Tags archives: Calendar Girl

  • This may be the craziest, most emotionally disruptive fall in recent history, but the annual DOC NYC film festival is right on schedule. Like many other events these days, the country’s largest all-documentary fest, now in its 11th year, is completely virtual, making it available nationwide for the first time. Running online from November 11 through 19, and accessible to viewers across the U.S., this year’s edition includes 107 feature-length documentaries among over 200 films and dozens of events. There’s an emphasis on diversity with 57 features (53% of the lineup) directed or co-directed by women and 36 by Black, indigenous and people of color (34% of the feature program). As always, there’s a lot of docs to choose from, many of which are world or U.S. premieres. Aside from the films themselves, there will be conversations with filmmakers taking place daily in “DOC NYC Live” events, and pre-recorded filmmaker Q&As after film screenings. Among the festival’s many worthy entries: Duty Free, directed by Sian-Pierre Regis (making his feature debut), a film about Rebecca Danigelis, Regis’s 70-something mother, who is fired from her hotel housekeeping job. When she is unable to land another position, her son raises money through Kickstarter to fund Rebecca’s bucket list, which includes desires both humble (milk a cow) and expansive (a visit to England to her sister’s grave and reunite with the daughter she gave up). Many themes are woven throughout, in[...]