAST WALTZ, about 30 years since Errol Morris’s THE THIN BLUE LINE and Michael Moore’s ROGER & ME, nearly 25 years since Steve James’s HOOP DREAMS, 20 years since Spike Lee’s FOUR LITTLE GIRLS, and 10 years since James Marsh’s MAN ON WIRE. That half a century of meaningful work with increasing mass exposure has slowly redefined the form, turning what had been considered by some moviegoers a starchy, stiff form of storytelling into some of the most vital, sought-out films in the country.”
Meanwhile, as the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival began to roll out their big name fiction features, DOK Leipzig revealed that its 61st edition will open with Werner Herzog and André Singer’s MEETING GORBECHEV, which sees “Herzog and Gorbachev sit together in the former’s Moscow office, engaging in intense conversations about the past and the winding path of history.” Bragging of an A-List of docs out-of-competition alongside its much-touted fiction competition, the Venice Film Festival is slated to premiere new work by Errol Morris, Frederick Wiseman, Victor Kossakovsky, Tsai Ming-liang, Sergei Loznitsa and Mark Cousins, just to name a few.
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