In 1967, while living in exile in New York City, South African freelance photojournalist Ernest Cole published his seminal and only book House of Bondage, exposing the violent atrocities of Black life under apartheid to the rest of the world for the first time. Officially made stateless one year later, Cole carried on his photographic documentation of racial violence and discrimination in the United States, chronicling the daily lived experiences of Black Americans in Harlem and the South during the peak of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
The late photographer’s life and work will be front and center on the big screen in the feature documentary Ernest Cole: Lost And Found (2024), making its New York debut at the 15th iteration of DOC NYC later this month. It’s one of more than 200 films that will screen in what is billed as America’s largest documentary festival, kicking off on November 13 with nonfiction films covering topics from the 2019 Sudanese revolution to the Yacht Rock evolution.
The event runs in-person through November 21 at Lower Manhattan’s IFC Center, SVA Theatre, and Village East by Angelika before continuing online, where audiences across the country can access virtual screenings through December 1.
Among other films premiering at the festival is Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter’s Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other (2024), which focuses on the ups and downs of later-in-life romance through the relationship of Bronx-born photographer Joel Meyerowitz and British artist Maggie Barrett. The feature-length documentaries My Sweet Land (2024) and There Was, There Was Not (2024), which both center on the experiences of ethnic Armenians during the Second Artsakh War, will also be making debuts followed by question-and-answer sessions with their filmmakers when they screen on November 16 and 18, respectively.
On November 15, the festival will screen the documentary No Other Land (2024), which illustrates the realities of Palestinian life in the Occupied West Bank over five years by zooming in on the friendship between two of the film’s directors, Palestinian journalist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. Despite receiving international acclaim and winning numerous awards, the film still does not have a US distributor, which the filmmakers have alleged could be due to political tensions from the US elections.
“Maybe they’re afraid to be defunded if Trump wins,” Abraham said in a Paris interview with the Associated Press. “But Basel [Adra] risked his life for years since he was a young boy to film this material … Can we not have one distributor with the courage … to take a certain risk, but to distribute such an acclaimed and such an important documentary?”
Alongside stories from outside the US, the festival will also highlight local history. At the Village East by Angelika on November 17, audiences will be able to watch Man From Pretentia (2024) — a documentary about the East Village curator and gallerist Paul Bridgewater, who hitchhiked from a California trailer park to become an essential figure in the Lower Manhattan neighborhood’s burgeoning ’80s art scene. The film follows Bridgewater from his humble beginnings through the rise and fall of his short-lived Lower East Side gallery Smart Clothes to his final days beleaguered by health issues, yet buoyed by his resilient spirit.
“Paul Bridgewater’s story shines a light on a self-invention, self-creation and self-directed evolution that has become rarer and rarer in our society but is not yet impossible,” filmmaker Chih Hsuan Liang told Hyperallergic. “If there is a message in this film it is that by following one’s intuition and aligning oneself with a legacy and lineage you believe in, whether you were born to it or not, you can recreate yourself to your own design.”
The full line-up for this year’s festival is available on NYC DOC’s website here.
