{"id":7134,"date":"2017-08-23T21:48:51","date_gmt":"2017-08-24T01:48:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hunterword.com\/?p=7134"},"modified":"2017-12-26T11:47:13","modified_gmt":"2017-12-26T16:47:13","slug":"gregg-w-morris-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/gregg-w-morris-14\/","title":{"rendered":"Complete Lineup for the Spotlight on Documentary Section of The 55th New York Film Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jane,<\/em> by Director Brett Morgen. A National Geographic Documentary Films release. Picture, courtesy Film at Lincoln Center<\/p><\/div>\n

Includes new works by Abel Ferrara, Alex Gibney, Sara Driver, Nancy Buirski, Mathieu Amalric, and Barbet Schroeder; Vanessa Redgrave\u2019s directorial debut; films featuring Joan Didion, Arthur Miller, Gay Talese, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jane Goodall; plus incisive stories about racism, American immigration, the global refugee crisis, and more<\/strong><\/h3>\n

This year\u2019s series of dispatches from the front lines of nonfiction cinema features intimate portraits of artists, depictions of social upheaval, and much more.<\/p>\n

Selections include three documentaries spotlighting acclaimed writers, including the World Premiere of Griffin Dunne\u2019s Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold<\/i>; returning NYFF filmmaker Rebecca Miller\u2019s tender portrait of her father, Arthur Miller: Writer<\/i>; and the World Premiere of Myles Kane and Josh Koury\u2019s Voyeur<\/i>, capturing the investigations explored in Gay Talese\u2019s book The Voyeur\u2019s Motel. <\/i>Other notable documentary subjects include Jean-Michel Basquiat, who commands the downtown NYC scene of the late \u201970s and early \u201980s in Sara Driver\u2019s BOOM FOR REAL The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat<\/i>; and Jane Goodall, whose original expedition to contact a chimpanzee population is brought back to life via 50-year-old National Geographic footage in Brett Morgen\u2019s Jane.<\/i><\/p>\n

Additional selections by NYFF alums are Travis Wilkerson\u2019s Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?<\/i>, in which Wilkerson confronts his family\u2019s white supremacist roots; the North American Premiere of The Rape of Recy Taylor<\/i>, Nancy Buirski\u2019s passionate film about the 1944 case of a black woman who was raped by several white men; Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki\u2019s El mar la mar<\/i>, a 16mm meditation on the dangerous trek from Mexico to the U.S. through the Sonoran Desert; the North American premiere of Abel Ferrara\u2019s Piazza Vittorio<\/i>, a charming snapshot of Rome\u2019s largest public square; and three music films by Mathieu Amalric: C\u2019est presque au bout du monde<\/i>, Zorn<\/i>, and Music Is Music<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Other highlights of this year\u2019s Spotlight on Documentary section include Vanessa Redgrave\u2019s directorial debut, Sea Sorrow<\/i>, an expertly crafted call for Western aid to the global refugee crisis; Barbet Schroeder\u2019s The Venerable W.<\/i>, which confronts an Islamophobic Burmese Buddhist monk; and Alex Gibney\u2019s No Stone Unturned<\/i>, a critical investigation into the 1994 Loughinisland massacre in Ireland.<\/p>\n

The 18-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming; Florence Almozini, FSLC Associate Director of Programming; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Film Comment<\/i> and Sight & Sound<\/i>.<\/p>\n

As previously announced, the NYFF55 Opening Night is Richard Linklater\u2019s Last Flag Flying<\/i>, Todd Haynes\u2019s Wonderstruck<\/i> is Centerpiece, Woody Allen\u2019s Wonder Wheel<\/i> is Closing Night, and the Retrospective honors Robert Mitchum\u2019s centenary. The complete lineup for the Main Slate can be found here<\/a>, for Projections here<\/a>, and for Revivals here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

NYFF Special Events and Convergence sections, as well as filmmaker conversations and panels, will be announced in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n

Tickets for the 55th New York Film Festival will go on sale\u00a0September 10 at noon. Becoming a Film Society Member at the Film Buff Level or above provides early ticket access to festival screenings and events ahead of the general public, along with the exclusive member ticket discount and brand new member benefits and offers available throughout NYFF. Learn more at\u00a0filmlinc.org\/membership<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For even more access, VIP passes and packages offer the earliest opportunities to purchase tickets and secure seats at some of the festival’s biggest events including Opening and Closing Nights, and Centerpiece. VIP passes also provide access to many exciting events, including the invitation-only Opening Night party, Filmmaker Brunch, and VIP Lounge. Benefits vary based on the pass or package type purchased. VIP passes and packages are on sale now. Learn more at\u00a0filmlinc.org\/packages<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS<\/u><\/b><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Arthur Miller: Writer<\/b>
\nDir. Rebecca Miller, USA, 2017, 98m
\n<\/b>Rebecca Miller\u2019s film is a portrait of her father, his times and insights, built around impromptu interviews shot over many years in the family home. This celebration of the great American playwright is quite different from what the public has ever seen. It is a close consideration of a singular life shadowed by the tragedies of the Red Scare and the death of Marilyn Monroe; a bracing look at success and failure in the public eye; an honest accounting of human frailty; a tribute to one artist by another. Arthur Miller: Writer <\/i>invites you to see how one of America’s sharpest social commentators formed his ideologies, how his life reflected his work, and, even in some small part, shaped the culture of our country in the twentieth century. An HBO Documentary Films release.<\/p>\n

BOOM FOR REAL The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat<\/b>
\nDir. Sara Driver, USA, 2017, 79m
\n<\/b>U.S. Premiere
\n<\/b>Sara Driver\u2019s documentary is both a celebration of and elegy for the downtown New York art\/music\/film\/performance world of the late 1970s and early \u201980s, through which Jean-Michel Basquiat shot like a rocket. Weaving Basquiat\u2019s life and artistic progress in and out of her rich, living tapestry of this endlessly cross-fertilizing scene, Driver has created an urgent recollection of freedom and the aesthetic of poverty. Graffiti meets gestural painting, hip hop infects rock and roll and visa versa, heroin comes and never quite goes, night swallows day, and everybody looms as large as they feel like looming on the crumbling streets of the Lower East Side.<\/p>\n

Cielo<\/b>
\nDir. Alison McAlpine, Canada\/Chile, 2017, 74m
\n<\/b>World Premiere
\n<\/b>The first feature from Alison McAlpine, director of the beautiful 2008 \u201cnonfiction ghost story\u201d short Second Sight, <\/i>is a dialogue with the heavens\u2014in this case, the heavens above the Andes and the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where the sky \u201cis more urgent than the land.\u201d McAlpine keeps the vast galaxies above and beyond in a delicate balance with the earthbound world of people, gently alighting on the desert- and mountain-dwelling astronomers, fishermen, miners, and cowboys who live their lives with reverence and awe for the skies.Cielo <\/i>itself is an act of reverence and awe, and its sense of wonder ranges from the intimate and human to the vast and inhuman.<\/p>\n

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?<\/b>
\nDir. Travis Wilkerson, USA, 2017, 90m
\n<\/b>How is it that some people escape the racism and misogyny in which they are raised, and some cling to it as their reason to exist? For 20 years, Travis Wilkerson has been making films that interrogate the malevolent effects of capitalism on the American Dream. Here he turns his sights on his own family and the small town of Dothan, Alabama, where his white supremacist great-great grandfather S.E. Branch once shot and killed Bill Spann, an African-American man. Branch was arrested but never charged with the crime. The life of his victim has been all but obliterated from memory and public record. \u201cThis isn\u2019t a white savior story. This is a white nightmare story,\u201d says the filmmaker, who refuses to let himself or anyone else off the hook.<\/p>\n

El mar la mar<\/b>
\nDir. Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki, USA, 2017, 94m
\n<\/b>The first collaboration between film and sound artist Bonnetta and filmmaker\/anthropologist Sniadecki (The Iron Ministry<\/i>, NYFF52) is a lyrical and highly topical film in which the Sonoran Desert, among the deadliest routes taken by those crossing from Mexico to the United States, is depicted a place of dramatic beauty and merciless danger. Haunting 16mm images of the unforgiving landscape and the human traces within it are supplemented with an intricate soundtrack of interwoven sounds and oral testimonies. Urgent yet never didactic, El mar la mar<\/i> allows this symbolically fraught terrain to take shape in vivid sensory detail, and in so doing, suggests new possibilities for the political documentary. A Cinema Guild release.<\/p>\n

Filmworker<\/b>
\nDir. Tony Zierra, USA, 2017, 94m
\n<\/b>Leon Vitali was a name in English television and movies when Stanley Kubrick cast him as Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon<\/i>, but after his acclaimed performance the young actor surrendered his career in the spotlight to become Kubrick\u2019s loyal right-hand man. For the next two decades, Vitali was Kubrick\u2019s factotum, never not on call, for whom no task was too small. Along the way, Vitali\u2019s personal life suffered, he drifted from his children, and his health deteriorated as he gave everything to his work. Filmworker<\/i> is of obvious interest to anyone who cares about Kubrick, but it is also a fascinating portrait of awe-inspired devotion burning all the way down to the wick.<\/p>\n

Hall of Mirrors<\/b>
\nDir. Ena Talakic and Ines Talakic, USA, 2017, 87m
\n<\/b>World Premiere
\n<\/b>In this lively documentary portrait, the great nonpartisan investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein, still going strong at 81, takes us through his most notable articles and books, including close looks at the findings of the Warren Commission, the structure of the diamond industry, the strange career of Armand Hammer, and the inner workings of big-time journalism itself. These are interwoven with an in-progress investigation into the circumstances around Edward Snowden\u2019s 2013 leak of classified documents, resulting in Epstein\u2019s recently published, controversial book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft<\/i>. One of the last of his generation of journalists, the energetic, articulate, and boyish Epstein is a truly fascinating character.<\/p>\n

Jane<\/b>
\nDir. Brett Morgen, USA, 2017, 90m
\n<\/b>U.S. Premiere
\n<\/b>In 1960, Dr. Louis Leakey arranged for a young English woman with a deep love of animals to go to Gombe Stream National Park near Lake Tangyanika. The Dutch photographer and filmmaker Hugo van Lawick was sent to document Jane Goodall\u2019s first establishment of contact with the chimpanzee population, resulting in the enormously popular Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees<\/i>, the second film ever produced by National Geographic. One hundred hours of Lawick\u2019s original footage was rediscovered in 2014. From that material, Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck<\/i>) has created a vibrant film experience, giving new life to the experiences of this remarkable woman and the wild in which she found a home. A National Geographic Documentary Films release.<\/p>\n

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold<\/b>
\nDir. Griffin Dunne, USA, 2017, \u00a092m
\n<\/b>World Premiere
\n<\/b>Griffin Dunne\u2019s years-in-the-making documentary portrait of his aunt Joan Didion moves with the spirit of her uncannily lucid writing: the film simultaneously expands and zeroes in, covering a vast stretch of turbulent cultural history with elegance and candor, and grounded in the illuminating presence and words of Didion herself. This is most certainly a film about loss\u2014the loss of a solid American center, the personal losses of a husband and a child\u2014but Didion describes everything she sees and experiences so attentively, so fully, and so bravely that she transforms the very worst of life into occasions for understanding. A Netflix release.<\/p>\n

No Stone Unturned<\/b>
\nDir. Alex Gibney, Northern Ireland\/USA, 2017, 111m
\n<\/b>World Premiere
\n<\/b>Investigative documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney\u2014best known for 2008\u2019s Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side<\/i>, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,<\/i> and at least a dozen others\u2014turns his sights on the 1994 Loughinisland massacre, a cold case that remains an open wound in the Irish peace process. The families of the victims\u2014who were murdered while watching the World Cup in their local pub\u2014were promised justice, but 20 years later they still didn\u2019t know who killed their loved ones. Gibney uncovers a web of secrecy, lies, and corruption that so often results when the powerful insist they are acting for the greater good.<\/p>\n

Piazza Vittorio<\/b>
\nDir. Abel Ferrara, Italy\/USA 2017, 69m
\n<\/b>North American Premiere
\n<\/b>Abel Ferrara\u2019s new documentary is a vivid mosaic\/portrait of Rome\u2019s biggest public square, Piazza Vittorio, built in the 19th century around the ruins of the 3rd century Trofei di Mario. The Piazza is now truly a crossroad of the modern world: it offers a perfect microcosm of the changes in the west brought by immigration and forced displacement. Ferrara, now a resident of Rome himself, talks with African musicians and restaurant workers, Chinese barkeeps and relocated eastern Europeans, homeless men and women, artists, members of the right wing movement CasaPound Italia, filmmaker Matteo Garrone, actor Willem Dafoe, and others, all with varying opinions about the vast changes they\u2019re seeing in their neighborhood and world.<\/p>\n

The Rape of Recy Taylor<\/b>
\nDir. Nancy Buirski, USA, 2017, 90m
\n<\/b>North American Premiere
\n<\/b>On the night of September 3, 1944, a young African-American mother from Abbeville, Alabama, named Recy Taylor was walking home from church with two friends when she was abducted by seven white men, driven away and dragged into the woods, raped by six of the men, and left to make her way home. Against formidable odds and endless threats to her life andthe lives of her family members, Taylor bravely spoke up and pressed charges. Nancy Buirski\u2019s passionate documentary shines a light on a case that became a turning point in the early Civil Rights Movement, and on the many formidable women\u2014including Rosa Parks\u2014who brought the movement to life.<\/p>\n

Sea Sorrow<\/b>
\nDir. Vanessa Redgrave, UK, 2017, 72m
\n<\/b>Vanessa Redgrave\u2019s debut as a documentary filmmaker is a plea for a compassionate western response to the refugee crisis and a condemnation of the vitriolic inhumanity of current right wing and conservative politicians. Redgrave juxtaposes our horrifying present of inadequate refugee quotas and humanitarian disasters (like last year\u2019s clearing of the Calais migrant camp) with the refugee crises of WWII and its aftermath, recalled with archival footage, contemporary news reports and personal testimony\u2014including an interview with the eloquent Labor politician Lord Dubs, who was one of the children rescued by the Kindertransport. Sea Sorrow <\/i>reaches further back in time to Shakespeare, not only for its title but also to further remind us that we are once more repeating the history that we have yet to learn.<\/p>\n

A Skin So Soft<\/b>
\nDenis C\u00f4t\u00e9, Canada\/Switzerland\/France, 2017, 94m<\/b>
\nU.S. Premiere <\/b>
\nStudiously observing the world of male bodybuilding, Denis C\u00f4t\u00e9\u2019s A Skin So Soft<\/i> (Ta peau si lisse<\/i>) crafts a multifaceted portrait of six latter-day Adonises through the lens of their everyday lives: extreme diets, training regimens, family relationships, and friendships within the community. Capturing the physical brawn and emotional complexity of its subjects with wit and tenderness, this companion piece to Cote\u2019s singular animal study Bestiaire<\/i> (2012) is a self-reflexive rumination on the long tradition of filming the human body that also advances a fascinating perspective on contemporary masculinity.<\/p>\n

Speak Up<\/b>
\nDir. St\u00e9phane de Freitas, co-directed by Ladj Ly, France, 2017, 99m
\n<\/b>North American Premiere
\n<\/b>Each year at the University of Saint-Denis in the suburbs of Paris, the Eloquentia competition takes place to determine the best orator in the class. Speak Up <\/i>(\u00c0 voix haute – La Force de la Parole<\/i>) follows the students, who come from a variety of family backgrounds and academic disciplines, as they prepare for the competition while coached by public-speaking professionals like lawyers and slam poets. Through the subtle and intriguing mechanics of rhetoric, these young people both reveal and discover themselves, and it is impossible not to be moved by the personal stories that surface in their verbal jousts, from the death of a Syrian nightingale to a father\u2019s Chuck Norris\u2013inspired approach to his battle with cancer. Without sentimentality, Speak Up <\/i>proves how the art of speech is key to universal understanding, social ascension, and personal revelation.<\/p>\n

The Venerable W.<\/b>
\nDir. Barbet Schroeder, France\/Switzerland, 2017, 100m<\/b>
\nThe Islamophobic Burmese monk known as The Venerable Wirathu has led hundreds of thousands of his Buddhist followers in a hate-fueled, violent campaign of ethnic cleansing, in which the country\u2019s tiny minority of Muslims were driven from their homes and businesses and penned in refugee camps on the Myanmar border. Barbet Schroder\u2019s portrait of this man again proves, along with his General Idi Amin Dada<\/i> (1974) and Terror\u2019s Advocate<\/i> (2007), that the director is a brilliant interviewer, allowing power-hungry fascists to damn themselves with their own testimony. His confrontation with Wirathu\u2014a figure whose existence contradicts the popular belief that Buddhism is the most peaceful and tolerant major religion\u2014is revelatory and horrifying. A release from Les Films du Losange.
\nPreceded by:
\nWhat Are You Up to, Barbet Schroeder?<\/b> (2017, 13m), in which the director traces the path that led him to Myanmar, a center of Theravada Buddhism, where racial hatred was mutating into genocide.<\/p>\n

Voyeur
\n<\/b>Myles Kane and Josh Koury, USA, 2017, 96m
\n<\/b>World Premiere
\n<\/b>Gerald Foos bought a motel in Colorado in the 1960s, furnished the room with louvered vents that allowed him to spy on his guests, and kept a journal of their sexual encounters\u2026among other things. As writer Gay Talese, who had known Foos for more than three decades, came close to the publication of his book The Voyeur\u2019s Motel<\/i> (preceded by an excerpt in The New Yorker<\/i>), factual discrepancies in Foos\u2019s account emerged, and documentarians Kane and Koury were on hand to record some wild encounters between the veteran New York journalist and his enigmatic subject. A Netflix release.<\/p>\n

Three Music Films by Mathieu Amalric
\n<\/b>C\u2019est presque au bout du monde <\/i>(France, 2015, 16m)
\nZorn (2010-2017) <\/i>(France, 2017, 54m)
\nMusic Is Music <\/i>(France, 2017, 21m)
\nThese three movies from Mathieu Amalric are musicals, from the inside out: they move with the mental and physical energies of John Zorn, the wildly prolific and protean composer\/performer\/bandleader\/record label founder\/club owner and all-around grand spirit of New York downtown music; and via the great Canadian-born soprano\/conductor\/champion of modern classical music Barbara Hannigan. Amalric\u2019s Zorn film began as a European TV commission that was quickly abandoned in favor of something more intimate: an ongoing dialogue between two friends that will always be a work-in-progress. The two shorter pieces that bracket the Zorn feature Hannigan nurturing music into being with breath, sound, and spirit. Taken together, the three films make for one thrilling, intimate musical-gestural-cinematic ride.<\/p>\n

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER<\/u><\/b>
\nThe Film Society of Lincoln Center is devoted to supporting the art and elevating the craft of cinema. The only branch of the world-renowned arts complex Lincoln Center to shine a light on the everlasting yet evolving importance of the moving image, this nonprofit organization was founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international film. Via year-round programming and discussions; its annual New York Film Festival; and its publications, including\u00a0Film Comment<\/i>, the U.S.\u2019s premier\u00a0magazine\u00a0about films and film culture,\u00a0the Film Society endeavors to make the discussion and appreciation of cinema accessible to a broader audience, as well as to ensure that it will remain an essential art form for years to come.<\/p>\n

Gregg Morris can be reached at gmorris@hunter.cuny.edu<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year\u2019s series of dispatches from the front lines of nonfiction cinema features intimate portraits of artists, depictions of social upheaval, and much more.<\/p>\n

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