DOC NYC, now in its 15th year, is the largest documentary festival in America: more than 200 films unspool during the festival, including more than 50 premieres. Of course, with so many entries, it’s impossible to do anything but get a sampling; here’s a handful I was able to see.

 

 

Of the festival’s opening night, centerpiece and closing night films, I caught the Opening Night selection. Blue Road—The Edna O’Brien Story, a compelling study of the great Irish author. Alongside Jessie Buckley beautifully narrating in O’Brien’s own words, director Sinéad O’Shea interviews admirers like actor Gabriel Byrne, other authors, disciples and O’Brien herself (before her death this summer at age 93) to present a full-bodied portrait of an artist who made many people deeply uneasy through her grit and honesty but who eventually gained the respect of and lionization by the literary world.

 

 

Other films explored the lives of remarkable women. In Beyond the Gaze: Jule Campbell’s Swimsuit Issue, the incredible career of the woman editor who crashed what was an exclusive men’s club to turn the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue into a cash cow is recounted by Jule’s daughter, director Jill Campbell. Jule unsurprisingly comes across as feisty and no-nonsense; it’s not surprising she shepherded the lucrative swimsuit issue for more than three decades as well as introducing the world’s first supermodels. As intimate as this story is—Jule died after being extensively interviewed, in 2022 at age 96—the most touching moments come from reunions with several models including Carol Alt, Roshumba Williams, Stacey Williams and especially Elle Macpherson.

 

A Photographic Memory (opens in NYC Nov. 22) is Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s fascinating film about her mother—photographer and journalist Sheila Turner Seed, who died when Rachel was only 18 months old. The intrepid daughter burrows into her mother’s personal and professional history to piece together a cinematic memoir. And she does: accessing interviews her mom did with luminaries Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks and Cecil Beaton, along with talking with her father, British photographer Brian Seed, and tracking down friends and colleagues who can fill in the blanks, Rachel has indelibly depicted this fierce and formidable woman for posterity.

 

 

The eponymous heroine of Spacewoman, astronaut Eileen Collins, was the first American woman to command a space shuttle flight, Columbia in 1997. Hannah Berryman’s first-rate doc explores Collins’ career in the space program and how her dedication led to strained family relations, especially with her daughter Bridget, who gives an honest account of their difficult past relationship. (Interestingly, Eileen and husband Pat’s son Luke is rarely mentioned or shown, but he appears briefly with his sister.) It’s a straightforward bio with a riveting protagonist at its center.

 

 

In Anxiety Club, several comedians open themselves up to director Wendy Lobel’s camera about their personal angst even more than they do onstage. Mark Maron is the only performer whose standup I was familiar with, so his cutting self-absorption is familiar (yet still funny). But of the rest—including Eva Victor, who seems more grounded than the others (I hope she is!)—getting the most camera time is Tiffany Jenkins, who’s so petrified of losing her children that she can barely stand to be away from them for even a short time. Her therapy sessions to break this mental stranglehold are memorable if uneasy to watch, but they’re of a piece with the anxiety she documents in a series of very popular and humorous YouTube videos.

 

In Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, the veteran comic illustrator—best known for the graphic novel Maus, his incisive and deeply personal allegory about his father, a Holocaust survivor, with the Jews shown as mice, the Poles as pigs and the Nazis as cats—gets his due in this illuminating look at a career full of lacerating observation. Directors Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin record Spiegelman’s thoughts about how his childhood in Rego Park, Queens, informed his worldview and artistry as well as his wife, French editor Françoise Mouly. 

 

 

Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole—Lost and Found (opens in NYC Nov. 22) vividly resurrects the career and legacy of the South African photographer, more than three decades after his premature death. Cole lived the daily horrors of Black South Africa under the racist Apartheid regime, documenting them with his camera. Moving to the U.S. in 1966, he published the book House of Bondage that chronicled what he experienced, becoming an international sensation—and it was unsurprisingly banned in his home country. Cole expected America to be different, but when he started taking pictures here, he was shocked to see racism ingrained through Jim Crow laws, similar to South Africa. LaKeith Stanfield narrates as Cole’s own voice, but Peck rightly concentrates on Cole’s powerful photographs throughout the film. Cole asks “Am I a traitor to my country?” in response to the apartheid state news’ description of him, and Peck denounces that vicious smear in the strongest possible terms, giving this pioneering artist a deserved posthumous tribute.

 

 

Last but definitely not least is Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (now playing), Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’s insightful cinematic essay that revolves around the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, which happened with the complicity of Belgium, England, and the U.S. But that’s only one piece of a complex feature encompassing how Western countries reacted to the rapid decolonization of Africa. It’s not easy to elucidate the convoluted political situation in the Congo, but Grimonprez’s ambitious mosaic provides fascinating context for these historical events as it tells equally riveting dual stories: the fraught atmosphere of colonialism and Communism alongside the recruitment of Black musicians as unwitting cover for backdoor machinations to prevent supposed Communist takeovers. These artists included Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Nina Simone—none aware that they were being used as decoys for their U.S. State Department handlers’ nefarious ends.