NEW YORK, NY.- MoMA presents Documentary Fortnight 2015: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media, the 14th annual showcase of recent documentary film that examines the relationship between contemporary art and nonfiction practices and reflects on new areas of documentary filmmaking, from February 13 through 27, 2015. This year’s festival includes an international selection of 21 feature films and seven short films, a lecture performance, an archival film program, and a flat-screen installation. Many of the directors will be present at the screenings and will participate in discussions following the films. Documentary Fortnight 2015 is organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, with Jesus Hernandez Bach, Festival Liaison. The selection committee consists of Sally Berger; Chi-hui Yang, independent curator; and Kimi Takesue, filmmaker. Presented in collaboration with Cinema Tropical, Milestone Films, and True/False Film Festival.
The festival opens on February 13 with the New York premiere of The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015). A thrilling, comprehensive history of the revolutionary movement that transformed race and class in America, the film is told through meticulous research and astonishing archival materials by MacArthur Fellow and Emmy Award winner Stanley Nelson. A riveting chronicle of power, idealism, tragedy, and transformation, the film brings together the multiple, complex histories of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, as told by its disparate factions, supporters, opposition, and the news media. Founded nearly 50 years ago, the Panthers and their Ten-Point Platform—which called for equal education and housing and an end to police brutality—continue to resonate in today’s world. The film is a 2015 Sundance Film Festival selection.
The closing night event is the world premiere of Hot Type: 150 Years of The Nation (2014), the new film by Barbara Kopple, a two-time Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature. The oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, founded in 1865 and now in its 150th year, The Nation covers politics and culture from a liberal point of view. The film captures daily life working on the periodical, introduces staff writers and editors past and present, and follows the in-depth stories of reporters in the field.
For the mid-festival event, the beloved Peruvian-born, Amsterdam-based Heddy Honigmann presents the U.S. premiere of Around the World in 50 Concerts (2014), a film that captures the transformative power of music through the 2013 Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s 125th anniversary world tour, with 50 concerts on six continents. Known for her sublime and intimate documentary portraits, here Honigmann combines full orchestral performances with individual musicians speaking about specific instruments and musical pieces, interactions with concertgoers from different cultural backgrounds, and the dynamics of the musicians’ lives on the road, from Amsterdam to Buenos Aires, Soweto, and St. Petersburg.
The complete line-up has films for a wide audience—documentaries of startling beauty and tragedy, stunning complexity, and sly humor. Two masters of "durational cinema" present long-form works about youth and how the young experience the world: Wang Bing's Father and Sons (2014) observes the interaction between a father, his two sons, and modern technology in China; and Lav Diaz's Storm Children Book One (2014) follows young boys as they resiliently deal with the aftereffects of a devastating typhoon in the Philippines.
Other films tell rare stories, from an Iranian trucker, a filmmaker at heart, who tries to bounce back from the death of his central actor—a trained fox—in Trucker and the Fox (2014), to Episode of the Sea (2014), in which the isolated Dutch fishing community of Urk struggles to adapt to fluctuating regulations and global competition while retaining their identity.
Two artists bring a mix of aesthetic styles to their feature-length projects: Phil Collins works with the citizens of Glasgow, playfully mixing documentary, musical, animation, and television styles to describe the scope of contemporary experience in Glasgow with Tomorrow Is Always Too Long (2014); while Cao Fei mixes pop and surrealism, fantasy and social critique to describe life in Beijing through the activities of the residents of one apartment building haunted by the “undead” in Haze and Fog (2013).
In conjunction with the recent exhibition Bill Morrison: Compositions (October 14–November 21, 2014), a retrospective selection of films by Bill Morrison is presented on a flat-screen installation in The Ronald S. and Jo Carole Lauder Building lobby. In February (February 3–March 2), three imagedriven documentary shorts are presented to coincide with Documentary Fortnight 2015. The films are RE: Awakenings (2013), a cine-poem of Super 8mm footage, shot by Dr. Oliver Sacks, of patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx who were administered the drug L-Dopa in the summer of 1969 and “awakened” after decades of inactivity; Koller and Freud, a found-footage piece reflecting on an early study of the effects of cocaine by Sigmund Freud and the filmmaker’s great-grandfather Carl Koller; and Back to the Soil (2014), with footage of Jewish farming colonies in Eastern Europe, shot in 1927 by Morrison’s grandfather James H. Becker.
