Documentaries face a great paradox in 2024: They proliferate, but most nonfiction filmmakers will tell you they’re also harder to get made. Streaming services groan under the weight of true crime and biographical films, but most feel fast, formulaic and shoddy, designed specifically to throw on while watchers scroll on their phones. Meanwhile, directors who aspire to challenge audiences and craft art from reality say that they struggle to find money and distribution — and that it’s gotten markedly tougher in just the past few years.
That’s why the festival circuit is so important to independent and international documentarians. It can be their best shot at reaching audiences and, perhaps, finding a distributor. But I notice that at many major film festivals, nonfiction can feel like a second-class citizen, unless a celebrity is involved. The films are often programmed in documentary-specific categories, as if they need to be kept away from the “real” movies. Some festivals, like Cannes, barely program any nonfiction at all.
Thankfully, the New York Film Festival is not one of those. This year’s edition includes 18 feature-length (and longer) documentaries and 10 nonfiction shorts, and they’re placed alongside fiction in various sections rather than siloed. And while the festival, which rarely features world premieres, has only two this year, both are nonfiction.
Technically there are two celebrity-focused documentaries on the slate (unless you count the delightful botanist Mark Brown, of the equally delightful “7 Walks With Mark Brown,” as a celebrity). The more conventional is “Elton John: Never Too Late,” directed by R.J. Cutler and David Furnish, the singer’s husband. The other is Alex Ross Perry’s gonzo “Pavements,” about the indie-rock band Pavement, which involves a little reflection and history from the band but mostly a bunch of elements that mess with the audience: footage from a Pavement jukebox musical that was briefly mounted downtown in 2022 (I saw it) specifically for this movie; a dramatic movie about the band, starring Joe Keery (“Stranger Things”) as the lead singer Stephen Malkmus, that may or may not actually exist; a museum exhibition of Pavement memorabilia. It’s terrifically strange and entertaining even if you (like me) have never really been a fan — and you’ll get a lightly satirical skewering of the whole musician biopic genre, to boot.
But where “Pavements” is goofy and doesn’t take itself too seriously, several other documentaries tackle serious subjects with aplomb, and run times to match. “Exergue — on Documenta 14,” directed by Dimitris Athiridis, is a whopping 14 hours, presented in chapters. It’s a riveting and often dryly funny film about Adam Szymczyk — the artistic director of the 2017 edition of Documenta, the highly influential every-five-years exhibition of contemporary art — as he works with his team of curators to put together that show. While there’s a specific event at its center, “Exergue” is also a formidable survey of the challenges facing the contemporary art world as it wrestles with racism, colonialism, politics and power.
More nonfiction of epic length comes from the director Wang Bing. Last year’s festival included his “Youth (Spring),” a 212-minute film about young people working in Chinese garment factories. This year’s edition includes the rest of the trilogy: “Youth (Hard Times),” about those workers organizing when their bosses refuse to pay them, and “Youth (Homecoming),” following the young people as they return to their villages. The former clocks in at 226 minutes; the latter feels brief, at a mere 152 minutes. It seems wrong to say these films are “about” labor in the factories, because watching them, you feel like you’re dwelling in their world, and the movies studiously avoid instructing us in what to think. They are experiential, which also makes them more memorable.
The long-form documentary from this year’s festival that bowled me over — I haven’t stopped talking about it since I saw it — was “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow,” one of the world premieres, from the Russian American director Julia Loktev. (The other premiere is Robinson Devor’s “Suburban Fury.”)
Loktev went to Moscow in 2021 to make a film about independent journalism in the Putin era, arriving, as it happens, mere months before the invasion of Ukraine. So “My Undesirable Friends” became both a portrait of a group of female dissident journalists and a searing, terrifying illustration of, or maybe warning about, the methods by which an authoritarian regime systematically dismantles dissenting media voices. “My Undesirable Friends” is about five and a half hours, in five parts, and by the end the women have mostly been forced to flee the country. (Loktev is currently working on Part II.)
A funny thing happens when you watch a lot of documentaries in close succession: You start to spot pairings, the ways various films rhyme. Such a harmony exists between “Youth (Hard Times)” and the stunning “Union,” directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, which follows a group of Amazon workers in Staten Island as they try to form a union. A similar consonance exists between “My Undesirable Friends” and “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” Petra Costa’s essayistic portrait of how evangelical Christianity has spread in Brazil and influenced the rise of that country’s far-right politics. And both the deeply personal “No Other Land” (directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor) and the inventive “Dahomey” (directed by Mati Diop) address vital issues of colonialism and exploitation of entire ethnic groups.
Taken together, these selections and others illustrate the great tragedy when festivals and streamers are loaded mostly with formulaic, uninventive documentaries. The New York festival entries make a compelling case that the most innovative and exciting work is happening away from traditional scripted filmmaking.
In fact, the festival illustrates that well: “Nickel Boys,” the opening-night film, is certainly fiction, based on the novel by Colson Whitehead. But the film’s director, RaMell Ross, comes from nonfiction. His Oscar-nominated “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” is among the most important documentaries of the past decade, an exercise in exploding the audience’s ideas about how Black people appear, and have appeared, in cinema. He ports this nonfiction-honed sensibility over to “Nickel Boys,” which at times visually quotes from “Hale County” and is as much about the act of watching Black stories on film as it is an adaptation of Whitehead’s novel.
“Nickel Boys” is a staggering achievement, and it’s in vital conversation with Ross’s earlier work. Great nonfiction carries the potential to remind audiences that they are part of the story they’re watching, and that the point of view through which they watch is as important as the content. We’re lucky to have a festival that sees documentaries the same way.
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