New York Film Festival Plays Long Game With Supersized Documentaries

The long-running New York Film Festival , now in its 62nd year – one of the longer film festivals, with a span of more than two weeks — is showcasing some of the longest documentaries on record.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow , directed by Julia Loktev, measures almost 5.5 hours long. Taken together, Wang Bing's Youth (Homecoming) and Youth (Hard Times), both playing at NYFF, run over 6 hours. That's brief compared to exergue, the documentary directed by Dimitris Athyridis that clocks in at 14 hours.

Exergue, which premiered at the Berlinale in February before playing at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece, explores the 14th iteration of Documenta, the quinquennial event that is considered the most important contemporary art exhibition in the world.

"There's something about the way that film really digs into this extremely fascinating process of making an art exhibition," says Dennis Lim , artistic director of the New York Film Festival. "But it's also very clear from the start that it's a film that's not just about contemporary art, but really about the intersection of art and money and politics."

"There's no easy way to program a 14-hour film," Lim continues, noting the initial NYFF screening unfolded over three nights, "so chunks of about between four and five hours. And then on the final weekend, we're doing it over two daytime screenings, so about seven hours each stretch, with an intermission. I do think the film is very compulsive, very engrossing, so length really isn't an issue."

Bing, the Chinese-born, Paris-based director, returns to NYFF with the second and third installments of his Youth trilogy documenting the experience of migrant textile workers flooding into an urban area of Northwest China.

"The films aren't easy to screen or access necessarily, partly because of their length," Lim tells Deadline. "But more and more they have shown in the U.S., especially in New York, and he's cultivated a following. I think he's a major filmmaker. I think very few filmmakers have done as much with the documentary form in the last two decades."

The New York Film Festival, extending through Monday, October 14, doesn't necessarily emphasize world premieres, but this year's lineup does feature a few documentaries making their debut. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Stanley Nelson's San Juan Hill: Manhattan's Lost Neighborhood examines the historic working-class area of Manhattan that was razed in the 1950s to create Lincoln Center, "the world's leading performing arts center" that is home to the Metropolitan Opera, Alice Tully Hall, Film at Lincoln Center and the New York Film Festival.

Holding its world premiere this Wednesday is Robinson Devor's Suburban Fury, about Sara Jane Moore, the woman who in 1975, "took a revolver out of her purse and fired two shots at President Gerald Ford on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco's Union Square," as the festival program notes.

Lim says that documentary was chosen for the NYFF slate before the recent assassination attempts against former Pres. Trump. He expresses no hesitation to program a film about a would-be presidential assassin (the recently released Hinckley: I Shot the President, directed by Neil McGregor, focuses on John Hinckley, who almost succeeded in assassinating Pres. Reagan in 1981).

"We saw this film quite a few months ago," Lim says of Suburban Fury. "Even then, it struck a chord. I think it's perfectly valid for documentarians to make films about difficult, controversial, unsympathetic subjects. It's not necessarily giving a platform to them. I think it's a way of actually engaging with their actions, which are part of history and their complexity as human beings."

While Suburban Fury takes place in San Francisco, one of the documentaries in the NYFF lineup is set much closer to home base: Union , directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing. The film, winner of a Special Grand Jury Award for Art of Change at the Sundance Film Festival, examines the first successful effort to unionize an Amazon sorting facility in the U.S., located on New York's Staten Island.

"Even though it premiered many months ago at Sundance, it was one of the first films we invited because we felt like we wanted to be part of this film's New York launch. It is an important New York story," Lim observes. "What Brett and Stephen have done is really capture the events that led to what is, I think, a pretty remarkable moment in the history of American labor... I think it's one of the key documentaries of the year."

The New York Film Festival does not segregate nonfiction films from other work.

"We don't have a documentary section. We haven't had one for several years," Lim says. "I think that really speaks to our belief that documentary isn't necessarily a separate category of film. I'd like to put it in conversation with fiction films. And, also, a lot of films these days sort of live on the border of fiction and documentaries. We have documentaries across the program in the main slate, also in the Currents section. And, also, our shorts are a mix of fiction, experimental, and documentary."

Among the films at NYFF that tread the border of fiction and nonfiction are Little, Big, and Far , directed by Jem Cohen, and Jimmy, directed by Yashaddai Owens. The latter film looks at a seminal period in the life of James Baldwin, the extraordinary essayist, novelist and playwright who was born 100 years ago this year.

"That filmmaker, Yashaddai Owens, is a discovery for me, and I think for my colleagues," Lim comments. "His work was certainly new to me. I know that he is a photographer, and this is a film that uses Baldwin's biography as a jumping off point. I don't know how easily classified it is as either fiction or documentary. It's a film that imagines the life of a young James Baldwin as he has just arrived in Paris, where famously he spent some time."

These are tough times for many film festivals in North America ( Hot Docs , among others, comes to mind), but the New York Film Festival, a program of Film at Lincoln Center, appears to be thriving.

"It's in a really healthy place in New York," Lim says. "I've lived in New York a long time, and I see people turning out for festivals, turning out for releases of big and small movies, turning out for retrospectives. Certainly, post pandemic, I think there's an appetite... We have had record attendance two years running now. The numbers aren't in or final yet, but we're doing at least as well as last year's sales so far."

He adds, "If the metric is attendance, then I think we're doing well and we're really happy. We're excited about how engaged the audiences are with the work that we're showing."