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DOC NYC · 2024

DOC NYC 2024

Short List: Features

Programme

14 films · 6 reviews

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Black Box Diaries

Review preview for Black Box Diaries

Documentaries don’t get much more personal or intimate than this

Amber Wilkinson · 4.5 out of 5
Journalist Shiori Ito embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems.

(Country: US, UK, Japan; Year: 2024; Director: Shiori Ito)

Full review

Dahomey

Review preview for Dahomey

Vigorously covering all bases, Diop cuts elegantly to give each position ample space.

Sunil Chauhan · 3.5 out of 5
Documentary about the return of artworks to Benin that were looted by French colonisers.

(Country: France, Senegal, Benin; Year: 2024; Director: Mati Diop)

Full review

Daughters

Review preview for Daughters

For the most part the film comes across as a celebration of this moment as a light in the darkness, but it will likely leave some viewers additionally uncomfortable.

Jennie Kermode · 3.5 out of 5
Four young girls prepare for a special Daddy Daughter Dance with their incarcerated fathers, as part of a unique fatherhood program in a Washington, DC, jail.

(Country: US; Year: 2024; Director: Angela Patton, Natalie Rae)

Full review

Ernest Cole, Lost And Found

Documentary profiling the Black freelance photographer.

(Country: US; Year: 2024; Director: Raoul Peck; Stars: LaKeith Stanfield)

Frida

Documentary of Frida Kahlo, told through her own words for the very first time — drawn from her diary, revealing letters, essays, and print interviews.

(Country: US; Year: 2024; Director: Carla Gutierrez; Stars: Frida Kahlo)

Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa

A single mother working as a dishwasher has another life as a record-breaking mountain climber and the first Nepali woman ever to reach the summit of Everest.

(Country: US; Year: 2023; Director: Lucy Walker; Stars: Lhakpa Sherpa)

No Other Land

Review preview for No Other Land

No Other Land brings humanity and particularity to a topic that is too often discussed in the abstract.

Jennie Kermode · 4.5 out of 5
This film made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective shows the destruction of the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta by Israeli authorities and the unlikely alliance which develops between the Palestinian activist Basel and Israeli journalist Yuval.

(Country: Palestinian Territories; Year: 2024; Director: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor; Stars: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal)

Full review

Porcelain War

Review preview for Porcelain War

A tactile and colour-infused film.

Amber Wilkinson · 3.5 out of 5
Under roaring fighter jets and missile strikes, Ukrainian artists Slava, Anya, and Andrey choose to stay behind and fight, contending with the soldiers they have become. Defiantly finding beauty amid destruction, they show that although it’s easy to make people afraid, it’s hard to destroy their passion for living.

(Country: US; Year: 2024; Director: Brendan Bellomo, Slava Leontyev; Writer: Aniela Sidorska, Brendan Bellomo, Paula DuPré Pesmen, Slava Leontyev)

Full review

Queendom

Gena, a queer artist from a small town in Russia, dresses in otherworldly costumes made from junk and tape, and protests the government on the streets of Moscow. Born and raised on the harsh streets of Magadan, a frigid outpost of the Soviet gulag, Gena is only 21. She stages radical performances in public that become a new form of art and activism.

(Country: France, US; Year: 2023; Director: Agniia Galdanova)

The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin

Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer, died of a degenerative muscular disease at the age of 25. His parents mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life, when they started receiving messages from online friends around the world.

(Country: Norway; Year: 2024; Director: Benjamin Ree; Stars: Kelsey Ellison, Zoe Croft, Paul Wild, Ed Larkin, Elena Pitsiaeli, Sebastian Tjørstad, John Andrew Mclay)

Soundtrack To A Coup d'Etat

In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America’s color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.

(Country: Belgium, France; Year: 2024; Director: Johan Grimonprez; Writer: Johan Grimonprez; Stars: Dag Hammarskjöld, Nikita Khrushchev, Patrice Lumumba, Andrée Blouin)

Sugarcane

An investigation into abuse and missing children at an Indian residential school ignites a reckoning on the nearby Sugarcane Reserve.

(Country: US, Canada; Year: 2024; Director: Emily Kassie, Julian Brave NoiseCat)

Union

The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) - a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City’s Staten Island - takes on one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies in the fight to unionise.

(Country: US; Year: 2024; Director: Stephen Maing, Brett Story)

Will & Harper (Will And Harper)

Review preview for Will & Harper

Greenbaum pinpoints the tension between the hate eating away at parts of US society and the tremendous potential that the country still has.

Jennie Kermode · 5 out of 5
When Will Ferrell finds out his close friend of 30 years is coming out as a trans woman, the two decide to embark on a cross-country road trip to process this new stage of their relationship in an intimate portrait of friendship, transition, and America.

(Country: US; Year: 2024; Director: Josh Greenbaum; Stars: Will Ferrell, Harper Steele)

Full review