The New York Film Festival: Documentaries Stand Front and Center

Documentaries were out in force at the 58th New York Film Festival. No longer cloistered in a separate section, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with narrative features throughout this mostly virtual, streamlined edition.

In part, that reflects the increasing fluidity of the form itself. “It’s sometimes even hard to say if a film is documentary or fiction,” observed director of programming Dennis Lim during one of the festival’s many virtual Talks, which you can catch on YouTube. Films like Inheritance, Ouvertures and My Mexican Bretzel seriously mess with boundaries by injecting scripts and/or actors. These joined a wide range of more traditional docs, coming from seasoned veterans like Frederick Wiseman (City Hall) and Sam Pollard (MLK/FBI), mid-career documentarians like Victor Kossakovsky (Gunda) and Jia Zhangke (Swimming Out Til the Sea Turns Blue), and newer filmmakers like Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw (The Truffle Hunters) and Garrett Bradley (Time).

The standouts covered in this article:

All In: The Fight for Democracy
MLK/FBI
The Monopoly of Violence (picture above)
City Hall
Gunda
The Truffle Hunters

Published on October 15, 2020, in Documentary magazine.