The New York Film Fest does not segregate nonfiction films from other work.
“We don’t have a documentary section,” artistic directir Denis Lim says. “I think that really speaks to our belief that documentary isn’t necessarily a separate category of film. We put it in conversation with fiction films. And a lot of films these days sort of live on the border of fiction and documentaries. We have documentaries across the program in the main slate, also in the Currents section.”
These are tough times for film festivals in North America, but the New York Film Fest, appears to be thriving.
Wang Bing’s Youth (Homecoming) and Youth (Hard Times), both playing at NYFF, run over 6 hours.
That’s brief compared to exergue, the documentary directed by Dimitris Athyridis that clocks in at 14 hours.
“There’s something about the way that film really digs into this extremely fascinating process of making an art exhibition,” says Lim. “But it’s also clear from the start that it’s a film that’s not just about contemporary art, but really about the intersection of art and money and politics.”
“The films aren’t easy to screen or access necessarily, partly because of their length,” Lim notes. “But more and more they have shown in the U.S., especially in New York, and he’s cultivated a following. I think he’s a major filmmaker. I think very few filmmakers have done as much with the documentary form in the last two decades.”
That documentary was chosen before the recent assassination attempts against Trump. He expresses no hesitation to program a film about a would-be presidential assassin (the recently released Hinckley: I Shot the President, directed by Neil McGregor, focuses on John Hinckley, who almost succeeded in assassinating President Reagan.
While Suburban Fury takes place in San Francisco, Union, directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, examines the first successful effort to unionize an Amazon sorting facility in the U.S., located on New York’s Staten Island.
The film, winner of a Special Grand Jury Award for Art of Change at the Sundance Film Fest.
Among the films at NYFF that tread the border of fiction and nonfiction is Little, Big, and Far, directed by Jem Cohen, and Jimmy, directed by Yashaddai Owens. The latter film looks at a seminal period in the life of James Baldwin, the novelist and playwright who was born 100 years ago this year.
“Yashaddai Owens is a discovery,” Lim comments. “His work was certainly new to me. I know that he is a photographer, and this is a film that uses Baldwin’s biography as a jumping off point. I don’t know how easily classified it is as either fiction or documentary. It’s a film that imagines the life of a young James Baldwin as he has just arrived in Paris, where famously he spent some time.”
“It’s in a really healthy place in New York,” Lim says. “I’ve lived in New York a long time, and I see people turning out for festivals, turning out for releases of big and small movies, turning out for retrospectives. Certainly, post pandemic, I think there’s an appetite… We have had record attendance two years running now. The numbers aren’t in or final yet, but we’re doing at least as well as last year’s sales so far.”
