AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE'S DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL
By Armen Pandola
Streaming TV has ushered in many changes, especially during the pandemic year, but no branch of the film community has witnessed more change than documentary films.
Quite simply, in the past, there was no place to watch documentary films. Oh sure, PBS has series like Independent Lens and Frontline that were top shelf and made a brand name of one documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, but all of that was just a drop in the bucket of documentaries produced.
Take the movies made in 2000. Gladiator won the Oscar for Best Picture while Steven Soderbergh won Best Director for Traffic. You remember those movies, right? How about Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer? That movie was about the British program during WWII of rescuing Jewish children from Germany and won Best Documentary Feature. Remember? Of course not. Never saw or even heard of it because there was no place to watch it.
Jump ahead to 2020. You may remember that Nomadland and its director Chloé Zhao won the Oscars for Best Picture and Director. And you probably also remember that the Best Documentary Feature Oscar went to My Octopus Teacher produced by Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed, and Craig Foster. That’s because you were able to watch on Netflix that great documentary about how an octopus helped a man cope with his life and its tribulations.
And the pandemic changed something else - it forced Film Festivals to go online.
That brings us to this year’s AFI DOCS 2021 Festival from June 22 - June 27. You can buy a ticket to watch an individual film for $10 and watch the movie online via your computer or TV. And you’ll have 48 hours to watch it at your own pace and at your most convenient time.
This year’s theme is Be Moved. Be Connected. Be Transformed. The theme is perfectly embodied in the Festival’s major series, 9/11. The Festival has the first three episodes of this harrowing and extensive multi-part docuseries, revealing the collective trauma and humanity of that dark day in America.
Here are a few of the films that caught my eye:
DAUGHTER OF A LOST BIRD is about Kendra, a Native American who was adopted and grew up in suburbia America. The film follows her journey to discover her heritage.
DELPHINE’S PRAYERS is about a 30-year old Cameroonian woman who tells us of her life in a country that most of us know very little about. It is more than a story - it’s an indictment of our world where we can close our eyes to the suffering that is just outside our very selective field of vision.
LFG is about the women soccer players on the US women’s national soccer team who have won four championships but still cannot get paid even a fraction of what their male counterparts make. In another country, this might lead to negotiations and bargaining; in the US, it’s a class action lawsuit for equality.
THE NEUTRAL GROUND follows comedian and satirist CJ Hunt (THE DAILY SHOW) as he goes through the country trying to understand why there are so many monuments to Confederate Civil War heroes or as they would be known anywhere else on earth - murderous slave masters.
NO STRAIGHT LINES is about one of my favorite things - comics or cartoons. The fight for recognition by LGBT comic artists was not much fun but the result was a perfect storm of artists like Alison Bechdel (FUN HOME) changing the way that America sees itself.
THE SLOW HUSTLE Baltimore’s establishment is shaken by the murder of a police officer who may have been about to testify against corrupt colleagues. This film is a gripping story of dirty cops, cover-ups and a failed political establishment - it could have been a script for THE WIRE.
SUMMER OF SOUL (. . .OR WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED) In 1969, Woodstock was for the (mostly) white American flower children - but this film is about the Harlem Cultural Festival, held that same year with performances by Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples, Sly & the Family Stone, Nina Simone and others.
There are six different SHORTS PROGRAMS with short documentaries about everything from the stages of opera to the fields of football.
AND THERE IS MORE - AND IT’S FREE!
Six short films produced as part of the Hindsight Project which chronicles the experiences of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities in the American South and U.S. Territories during the unprecedented events of 2020, Hindsight is a new nonfiction short film series that explores the cultural shifts, community ingenuity and pivotal conversations defining this moment in America. This is a free program that launches at Noon EDT on June 23 and is available to unlock until 11:59 p.m. EDT on June 27 or until it sells out, whichever comes first.
The Guggenheim Symposium honors a master of the nonfiction art form, filmmaker Dawn Porter, featuring clips from her acclaimed work and a free screening of her most recent project, RISE AGAIN: TULSA AND THE RED SUMMER. This is a Free event on June 23.
So, take a look at its website - https://docs.afi.com/ - and pick a couple of great documentaries to watch.