What’s Up? Docs!

Michael Moore, one of the most provocative and influential filmmakers of the past three decades, is coming to town for a local documentary film fest that has blossomed from a weekend-long showcase of New Haven talent into an 11-day marathon worthy of national consideration.

The festival begins Thursday and runs through Sunday, June 9.

Moore, a Michigan native and cinematic gadfly whose movies include Bowling for Columbine, Roger & Me, and Fahrenheit 9/11, is visiting the Elm City for a career retrospective to be held during the sixth annual New Haven Documentary Film Festival, which runs from Thursday, May 30, through Sunday, June 9.

All but two of the festival’s 100-plus screenings are free (the two paid screenings include admission to live musical performances at Cafe Nine), and all take place downtown at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, the main branch of the New Haven Free Public Library, Cafe Nine, or the State House. Click here for a full schedule of screenings.

The fest continues to celebrate New Haven and Connecticut-based documentarians looking to find and build community through their movies. But NHdocs co-founder, co-director, and lead programmer Gorman Bechard said on a recent episode of WNHH’s ​“Deep Focus” radio program that this year’s line-up goes even further than last year’s in its attempt to attract the most innovative and entertaining nonfiction films from throughout the country and the world.

“I basically look at every documentary that’s playing” at the first half of the year’s three big international film fests, Sundance, South by Southwest, and Tribeca, he said. ​“And if something piques my fancy, I go after it.”

Bechard’s festival co-founder and co-director, Yale professor Charles Musser, added that he also scouted out new films to bring to the local fest on recent trips to the Ethnografilm Festival in Paris and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival at Duke University in North Carolina.

That programming ambition has landed celebrated new documentaries like Rachel Mason’s Tribeca-premieredCircus of Books (Bechard’s one-sentence description: ​“What happens if your sweet Jewish parents just happened to own the largest gay porn bookstore in Los Angeles?”) and experimental installations like Derek Taylor’s 11-minute, three-screen geological exploration The Earth Remains. It has also enticed Moore to participate in the first-ever retrospective of his nonfiction work.

Bechard said Musser hatched the plan that ultimately convinced Moore to come to New Haven for the comprehensive review of his documentaries.

Before Musser began his academic career teaching film studies at Yale, he worked as an assistant editor on Peter Davis’s 1974 doc Hearts and Minds. Made at the height of the Vietnam War, the documentary assembled original interviews, newsreel footage, and battlefield recordings to deliver a scathing critique of a seemingly interminable conflict rich in foreign civilian casualties and devoid of American popular support and strategic military rationale.

The 1974 film was a strong influence on Moore’s 2004 anti-Iraq War doc Fahrenheit 9/11, also made at the heart of an international conflict criticized as dubious and imperial.

On Friday, June 9, NHdocs will be screening Hearts and Minds, to be followed by Moore interviewing Davis in person at the Whitney Humanities Center about the making of and legacy of the Vietnam-era doc. Then, that same night, the fest will screen Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, to be followed by Davis interviewing Moore about the holding power of the latter’s work.

Later that same weekend, NHdocs audiences can also sit in on Moore interviews with cinema verite documentary legends D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus following screenings of Bowling for Columbine, Where to Invade Next, Fahrenheit 11/9, Roger & Me, and other Moore movies.

“We’ve been bringing in top documentary filmmakers since the beginning of the festival,” Musser said, citing previous retrospectives on the works of Pennebaker, Hegedus, and Alex Gibney. But for Moore to decide to hold his first in-depth retrospective at NHdocs, he said, is testament to the appeal of this year’s festival line-up as well as of New Haven itself, which Musser credited as being a less politically hostile environment for Moore’s provocative left-wing filmmaking than some other festival sites might have been.

Bechard said that Moore’s movies, which have long criticized this country’s obsession with guns, subservience to corporate greed, and eagerness to engage in military interventions overseas, are a healthy reminder that nonfiction films do not have to be dry, impersonal, ​“objective” documents in order to educate and provoke a conversation.

“One of the things that’s sometimes lacking from documentaries is they’re too information heavy,” he said, ​“and they forget that they also need to be entertaining. Or you’re going to be turning them off. Michael Moore’s films are always entertaining.”

In addition to the Moore retrospective, this year’s fest continues NHdoc’s celebration of rock docs with screenings of Boy Howdy: The Story of Creem Magazine, director Scott Crawford’s new movie about the endearingly obnoxious and salacious 70s alternative to Rolling Stone Magazine, and of I Need That Record!, New Haven filmmaker Brendan Toller’s 2010 pic about the enduring appeal of independent record stores. Musser credited filmmaker John Lucas, a new addition to the festival’s programming team, as helping bring in the documentary The Ballad of Fred Hersch about the legendary jazz pianist.

This year’s fest also features a surge of new documentaries about police accountability and Black Lives Matter protest movements with such films as Jeffrey Teitler’s Hartford-based The Sweetest Land, Aaron Peirano Garrison and Clark Burnett’s New Haven-based Questions of Justice, and local filmmaker Steve Hamm​‘s Shift Change, about the history of community policing in the Elm City.

“Whatever’s in the news today,” Bechard said, ​“is a documentary two years from now.” And with the continued, sustained conversations in cities throughout the country about the fraught relationship between police and communities of color, he expects to see plenty more movies on the subject in the months and years to come.

The movies featured in this year’s NHdocs are testament to the adage that ​“fact is a lot stranger than fiction,” Becahrd said in a closing pitch for documentary filmmaking in general. (See: Eric Michael Schrader’s Zulu Summer, preview above.)

“With most independent films right now,” he said, ​“people are trying to do ridiculous things. Their lighting is terrible. Their photography is terrible, particularly in the low-budget range. And the acting is terrible.

“This is not acting. This is real life.”

NHdocs runs from May 30 through June 9. Go to http://www.nhdocs.com/ for a compete schedule and list of screenings.

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full Deep Focus interview with Bechard.