The Washington area is full of film festivals, and AFI Docs is the one worth traveling for, a destination for professionals and moviegoers looking for the best in new non-fiction filmmaking. This year’s festival runs from June 22-26, and while high-profile events like a symposium with Guggenheim honoree Werner Herzog sold out quickly, there are still plenty of great documentaries on tap. DCist staff previewed some of this year’s titles, and if this sample is any indication, it’s another great year.
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(AFI Docs)Junior year in high school is starting for Lena, Ginger, Sage, and a handful of other girls. They ride their bikes, put on makeup, and wonder who will be the first to get a boyfriend; they drink too much at parties, navigate relationships with their parents, and try to figure out who they are. They constantly reminisce about their high school years even though they’re only halfway through them. All This Panic beautifully documents the experience of growing up, piecing together moments filmed in gorgeously lit scenes, focusing on little details, and warmly capturing a sort of visual nostalgia. Director Jenny Gage pulls the viewer into those late teenage years where you were sure what you were saying was profound, when your future felt so frighteningly, wonderfully big and uncertain. —Elisabeth Grant
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Friday, June 24 at 9:45 p.m. at the AFI Silver and Saturday, June 25 at 3:30 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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(AFI Docs)If, as the title suggests, Chicken People was about anthropomorphic fowl men, the film still might not be as strange as the world of competitive show chicken breeders it depicts. Characters seem like bit players from a Christopher Guest movie, but they’re not improvised comedy facades—they’re real people. Chicken People. A mother who regrets not being there for her children when she was an alcoholic pays that maternal warmth forward to her little chicks. A man laments a failed relationship while carrying a torch for the old flame he keeps crossing paths with at competitions. Another man moonlights as a singer but can’t leave behind the culture of chicken grooming that’s been there for him when society made him feel alone. As he says, “the chicken don’t judge you.” This is a heartwarming oddball about folks who retreat to a hobby where they can seek the perfectionism they can’t create in their own lives. If you can stomach the frightening abundance of poultry jargon, it’s a real blast.—Dominic Griffin
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, June 25 at 7:00 p.m. at the AFI Silver and Saturday, June 26 at 2:45 p.m. At Landmark E Street Cinema.
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(AFI Docs)This bittersweet ode to a life lived in the movie business follows theater operator Victor Purice and his quest to preserve the Dacia Panoramic Cinema in Romania. The idealism of this chain smoking curmudgeon battles budget constraints while the magic of cinema is heartbreakingly shackled to a decaying slab of brick and mortar. Anyone who’s ever worked in a movie theater will get misty as Purice shows an employee how to splice film, the comforting rattle of celluloid coursing through the veins of a nearby projector. Frayed posters of Patrick Dempsey rom-coms litter the walls of this nearly abandoned castle, but no amount of misfortune keeps Purice from dreaming of a theater that’s warm and filled with happy audience members.—Dominic Griffin
Watch the trailer.
Friday, June 24 at 9:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver and Sunday June 26 at 5:45 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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(AFI Docs)Robert Kenner, the director of Food, Inc. tackles the dangers of nuclear weapons storage in this adaptation of a 2013 book by Eric Schlosser. Both engaging and extremely suspenseful, the film tells the story of a maintenance accident in 1980 that nearly caused an H-bomb to go off just outside Little Rock, Arkansas. A mix of interviews with people who worked at the missile silo (most of whom were under 25 at the time) and a surprising amount of archival footage, Command and Control uses the incident to show how today’s world of advanced weaponry makes it alarmingly easy to destroy your own country. About a thousand of these kinds of accidents occurred in the U.S. alone during the Cold War. We were lucky none of them turned apocalyptic, but as nuclear weapons continue to age in their silos around the world, it’s only a matter of time before one of them detonates. As Schlosser himself says, “The problem with luck is that it eventually runs out.” — Elena Goukassian
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, June 25 at 3 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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(AFI Docs)Bob and Nancy Griffith are probably the most accomplished American sailing couple you’ve never heard of. Over a span of a few decades starting in the 1960s, they circumnavigated the globe three times (with their children in tow) and even set a world record for sailing around Antarctica—all in a sailboat only 53 feet long. Yet even the couple’s sailing skills are eclipsed by their ability to build their own sailboat out of scratch and survive for two months on a deserted atoll in the Pacific after crashing into a coral reef. Although Following Seas feels a little disjointed at times, Nancy Griffith’s archival footage of their voyages is absolutely stunning. And even if you’ve never been sailing before, it’ll make you yearn for the romance of the sea. — Elena Goukassian
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, June 23 at 1:15 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema and Friday, June 24 at 1:45 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
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(AFI Docs)One cycle of in vitro fertilization costs around $20,000 and only gives a woman a 30 percent chance of getting pregnant. Hopeful parents unable to conceive in other ways take out second mortgages, borrow money from family, and go into tens of thousands of dollars in debt for the chance to have a child. When the Sher Institute in Las Vegas hosted a contest to give away a free cycle of IVF, contestants poured in, offering heartbreaking video confessionals. Haveababy, named after the contest website, documents the judging process for three families who made it to the finals. The audience joins these families in on the rollercoaster of uplifting news and devastating losses that come with a diagnosis of infertility.—Elisabeth Grant
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Friday, June 24 at 6:30 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema and Saturday, June 25 at 11:30 a.m. at the AFI Silver.
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(AFI Docs)Nanfu Wang’s brilliant record of her time with human rights activist Ye Haiyan, also known as Sparrow, is the finest superhero film you’ll see this year. Haiyan is everything you could hope for in a caped crusader: fearless, witty, and compassionate in a way that instantly endears the viewer to her travails. But there are no mad scientists with doomsday lasers here; just feckless pedophiles and a corrupt Chinese government that shields them from justice. With a league of fellow protesters, legal eagles, and Wang herself, Haiyan stands up for six little girls abused by their school principal before the omnipresent forces that govern her home seek to destroy her life. This is a beautifully realized a portrait of bravery that will make you ask if you are doing enough to make the world a better place.—Dominic Griffin
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, June 23 at 6:45 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema and Sunday June 26 at 8:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
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(AFI Docs)Sci-fi films often use time travel as catnip for egghead fanboys to parse logistics and debate potential paradoxes, and director Jay Cheel observes dueling perspectives on the well-worn trope. The film documents two men obsessed with the ability to travel through time. Animator Rob Niosi has spent years forging a meticulous recreation of the time machine from the 1960 adaptation of HG Wells’ The Time Machine, while theoretical physicist Dr. Ron Mallett has devoted his entire life to studying the science necessary to travel in time to see his late father. How to Build a Time Machine film lives at the intersection of science and science fiction, exploring the sweetness of technology and the complications it brings. There’s an ornate sense of wonder to Niosi’s creations and the film finds serenity as it paces through each man’s life and pursuit. —Dominic Griffin
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, June 25 at 4:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver
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(AFI Docs)For all the haunting imagery in his photographs, Enrique Mentinides’ hollowed out stare is what lingers most once the credits roll. The Weegee of Mexico City, Mentinides spent 50 years photographing crime scenes and disasters. This film takes the millennial impetus to record everything and explores it through the morbid aesthetic of La Prensa, the tabloid for which Mentinides worked his whole career. It’s a harrowing collection of images captured by a man obsessed with a kind of dark beauty. One fellow photographer refers to one photo as “the birth of a bad memory”; Mentinidies is the midwife of everlasting horror.—Dominic Griffin
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, June 23 at 9:00 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema and Friday, June 24 at 2: 00 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
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(AFI Docs)Making its international premier, director Tamar Tal Anati’s film follows three elderly Italian-born Jewish brothers as they drive across the Italian countryside and hike through the woods to find the cave where their family hid from the Nazis 70 years ago. The brothers have wildly different personalities, likely a result of how they experienced the war. The oldest, Emmanuel, who was a teenager at the time, is now a serious archeologist and professor and remembers a lot of suffering and death. The younger brothers recall things differently. Happy-go-lucky middle brother Andrea saw the whole experience of hiding out in the woods as a kind of adventure, saying, “We had fun during the Holocaust.” Despite the film’s sobering premise, sibling relationships add levity as the brothers they bicker over who woke up latest and held up the group and who is supposed to cook for the others. The film is as much about the importance of family as it is about coming to terms with the past. — Elena Goukassian
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, June 25 at noon at Landmark E Street Cinema and Sunday, June 26 at 6:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver. Tickets and info here.
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(AFi Docs)Laura is a sixth-grader living in rural Poland, the hearing daughter of two deaf parents. An only child, she spends a lot of her time translating and interpreting for her parents, accompanying them to the hardware store, helping them negotiate a bank loan, and calling in sick days for her father. Like any teenager, Laura gets annoyed at times, but she also revels in the fact that she can easily keep personal secrets from her parents. Laura’s situation is reminiscent to that of the children of recent immigrants, who acquire the new language more quickly and must translate for their parents, learning the bureaucracies of the world much sooner than their peers. Except in Laura’s case, her parents will never be able to “learn” spoken Polish. As Laura says, they’ll always live in their own world. Director Maciej Adamek offers us a peek into a society where deafness is still considered a handicap. — Elena Goukassian
Watch the trailer.
Friday, June 24 at 12:30 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema and Sunday, June 26 at 5:45 p.m. at the AFI Silver. Tickets and info here.
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(AFI DOcs)Following the extremely staged day in the life of a young girl and her family in Pyongyang, director Vitaliy Manskiy’s documentary is, in his words, “a film about fake reality.” North Korean officials agreed to let Russian filmmakers into the country on the condition that the film be a “collaboration” in which local officials set everything up and created a script. The girl’s dad, a journalist in real life, is shown instead as an engineer in a garment factory—a profession more fitting to the communist work ethic—and cameras continue to roll even while officials tell participants how to say their lines, when to applaud, and how enthusiastically to laugh. Explanatory paragraphs appear as captions in a few select scenes, but such texts pale in comparison to the power of beautifully subtle shots of reality, like people reading the paper on the subway platform and an adorable child nodding off while listening to propagandistic war stories. — Elena Goukassian
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, June 23 at 2 p.m. at the AFI Silver and Sunday, June 26 at 7:45 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema. Tickets and info here.
