DOC NYC at Fifteen

DOC NYC’s fifteenth-anniversary edition will run at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, and Village East by Angelika through November 21—when this year’s edition wraps with the world premiere of Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn’s Drop Dead City: New York on the Brink in 1975—and then carry on virtually for viewers across the U.S. through December 1. The Centerpiece screening is another world premiere, Ondi Timoner’s All God’s Children, which tracks the efforts of a rabbi and a Baptist pastor to bring their congregations together and ease tensions between Jewish and Black communities in New York.

Since 2012, DOC NYC programmers have been putting together a short list of fifteen features they consider to be among the year’s best documentaries, and there’s a bit of overlap with the fifteen most-anticipated titles the staff at Hammer to Nail has selected from the festival’s 2024 lineup of 110 features and nearly as many shorts. Three films appear on both lists: Mati Diop’s Dahomey and two that are bound to stir impassioned discussion.

When Alexis Bloom’s The Bibi Files—an exposé drawing on leaked footage and fresh interviews pertaining to charges of corruption leveled against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—premiered in Toronto, “the screening was truly emotional,” wrote Marc Glassman in POV. “The mere fact that Netanyahu had tried to quash the showing of the documentary through an unsuccessful intervention in the Israeli courts that very day made international headlines. Ironically, Bibi might have turned into the best press agent for Bloom and producer Alex Gibney’s film.”

Directed by two Israelis, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and two Palestinians, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, No Other Land has won several awards since premiering in Berlin, but it still has no U.S. distributor. The anchor is the friendship between Adra and Abraham, and the focus is on the Israeli military’s efforts to crush Masafer Yatta, a community of twenty Palestinian villages in the West Bank. “Activism takes waiting,” notes 4Columns senior editor Ania Szremski. “Waiting is one of the conditions of occupation, which in turn is a septic state that destroys homes, lives, dreams, futures, possibility, dignity, hope . . . Early in the film, which begins in summer 2019, Basel insists that if he can get his footage of the Israeli atrocities out there, the U.S. authorities will understand the severity of the situation and pressure Israel to stop. Heard in 2024, the statement is devastating.”

At Gay City News, Gary M. Kramer spotlights a dozen LGBTQ-themed films at DOC NYC, and at Hyperallergic, Maya Pontone focuses on Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, a portrait of the South African photographer directed by Raoul Peck and featuring LaKeith Stanfield as the voice of Cole. Back in July, Eileen G’Sell wrote for Hyperallergic about two first features shot in Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh, a landlocked mountainous region in Azerbaijan that had been governed by its ethnic Armenian majority until Azerbaijani forces swept in last September.

As Sevara Pan notes at the top of her interview with director Sareen Hairabedian for Documentary, “Armenians continue to fight for their identity and self-determination amid a relentless cycle of conflict. In her assured debut feature, My Sweet Land, the filmmaker portrays this experience of limbo by turning her lens toward an eleven-year-old ethnic Armenian boy named Vrej, who is growing up in a place teetering on the edge of war.”

Emily Mkrtichian’s There Was, There Was Not begins as a portrait of four Armenian women “engaged,” as Scott Tobias writes at the Reveal, “in trying to create a better home out of this beautiful place: a politician trying to break into an all-male city council, a judo master chasing an Olympic dream, and two activists, one working on domestic violence issues and the other disarming landmines.” Then war breaks out once again, and Mkrtichian’s film becomes “a wrenching memorial for a country that no longer exists, a fairy tale without a happily ever after.”

“Where My Sweet Land reveals the way that the war robs boys of their childhoods,” writes Eileen G’Sell, “There Was, There Was Not indirectly exposes the fraught relationship between feminist solidarity and nationalist zeal.”