nothin NHDocs Ushers In Monthly Online Series | New Haven Independent

NHDocs Ushers In Monthly Online Series

Winter may be coming, but Gorman Bechard and NHDocs have no plans to hibernate. Instead, they are debuting a monthly online series offering a new documentary feature to fans hungry for more after a successful online festival this past summer.

“We’re bringing great new feature documentaries to Connecticut’s documentary loving audience,” said Bechard. “We want to keep exposing them to films that may have not been able to see otherwise.”

Although Bechard had success at this past year’s mostly online festival with the limited seating and properly distanced outdoor events he was able to schedule, he knows that is not possible in the months ahead.

“Down south they’re pulling off the drive-in thing and it’s kind of great,” he said of film festivals in warmer climates, but he noted that up here in New England we need other options, especially as the days get shorter and colder.

“We’re all just stir crazy,” he said. “We got to make the best of it, think up things that are new and different that alleviate the boredom and frustration.”

To that end, NHDocs will be showing a new film the second weekend of each month, beginning this Friday, Nov. 13.

“With the ticket purchase you can watch the film anytime between 6 p.m. Friday and midnight Sunday, so that’s two and a half days,” said Bechard. There is also a Q&A for each film. “The Q&A can be watched any time,” said Bechard. And “watching the film with the Q&A, you can still have the some of the experience of being at a film festival that you can’t get anywhere else.”

For the series’s inaugural screening, NHDocs chose the film Missing in Brooks County, which is being presented by both NHDocs and IRIS and has ties to NHDocs and its beginnings. Producers Lisa Molomot and Jacob Bricca were cofounders of the first NHDocs film festival along with Bechard and Charles Musser.

“We had been talking about it, said ‘let’s do the second weekend of the month, since there usually aren’t any holidays then, let’s find a movie,’ and that night I got an email from Jacob,” said Bechard. He watched the film and “immediately reached out to Chris George and Anne O’Brian at IRIS and asked them to co-sponsor it. They watched it, loved it and agreed.” The Q&A with directors Molomot and Jeff Bemiss is being moderated by George, executive director of IRIS.

Bechard hopes both the film and the series resonate with viewers. “We’re hoping, if it goes well, to do it through until the next festival,” he said The annual NHDocs festival is already set to begin Aug. 10, 2021 and began accepting submissions on Nov. 1.

But for now, there is Missing in Brooks County, a film that is part mystery, part memorial, and part meditation on immigration. This documentary focuses on a particular area in Texas 70 miles north of the Mexican border that has been called the largest cemetery in the United States” by Sheriff Benny Martinez. Thousands of deaths are estimated to have occurred since 2008 in this Texas county, which happens to hold one of many treacherous crossing areas that migrants make their way through as they attempt to avoid one of the U.S. Border Patrol’s interior checkpoints.

The film maintains a delicate balance between desperation and hopefulness as it follows the stories of two families searching for their loved ones who went missing while attempting to make the journey, as well as the multiple stories of those who work on these cases, including the volunteers who work tirelessly to account for those who did not make it through alive. As the film presents a variety of perspectives — including those of law enforcement officials, ranch owners, and human rights workers — it is difficult to not be affected by the discovery of decaying bodies and bones lying amid the brush and buried in unmarked graves. As Dr. Kate Spradley, biological anthropologist from Texas State University, says while among the hundreds of remains she and her team have collected, there’s a person inside every one of these boxes.”

Missing In Brooks County takes its place as an important part of the conversation regarding humanity and human rights as our country continues to evolve and make its own precarious journey from one immigration regime to another that is, perhaps, a little kinder.

Please visit the NHDocs website here to purchase tickets to this event.

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