Documentary Fest Puts Elm City On Screen

“If I were to identify the theme of this year’s festival,” NHDocs co-founder and co-director Charles Musser said on a recent episode of WNHH’S Deep Focus, ​“I would say that the theme is New Haven. We have a wide range of films about people who work in New Haven, about communities in New Haven, about incidents in New Haven.”

For Musser, who teaches documentary film at Yale University and is an experienced filmmaker in his own right, the focus on New Haven not only recognizes people in this city who have not had a chance to see themselves or their neighbors on screen before; it also offers an opportunity for New Haven audiences to take a step back and better understand the great diversity of people, communities, challenges, and achievements that make up this city of 130,000 residents.

NHDocs started in 2014 after Musser met fellow New Haven-based documentary filmmakers Gorman Bechard, Lisa Molomot, and Jacob Bricca at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana. Although practically neighbors, the four filmmakers did not know each other and had not seen each other’s movies. Coming from such a small city, that unfamiliarity struck each of them as a big problem.

“We were pleased, astonished, but also embarrassed that New Haven film culture was in such disarray,” Musser said. Over the course of a weekend, ​“we decided to screen our films for each other and our friends, and that was really the beginning of the festival.”

What started as four screenings over two days has now blossomed into an 11-day festival consisting of hands-on workshops, a student film competition, a rock concert at Cafe Nine, and screenings of more than 70 shorts, webisodes, and feature-length documentaries. Almost all of the movies playing are about local subjects or by local filmmakers.

Although Molomot and Bricca now live and work in Arizona, Musser and Bechard are still the co-directors of the festival, and have brought on Connecticut documentary filmmaker Karyl Evans to act as festival organizer.

This year’s festival opens at the Whitney Humanities Center on Wall Street on Thursday night with I Am Shakespeare, director Stephen Dest’s new documentary about Newhallville resident Henry Green, an accomplished acting student at Co-Op who ran with a street gang after school and was shot and nearly killed in a confrontation just a few blocks from his home. Dest’s feature-length film keeps its camera-eye trained closely on Green’s face as he narrates his young life story, reflecting on the anger, fear, pride, machismo, empathy, and restraint that contribute to his complex sense of self.

The festival continues with nonfiction movies short and long, amateur and professional, that help piece together the mosaic of life in New Haven. Jennifer Abod’s The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen tells the story of an influential New Haven dance instructor who struggled with the racism of the ballet world as well as the homophobia of her own community. Sebastian Medina-Tayac’s Tlaxcala Dreams focuses on the city’s Mexican population, and on the border-blurring impact of an all-women‑s Mexican theater group. And Briana Burroughs’s The Politics of People sits down with Dixwell alder Jeanette Morrison, State Senator Gary Winfield, and a handful of concerned constituents to explore just what makes for a responsive, responsible relationship between citizens and their local politicians.

This year’s festival also continues a collaboration between NHDocs and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas to bring to town a prominent documentary filmmaker whose work has shaped and continues to shape the contours of the art form. This year’s featured filmmakers will be D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, two of the pioneers of cinéma vérité, a filmmaking approach that helped transform documentary film from a medium of staged interviews and reenactments into a snapshot of life lived in the present and on the run. The final weekend of the festival will see Pennebaker and Hegedus in New Haven to introduce a few of their more influential movies from the past 25 years, including The War Room, Startup.com, and God Spoke: Al Franken.

But ultimately, the festival is by, about, and for New Haven. And the movies on display offer a variety of routes into understanding what is unique about this place, as well as about how people in this city face the many personal and political challenges common to cities throughout the country and the world today.

For Bechard, the prevailing theme of the festival is ​“surviving life in 2017,” he told the Independent. ​“Finding a way to promote kindness in a society that seems to have embraced bigotry and hatred. Finding beauty in something as simple as a garden, a carousel, a rock concert. The films we have programmed will open people’s eyes. And while they may not answer the eternal questions, they give it a good shot.”

Click on the audio player below to listen to a recent interview with NHDocs co-founder and co-director Charles Musser.

The festival starts on Thursday, June 1 and runs through Sunday, June 11. Except for one ticketed screening and subsequent concert at Café Nine on Tuesday, June 6, all of the screenings are free and open to the public, and all will be taking place at either the Whitney Humanities Center on Wall Street or the main branch of the New Haven Free Public Library.

For a complete schedule of festival movies, showtimes, and screening locations, check out the NHDocs website at http://www.nhdocs.com/.