WORLD PREMIERE The style. The fashion. The moves. Saturday Night Fever left an indelible stamp on our cultural memory of the 1970s—and there was one man behind it all. Robert Stigwood, a producer impresario, best known for managing the Bee Gees, took the swagger of a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn disco, and brought it to the […]
US PREMIERE An experimental portrait of Ilhan Mimaroglu, the legendary Turkish pioneer of electronic music who passed away in 2012. Through a multilayered structure that mirrors Ilhan Mimaroglu’s music, the film also tells the story of his vibrant wife Güngör, who migrated to the USA from Turkey in the early 1960s and became an activist […]
US PREMIERE In 1973, four young Black Muslims held up a sporting goods store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The bungled robbery triggered a response of deadly force by a then mostly-white police force and the longest hostage siege in NYPD history. Director Stefan Forbes, producer Fab Five Freddy and their team reconstruct what took place through […]
NYC PREMIERE A cinéma vérité glimpse into the lives of an eccentric New York family, Charm Circle follows filmmaker Nira Burstein as she attempts to bridge the fractured relationships between herself, her two sisters, and her parents. Emotional and accomplished, especially in the way it weaves together decades-old home videos and contemporary footage, the film […]
2020 METROPOLIS GRAND JURY PRIZE After making the dangerous journey from his native Guatemala to New York City, 15-year-old Luis struggles to balance attending school and finding work to support his family back home. Meanwhile, Judy, a Cuban-American ICE agent, faces her own internal conflict with the shifting enforcement priorities of her longtime career, from […]
2020 VIEWFINDERS SPECIAL JURY RECOGNITION FOR BEST USE OF ARCHIVAL MATERIAL WORLD PREMERE | Emerging as a distinctive voice in the East Village art scene of the 1980s, David Wojnarowicz combined a variety of disciplines, from painting and photography to music and writing, in his artistic practice. Fiercely and unapologetically embracing his queer identity, he rebelled against […]
WORLD PREMIERE | Dash Snow rejected a life of privilege to make his own way as an artist on the streets of downtown New York City in the late 1990s. Developing from a notorious graffiti tagger into an international art star, he documented his drug- and alcohol-fueled nights with the surrogate family he formed with […]
DOC NYC 2020 AUDIENCE AWARD WORLD PREMIERE | Lorine Padilla rose to prominence as the “first lady” of the Savage Skulls gang in 1970s New York City. As the wife of one of its founders, Padilla’s position as surrogate mother led her to push her penchant for organizing into a life of community activism. After […]
The Harlem Children’s Zone Initiative has transformed the lives of several generations of children and led a revolutionary educational and social experiment to break the cycle of poverty and violence. This inspiring and timely film uses an extraordinary archive to document its history. From serving one block in the 1990s to ultimately reaching 97 blocks, […]
WORLD PREMIERE | Ruth Finley, a pocket-sized woman of immense determination, has been the queen of the fashion industry since the 1930s. As a young mother, Ruth created the iconic pink Fashion Calendar, a publication that continues to organize and marshal American fashion today. Featuring Bill Cunningham, Carolina Herrera, Nicole Miller, Diane von Furstenberg, and more, […]