Film Festival Roundup—DOCNYC 2023

DOCNYC 2023

Online streaming through November 26, 2023

docnyc.net

The annual documentary festival DOC NYC again includes the option of online watching for those who couldn’t get to the in-person screenings in Manhattan; anyone can access several of the films through Sunday. As always, there were dozens of enticing features and shorts to pick through; the features I saw covered the arts and politics.

Fanny—The Other Mendelssohn

In Fanny—The Other Mendelssohn, director Sheila Hayman takes a close look at Fanny Mendelssohn, an accomplished composer in her own right who was eclipsed both by the era in which she lived that didn’t take women composers seriously and her brother, the also accomplished Felix, who was celebrated for his symphonies and chamber music. Hayman shows that Fanny was as equally masterly as Felix, but the demands of her marriage (despite her husband Wilhelm being totally supportive) and the misogyny of the 19th century held her back. There’s a subplot of sorts in which a Fanny scholar, Angela Mace, resurrects the composer’s “Easter” piano sonata, originally attributed to Felix but now considered one of her summit achievements, more than 150 years after her untimely death of a stroke at age 41. (Felix died six months later, also of a stroke.)

How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer

The most egotistical and rabidly aggressive American author is resurrected, so to speak, in How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer, Jeff Zimbalist’s surprisingly nuanced glimpse at how Mailer, an unapologetic chauvinist who swore he was a progressive feminist, treated others, including his several wives and children. Zimbalist speaks with Mailer’s children—including John Buffalo, an executive producer of this film—who willingly discuss their dad’s complexity, as do several Mailer colleagues, admirers and detractors; the result is an entertaining warts-and-all snapshot.

Psychedelicized—The Electric Circus Story

It happened during the heyday of flower power and hippie culture, but the history of the Electric Circus, the storied club on Manhattan’s East Village that lasted from 1967 to 1971, is lovingly recounted in Larry Confino’s Psychedelicized—The Electric Circus Story. Cofounders Stan Freeman and Jerry Brandt engagingly discuss their ambitious project that was a victim of changing times (a bomb supposedly planted by the Black Panthers went off one night, injuring 15 partygoers) but that still remains vivid in their memories.

Rainbow Warrior

The name of a Greenpeace ship set to protest French nuclear testing that was blown up by operatives under the auspices of the French government while it was docked in the port of Auckland, Rainbow Warrior is also the title of Edward McGurn’s breathlessly exciting account of how New Zealand police solved the case—almost inadvertently. Interviews with many participants and witnesses—some of whom fondly remember Fernando Pereira, the photographer who was the lone fatality—revisit a case that turned out to be embarrassing for the French, who first denied their role then ended up paying reparations to Greenpeace, to New Zealand, and to the family of Pereira.

Angel Applicant

In Angel Applicant, designer turned director Ken August Meyer explores the oeuvre of Swiss expressionist artist Paul Klee, who—like Meyer—was stricken with a rare disease, systemic scleroderma, in which the skin and tissues harden, making ordinary movement painful. As he interprets Klee’s final works as a journey taken while in the throes of the ailment, Meyer undergoes his own transformation, looking to alleviate his own suffering from the disease. As he does so, his film finds inspiration in Klee’s art, along with something even more important: hope.

No One Asked You

Comic Lizz Winstead created The Daily Show and cofounded the liberal radio network Air America, but she would probably say her greatest contribution is her pro-choice Abortion Access Front, which Ruth Leitman’s No One Asked You explores in meaningful and even amusing detail. Winstead and her cohorts have kept their sense of humor as well as their sense of proportion, and Leitman shows them using everything in their arsenal to ensure that, in the face of mounting defeats culminating in the overturn of Roe v. Wade, women—and not the (mainly) men in power—retain control over their own bodies.

The Trials of Alan Dershowitz

Detailing the life and career of America’s most famous lawyer (mostly for the wrong reasons), The Trials of Alan Dershowitz director John Curtin recounts Dershowitz’s most famous litigations, which in the public consciousness are mostly a parade of bad guys from Mike Tyson and O.J. Simpson to Klaus von Bulow and Donald Trump—the latter a head scratcher even for a free speech absolutist like Dershowitz. He expediently defends himself and his choices, but when he speaks about why he defended Trump, it comes off half-heartedly, as if he knew he did it to keep up appearances. It’s too bad that black (or orange) mark has marred an otherwise estimable career.