Festival season is now in full swing and as further confirmation the New York Film Festival revealed its 13 film lineup for its Spotlight on Documentary. Highlights include world premieres of Mark Bozek’s THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM and Tom Surgal’s FIRE MUSIC, as well as a new restoration of William Wyler’s THE MEMPHIS BELLE: A STORY OF A FLYING FORTRESS. Following the close of this year’s Locarno Festival, the festival announced “Lili Hinstin will be the new Artistic director of the Locarno Festival, replacing Carlo Chatrian who is leaving Locarno to take over the artistic direction of the Berlinale. Hinstin will take up her appointment from December 1st 2018, while already devoting part of her time to the preparation of the next edition of the Locarno Festival.” And while it is more a doc professional conference than a film festival, IDA’s Getting Real ’18 also listed its full schedule and boasts of a keynote from Michèle Stephenson, a masterclass with Frederick Wiseman, and a closing night screening of a newly restored SALESMAN on 35mm. The event will take place in Los Angeles from September 25-27.
A few festival hits reached audiences this past weekend, most notably CRIME + PUNISHMENT, another big Hulu release following the success of MINDING THE GAP. The film was selected by our own Raphaela Neihausen and Thom Powers as WNYC’s Documentary of the Week, noting that it “plays like a modern day SERPICO” as it “follows the case of the NYPD 12, who spoke out against biased policing.” In The New York Times, A.O. Scott deemed it a NYT Critics’ Pick, while in Vogue, Julia Falsenthal called it “a blood-boiling look at systemically racist policing” in her feature on the project in which she spoke at length with the film’s director, Stephen Maing. It should be noted that over at Nonfics, Christopher Campbell has acknowledged Hulu as a new documentary powerhouse with a list of 50 of the best films currently streaming on the service, with CRIME + PUNISHMENT sitting at #2.
Next up was Steve James’s new Starz doc series AMERICA TO ME, which also has a connection with MINDING THE GAP, as the film’s director Bing Liu worked as a cinematographer on the series. Sam Adams called the project a “panoramic portrait of racial inequality at one Illinois high school” and a “worthy follow-up to HOOP DREAMS” at Slate, as Jake Nevins joyously unpacks the series in-depth in a lengthy feature that appeared in The Guardian. He comprehensively regales, “Like many of James’s films, AMERICA TO ME is about one thing, a high school, and so much more: those tumultuous, formative years of pubescence; the intersections between race, class and sexuality; the rich but often fraught relations of teachers and students; cafeteria banter; spoken word class; administrative oversight; homecoming and the football team; the amorphous politics of the high school food chain; and one relatively progressive school’s failure to adequately address the achievement gap between its white students and those of color.”