DOC NYC 2024: 11 Films to See at New York’s Premier Documentary Fest
Well, now’s the time to seek out documentaries that examine our place in the world — and those creating it, those destroying it, those rebuilding it.
The 15th annual edition of DOC NYC, New York City’s premier documentary film festival, launches November 13-21 in Manhattan, with 31 world premiere features and 24 U.S. premieres covering topics from banned (and burned!) books to activism, war, and artistry in the face of censorship and genocide.
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While a few, like Eddie Huang’s profile of a certain media empire’s downfall “Vice Is Broke,” may be familiar to you off the festival circuit, many are getting exposure in the United States for the first time. Here, Ronan Farrow investigates cyber surveillance in HBO Documentary Films’ “Surveilled,” directed by Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz. In “Yalla Parkour,” U.S.-based filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter sifts through memories of her childhood growing up in Gaza while connecting with a parkour artist in the West Bank city of Nablus. Emily Mkrtichian’s True/False favorite “There Was, There Was Not,” meanwhile, follows the lives of four women living in the recently dissolved Republic of Artsakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The festival opens with “Blue Road,” a portrait of Irish writer Edna O’Brien, whose sexually charged novel “The Country Girls” proved explosive in the 1960s. Closing the festival is Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn’s “Drop Dead City – New York on the Brink in 1975,” about the financial crisis that hit New York in the 1970s.
While these are just a sampling of the many titles worth seeking out, IndieWire rounds up even more in our below selection of DOC NYC features coming to New York this month.
David Ehrlich, Anne Thompson, and Christian Zilko contributed to this story.
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