Established in 2010 the DOC NYC film festival has become the largest documentary film festival in North America and has quadrupled in size since its beginning.  In the 2016 edition from November 10 – 17 more than 250 films and seminars were presented to an estimated audience of more than 30,000 ticket buyers.  About 1700 productions were submitted to the fest. The program included 110 feature length documentary films.   300 industry specialist and film makers participated in Q&As and panels which focused on the most important aspects of documentary productions.  Special events sections and an award session for non-fiction film making were essential parts of the program. Stanley Nelson and Jonathan Demme (Lifetime Achievement Award), Dawn Porter (Documentary Excellence Award), and Moly Thompson (Leading Light Award for critical contribution to the field) were honored.  HBO Documentary Films was the leadership sponsor for the festival followed by A&E Independent Films, Amazon Studios, History H Films and Netflix as major sponsors.  Other sponsors included 34 companies and groups involved with the production and distribution of documentaries ranging from ShowTime and Sony to the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms and Kickstarter, virtually all of them currently involved with documentary productions in the USA.   Documentaries were programmed in 13 thematic areas presenting local, national and international issues. The new program section DOC NYC U introduced last year presented films by students from Columbia University, NYU, New York Film Academy and the School of Visual Arts and expanded this year to include CUNY’s Hunter College.  In its Short List section DOC NYC screened twelve outstanding documentaries which had already been shown at other festivals but were important enough to be presented again. The selection included I am not Your Negro (Raoul Peck), Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi), Life Animated (Ross Williams), Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (Fanton Bailey & Randy Barbato), O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman) and Weiner (Josh Kriegman & Elyse Syeinberg).

Among other principal highlights were the comprehensive series of master classes and panels of DOC NYC PRO spanning  eight fully programmed days covering and an extraordinary selection of themes and issues presented by documentary specialists. They including to name but a few, Kristine Feeley (Sundance), Kirsten  Johnson (Cameraperson),  Matthew Hamacheck (Amanda Knox), Stanley Nelson, Metthew Heineman (Cartel Land), Cara Mertes (Ford Foundation’s Just Films), and Marc Simon (Cowan, De Baets, Abrahams & Sheppard).  Interested film makers and observers could learn about essential steps and avoidable mistakes first time documentary film makers have to engage in and acquire pragmatic knowledge from film makers whose productions were selected from the festival’s short list line up of standout documentaries. In other seminars they learned the craft of nonfiction film making in content and technical areas and how to pitch projects to industry executives based on the analysis of six festival submissions.  Ethics and objectivity challenges in journalistic film making were explored in a series of panels, complemented by a Smart Producing Day covering issue oriented documentary productions, management skills, and creative production as well as a series of panels on funding sources, financial survival skills, and legal film making issues.  This long series of problem oriented seminars with up to date knowledge was an extraordinary learning source and offered an opportunity to engage in profitable discussions.

 Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, Matt Tyrnauer, USA, 2016

Juxtaposing Jane Jacobs who authored The Death and Life of Great American Cities with Robert Moses the powerful city planner who pursued a top down urban renewal strategy until Jacobs stopped him, Tyrnauer presents a superb documentation of the struggle between the progressive Jacobs who embraced a bottom up neighborhood approach and the power broker Robert Moses who organized the redesign of major segments of the city through expressway routes and massive housing projects. For Jacobs, the maintenance of social structures and the communities that arose from the organic development of neighborhoods was essential. She always kept in mind that individuals and their families are grounded in neighborhoods and their diversity. Moses, to the contrary, considered traditional neighborhoods as slums bereft by poverty. Their dwellers would be better served through massive public housing projects which in turn facilitated the traffic flow. For Moses, Corbusier’s living machines, housing the maximum number of people over many floors was the ideal response to their urban concentration. Jane Jacobs anticipated that the destruction of traditional neighborhoods and placing of their inhabitants in public housing would uproot the people and generate large scale problems such as social isolation, community fragmentation and the decline of security. Without stoops, readily accessible neighbors in walk up buildings, street level shops, and community facilities such as playgrounds, parks and churches a social life cannot exist.  Apart from extensive illustration, the documentary depicts the precarious soulless life of the public housing built in the thirties and forties and their demolition in many cities several decades later after Jacob’s dire predictions were born out.  Moses’ ruthless renewal strategies benefitting the construction industry and related political interests are analyzed. But equally important is the demonstration of   how the grass root movements under the leadership of Jane Jacobs prevented the destruction of the historic Greenwich Village, Soho and Little Italy neighborhoods which would have been otherwise bisected by an express way Moses proposed. Street life, neighborhoods and community were just not part of the Moses vocabulary.

City of Joy, Madeleine Gavin, France / United Kingdom

First time film maker Madeleine Gavin premiered City of Joy at DOC NYC. Portraying a center for women, the City of Joy in Bukava for those who survived sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the documentary provides an in-depth look at the rehabilitation process and the experiences of a class of women going through the program. The wide spread use of rape by militants in DRC as a tool of war results from the pursuit of control of mines exploited by multinational corporations. Since the beginning of the conflict in 1996 over half a million women and girls have been raped.  Rape and violence destroys the families and empties villages clearing them for the exploitation of the region’s resources to satisfy colonial greed. The victims are traumatized and those who reach Bukava and are accepted in the program, also known as the Vagina Warrior Program,  learn how to heal from their trauma in an extended process and re-build their self-esteem. They also acquire the skills to help other victims after they graduate and are trained to become leaders and return to their homes. The center is owned and run by local Congolese and funded through contributions. The radical activist Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues established the City of Joy with other activists in 2007. About 90 survivors graduate the program each year.  Although the City of Joy generates hope and demonstrates that victims of sexual violence can be healed and join the work force, systematic rape as a weapon will continue unless multinational companies change their strategy of exploitation.

Off the Rails, Adam Irving, USA, 2015

This documentary is a most enjoyable but serious tale of Dan McCollum’s obsession with New York’s subway system for whom a society with inflexible rules and regulations has no place. Told from his perspective with some elucidating comments by the director and superb archival footage we are introduced to a person who has spent half of his life in prison, incarcerated 30 times, for impersonating employees of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Daniel has an encyclopedic knowledge of the system and  all the skills for the positions he impersonates, from supervisor to repair and motor man and bus driver, often knowing more than the real employees did, and became so obsessed with the system that it was more important in his life than relatives, friends, or even the one woman whom he has become close with. His obsession and faultless memory about anything concerning the MTA is the result of Asperger’s syndrome. His obsession began early on in life when he was adopted by MTA employees as a mascot at the age of eight and was arrested for the first time at 15 for driving a train. In the intervening period the subway system functioned like a surrogate school for him. Daniel reports that over a 20 year period he has driven more than 500 trains and the record shows that he was never involved in an accident.  Wearing the uniform bestowed a sense of value and identity, to the point that he even participated in a transit union demonstration to increase wages.  Daniel saw himself as an individual serving the community when he helped passengers, drove buses, fixed the signal system and volunteered at the MTA museum. Yet the legal system and the MTA could not and would not accommodate him. He was consistently jailed at the tax payer’s expense for about $60,000 a year without any thought given to treatment of his Aspergers syndrom, with one judge going so far as to decide he rejected McCollum’s diagnosis of Aspergers syndrome despite to the evidence presented by medical professionals. The MTA fired him as a volunteer when it was found out that he had a record. 

Finding Oscar, Ryan Suffern, USA/Guatemala, 2016

An estimated 200,000 civilians disappeared or were killed from 1960-1996 during Guatemala’s civil war which lasted 36 years. To date 40,000 are still not accounted for. Specifically, in indigenous regions of the country entire villages were eradicated by government special forces because they were suspected of collaborating with guerillas.  Finding Oscar is the case study of one village Dos Erres where more than 200 people including 80 children disappeared with no traces left behind. An elite government military squad in civilian clothing from the Special Forces murdered them on December 6, 1982. The soldiers had been told by superiors that the villagers were hiding arms though none were found.  Villagers were killed by throwing infants, children, women and men into a deep well which was covered afterwards. Only two children, Oscar aged 6, and another child aged 3 were spared by the militia squad with both being adopted by soldiers.  Few villagers who were not present when the massacre took place survived to provide important information the investigators. With its outstanding interviews, Finding Oscar is a rigorous examination and reconstruction of the extermination and the subsequent efforts to identify and punish those responsible.  This included finding the well in 1994 in an area no longer inhabited, exhumation of human remains, and identification and forensic DNA examination of the bones. With evidence provided by two former members of the squad, who now live with a grant of immunity in protective exile, other members and officer were tracked down. Simultaneously the two children, now grown up, were located after a difficult search. The evidence presented at two trials in Guatemala was sufficient to condemn 5 members of the death squad to life but seven suspects could not be fund. In May 2013 Efrain R. Montt, the commanding officer of the Special Forces team responsible for giving the order for the massacre was convicted of genocide and punished to 80 years in prison. The sentence was overturned and a re-trial set for 2015 though a court has decided that he is mentally unfit to stand for trial. Members of the Special Forces including, Montt had been trained in the United States at the School of the Americas.

Captive:  Cola Kidnap, Jesse Vite,  USA,  2015

Netflix premiered the documentary at the festival as part of the new Netflix Captive series which is devoted to instances of hostage-taking and their resolutions. Produced by two-time Oscar-winner Simon Chinn, Man on Wire; Searching for Sugarman and executive producer Doug Liman of The Bourne Identity, Captive focuses on the rarely covered subject of hostage taking. The approach taken for Cola Kidnap apparently reflects the philosophy for all segments of the series; providing a holistic understanding of the characters and issues involved. The viewer is given an understanding of the context of the hostage taking and the motivations of the hostage takers, inciting possible sympathy for both parties, for victims and those carrying out the hostage taking. This production philosophy is reflected by statements of all participants in the kidnaping about their motivations and responses. The audience shares their viewpoints and interpretations as recorded by the documentary with the producers staying in the background. In Cola Captive, Vite certainly delivers on this promise. The audience learns from the wife of an American Coca-Cola executive her reaction to the kidnaping and her strategic adaptive response. Members of her family share their assessment and experience of the blackmail. Carrying out the kidnaping, the culprit Ronaldo Monteiro describes his background and how the kidnapping was planned and executed and his conversions to a crime free life after having served his time in prison.  From his statement, Brazil transpires as a society beset by class conflicts with a tremendous amount of poverty for many and the possible accumulation of wealth in the hands of few. Hostage taking seems to be a plausible response to the growing discrepancy and for Ronaldo who grew up in the favela slums an obvious opportunity.

When DOC NYC started in 2010 its program was considered by the press as ambitious. Observers now identify NYC DOC as the essential summit and kingmaker for documentary filmmaking.  Offering a large selection of topical outstanding high quality productions and professional panels the festival remains the mandatory North American platform for documentaries.

Claus Mueller

filmexchange@gmail.com