DOC NYC’s Industry Roundtables program–formerly known as Only In New York–facilitates face-to-face meetings between leading industry decision-makers and filmmakers with works-in-progress. This program is co-presented by Showtime®.
Part of DOC NYC PRO, the festival’s industry and educational program, Industry Roundtables presents an opportunity for film teams with shorts, features and episodic projects to join lively roundtable-format information sessions with key industry figures from the fields of distribution, philanthropic funding, financing, PR, marketing, social impact, festival programming, and more. In advance of each year’s November festival, DOC NYC curates the most promising documentaries of the future for industry consideration, and selects these projects for Industry Roundtables from a competitive pool of online submissions. Filmmakers honored with the annual 40 Under 40 recognition are also eligible to participate.
The competitively selected film teams participating in this year’s program include first-time directors and long-time industry veterans from across the world, including Canada, Finland, France, Iraq, Israel, Mexico, Norway, Qatar and the United States. More than 80% of the selected film teams are helmed by filmmakers who identify as women, non-binary or genderqueer; 47% are headed by first-time directors; and 42% are director and/or produced by filmmakers who identify as Black, Indigenous or people of color.
Companies and organizations participating in 2022 Industry Roundtables meetings include A&E IndieFilms, ABC Studios, America ReFramed, Black Public Media, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Cinetic Media, CNN Original Films & Series, Conde Nast, Disney’s Onyx Collective, Disney+, ESPN Films, Firelight Media, HBO Documentary Films, Hulu, IFC Films, Imagine Entertainment, Impact Partners, International Documentary Association, Kickstarter, NBC News Studios, NEON, Netflix, MTV, Paramount+, Submarine Entertainment, WME Agency, WNET, Women Make Movies, and many others.
Projects denoted with an (*) indicate teams that are part of our Voices of Canada cohort.
#WhileBlack *
Witnesses who filmed the deaths of George Floyd, and others, step forward about the citizen journalist videos that have ignited global movements, exploring how technology and social media shape the trauma of racial violence against African Americans.
Directors: Sidney Fussell, Samantha Knowles
Producers: Ann Shin, Geeta Gandbhir
ADA: My Mother, My Architect
Ada Karmi-Melamede is Israel’s most important living architect, as well as an unusual role model and mother. Her daughter, a former architect, sets out to tell her unique story against the backdrop of the turbulent country Ada loves.
Director: Yael Melamede
Producer: Hilla Medalia
All American
In this modern, coming-of-age documentary, immigrant and first-generation American girls confront gender expectations, economic disadvantages and cultural divides while defining themselves and their futures within the fastest-growing high school sport in the country: women’s wrestling.
Director: Mark Andrew Altschul
Producers: Mark Andrew Altschul, Trish Dalton and Evan Murphy Johnson
Bam Bam: The Story of Sister Nancy *
A feature music documentary that explores the wild story behind how Sister Nancy’s hit song, “Bam Bam,” became the most sampled reggae vocal of all time.
Director: Alison Duke
Producers: Alison Duke, Ngardy Conteh George
Barbara Hammer Project
An exclusive look at the iconic life, work and legacy of pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, tracing her prolific canon alongside never-before-seen documentations of her life and body to reveal Barbara’s unconventional attempts to live on forever.
Director: Brydie O’Connor
Producer: Elijah Stevens
Between Earth and Sky
Renowned ecologist Nalini Nadkarni studies “what grows back” after a disturbance in the rainforest canopy. After surviving a life-threatening tree fall, she must turn her research question onto herself to explore the effects of disturbance and recovery throughout her life.
Director: Andrew Nadkarni
Producers: Katie Schiller, Swetha Regunathan
Break the Game
Watch a video game legend embark on a quest to recapture her lost fame, shatter world records and find love in the digital age.
Director: Jane M. Wagner
Producer: Jane M. Wagner
Chain of Rocks
A death row inmate accepts a plea deal for a crime after 30 years of maintaining complete innocence. Now, an activist that once fought for his release is faced with the moral dilemma of whether the fight was in vain.
Director: Damon Davis
Producer: Chris Renteria
Comparsa
When tragedy strikes on the outskirts of Guatemala City, two lionhearted sisters recruit a group of local kids to transform their community’s pain into an artistic statement of hope and resistance, culminating in a night of spectacle and street performance.
Directors: Vickie Curtis, Doug Anderson
Producer: Anna Hadingham
Cycle
Deconstructing the systemic cycle of police brutality in the United States, Cycle independently investigates the officer-involved shooting death of a young man stopped while riding his bicycle in the early morning hours before his community’s Juneteenth Day Celebration.
Director: Laura Dyan Kezman, William Howell
Producer: Vianca Fuster
Daddy
One family’s coming of age story, which also happens to be an old man’s coming out story.
Director: Hannah Myers
Producer: Emily Simoness
Downwinders: First We Bombed New Mexico
A Latina cancer survivor ignites a movement challenging the government’s cover-up and refusal to provide reparations to Latinx and Native residents who’ve suffered multigenerational cancers they tie to Trinity, the world’s first nuclear bomb, detonated in New Mexico in 1945.
Director: Lois Lipman
Producer: Lois Lipman
Everest Dark *
A revered Sherpa climber comes out of retirement and returns to Mount Everest one last time to try to find the bodies of his friends missing in the Khumbu icefall.
Director: Jereme Watt
Producer: Michael Bodnarchuk, Merit Jensen Carr
Finding the Money
An underdog group of economists dubbed “Modern Monetary Theory,” or MMT, are on a mission to turn our understanding of the national debt upside down. They say the national debt is not our debt; instead, it’s our money.
Director: Maren Poitras
Producers: Maren Poitras, Ines Hofmann Kanna
Flophouse America
Twelve-year-old Mikal is born and raised in the hotel room he shares with his parents, both struggling with alcohol addiction. Mikal’s biggest wish is for them to stop drinking, but what does it take for someone to change their ways?
Director: Monica Strømdahl
Producers: Beathe Hofseth, Siri Natvik
Happy Campers
The working-class denizens of a scrappy seasonal trailer park reveal the secrets to a rich life as the march of capitalism closes in on their shabby Shangri-La.
Director: Amy Nicholson
Producer: Amy Nicholson
Harkness *
Harkness, an enigmatic musician disguised in an alien-looking cloak and visor, is on a mission to launch an artistic revolution against the commodification of music that gluts the masses and starves the artists.
Director: Maria Markina
Producer: Ed Barreveld
Home and Native Lands *
The story of two doctors living in the Japanese Canadian internment camps after losing their homes and identities.
Director: Alice Shin
Producer: Eiko Brown
Home is a Hotel
Within the walls of their 80-square-foot SRO hotel rooms, a diverse group of five diverse San Francisco residents strive against cyclical forces and a housing crisis in their search for a place to call home.
Directors: Kevin Wong, Kar Yin Tham
Producers: Todd Sills
I Will Be The Best of You
A rare, harrowing, observational film that takes a personal and unflinching look at one family’s painful history of intergenerational trauma, violence, and addiction.
Director: Rebeca Byerly
Producer: Kat Vecchio
Impossible Town
When her father dies unexpectedly, Dr. Ayne Amjad is thrust to the helm of a decades-long struggle to aid a southern West Virginia town beset by cancer-causing chemicals.
Directors: Scott Faris, Meg Griffiths
Producer: Meg Griffiths
Keepin’ Up With The Joneses: Hank, Thad & Elvin Jones
Hank, Thad and Elvin Jones were African American musical geniuses who attained fame as jazz performers and composers from the 1950s on, while dealing with racial segregation and violence. But family conflicts kept them from playing together or becoming legends.
Director: Rob Levi
Producer: Rebecca Halbower, Josh Blum
Kings of Kawergosk
Two Syrian Kurdish football (soccer) prodigies who have spent their entire childhoods mired in Kawergosk Refugee Camp are swept up into the camp’s mythology of football, and hope that their tremendous talents can bend destiny.
Director: Timothy Wu
Producers: Timothy Wu, Sabir Rasheed
Lust on Earth: The Global Cultures of Infidelity
In this stunningly candid exploration of infidelity, adulterers and victims of unfaithfulness in 40 countries break their silence to compare norms, laws and taboos while also revealing their own personal escapades.
Director: Michael LaPointe
Producers: Michael LaPointe, Dara Diaz
Qatar Stars
A four-year story of girlhood in all its joys and growing pains, through intimate access to a multinational rhythmic gymnastics school led by a former Russian gymnast.
Director: Danielle Beverly
Producer: Jawaher AlMoawda, Marco Williams
Russians At War *
Since February 24, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and the world awoke to a very different reality, Anastasia has quietly and unassumingly been on the ground in Russia taking her camera and great risk to document what she encounters.
Director: Anastasia (Last Name Withheld)
Producer: Cornelia Principe
Shaken
Following a flawed medical diagnosis, a couple faces a staggering criminal charge and state removal of their children. An intimate portrait of a family torn apart by injustice, Shaken is also a gripping account of their battle to stay together.
Director: Asher Levinthal
Producer: Kellen Quinn, Caitlin Mae Burke
The Book of Vaughn
A documentary on the life, light, and legacy of one of underground comics’ most mysterious and legendary figures, Vaughn Bode, The Cartoon Guru.
Director: A. Nick Francis
Producer: A. Nick Francis, Jorge Novoa
The Messengers
The Messengers follows four Conservative climate activists from a growing movement known as the “eco right.” Working in diverse areas—the church, in agriculture, the youth movement, and in city government—they have chosen to lead the fight for climate action within their own conservative worlds.
Director: Nadia Gill, Dominic Gill
Producer: Nevo Shinaar, Nadia Gill
The New York Love Songs
Filmed with personal journey intimacy for fifteen years, The New York Love Songs is an immersive portrait of millennial musicians on the journey from jazz school to adulthood, as the aughts give way to a new digital frontier.
Director: Darah Golub
Producer: Darah Golub
The Remarkable Women
A global hybrid documentary series telling untold stories about the women behind the success of iconic men.
Director: Nora Jacobson
Producer: Jane Applegate, Alice Look
The Siren Song
Two sisters had kept searching for love and a place of their own since they were teenagers but until today, they had found nothing. Now in their 80s, they hope to find it at an unimaginable place: the sea bottom.
Director: Eden Bernal
Producer: Polly Yeung
The Track *
A contemporary coming-of-age journey following three Muslim teenagers chasing their Olympic dreams in post-war Bosnia while training on their bullet-riddled luge track discarded after the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo.
Director: Ryan Sidhoo
Producer: Ryan Sidhoo
To The Birds *
A vibrant cinematic journey exploring unseen links between birding and economics, To The Birds is a feature-length documentary that reveals profound connections at the root of our intersecting political, economic, and ecological crises.
Director: Daniel Froidevaux
Producer: Marc Serpa Francoeur, Ben Lenzner
Untitled Creede Documentary
Can Americans on either side of today’s political and social divides actually live together in the same place? In conservative Creede, Colorado, population 357, the unlikely combination of mining families and progressive theater people have no choice but to try.
Director: Kahane Cooperman
Producer: Innbo Shim
Untitled Muscogee Nation Documentary
When the Muscogee Nation suddenly begins censoring their free press, a rogue reporter fights to expose her government’s corruption in a historic battle that will have ramifications for all of Indian Country.
Directors: Rebecca Landsberry-Baker, Joe Peeler
Producer: Garrett Baker, Conrad Beilharz
Untitled Nomads Documentary
An overworked family from rural Iowa and a troubled older woman in search of healing join the growing nomadic movement, led by “vanlife” evangelist Bob Wells. When the fantasy of road life meets reality, each must overcome adversity and self-doubt.
Director: Vanessa Carr, Josh Gleason
Producer: Xan Parker