Editor’s Note: The following story contains mentions of self-harm. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
For New Yorkers, the joy of the holiday season might be dampened by one particularly dreaded seasonal event. Around mid-December comes Santacon, in which thousands don the apparel of Saint Nick and swarm Manhattan for a massive pub crawl, jamming the streets, sidewalks, and subways with disruptive nonsense. I personally am preemptively cringing for the weekend when I’ll be on a train, see someone in a red suit, and think, “Oh fuck, that’s today? God dammit.”
Something I did not know until perusing the program for this year’s DOC NYC film festival is that Santacon has its roots in the West Coast arts scene. This history is explored in Santacon, one of hundreds of documentaries playing online and at myriad New York City venues as part of the festival. Just as Christmas itself is a religious observance utterly absorbed by consumerism, Santacon (founded as “Santarchy”) was originally a culture-jamming anticapitalist venture before getting co-opted by the mainstream. In the mid-’90s, members of countercultural groups like Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society, and the Billboard Liberation Front disrupted everyday holiday activities dressed as Santa to make artistic statements. Now, well, you can watch Santa vomit in Times Square.
This year’s DOC NYC slate is also your chance to watch titles we at Hyperallergic have highlighted for you before. Third Act is a tribute to Robert Nakamura, the “godfather of Asian-American media.” Suburban Fury looks at the curious case of a woman who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975. Free Leonard Peltier summarizes the namesake imprisoned Native activist’s long road to clemency. Monk in Pieces is a biography of avant-garde composer and multihyphenate Meredith Monk. And like Santacon, Secret Mall Apartment follows artists engaged in an unusual bit of culture-jamming performance, secretly squatting for years in an apartment they built within a mall’s parking structure.
Other titles playing the fest explore the lives and adventures of artists in a variety of fields. For example, John Lennon’s sole post-Beatles musical show with Yoko Ono is the subject of One to One: John & Yoko. That film will have already played DOC NYC by the time of publication, but you can catch up with it on various streaming platforms.
Public performance is also at the heart of several other picks. The Nutcracker at Wethersfield follows members of the New York City Ballet who staged the classic namesake show in the Hudson Valley after the COVID-19 pandemic foreclosed its regular annual performances in 2020. It’s a sharp reminder of the inventiveness of artists in response to the challenges of quarantine. Bull’s Heart looks at much less conventional dancers, profiling Greek experimental choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou and following him through the rehearsal of a new production.
The photographer Kwame Brathwaite is best known for turning the phrase “Black is beautiful” into an artistic movement. Both his family and a cadre of celebrities attest to his influence in Black Is Beautiful: The Kwame Brathwaite Story, making its North American premiere at the fest. Brathwaite ignored any distinction between art and activism; that thread continues in Misan Harriman: Shoot the People. The titular photographer has documented protests worldwide, notably those part of the Black Lives Matter movement, but the film is anything but self-congratulatory. In it, he questions how much he’s tangibly accomplished through his work.
Other docs focus specifically on feminist issues in the arts. Although the feminist community has had a contentious relationship with Marilyn Minter at times, as chronicled in her new biopic, Pretty Dirty, a fresh look at her unabashedly sexual, sometimes pornographic work might land differently with a new generation with differing sensibilities. Meanwhile, a more archivally focused work, Artists in Residence, tells the story of three divorced single mothers and working artists who bought a house together on the Bowery in the 1950s, highlighting how drastically social norms have changed in the intervening years.
One last film is a much more intimate tribute. Alan Berliner, who specializes in crafting films based on personal archives, made a portrait of his friend Benita Raphan, an experimental documentarian who died by suicide several years ago. Benita is both a biopic and assisted memoir, a posthumous collaboration Berliner assembled out of footage and writings Raphan left behind. Like many of the films in this year’s DOC NYC, its emphasis on artistic labor and the everyday opens a window onto creative life.
DOC NYC continues at various venues in New York City and online through November 30.
