New haven documentary film festival begins
New Haven Documentary Film Festival (also known as NHdocs) is an annual documentary film festival held in New Haven, Connecticut, over a weekend in the month of June. Screenings take place at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium and the New Haven Free Public Library. NHdocs is a regional festival that showcases documentaries by filmmakers from the greater New Haven area and beyond. NHdocs was launched in 2014 when the film festival’s co-founders Charles Musser, Gorman Bechard, Jacob Bricca, and Lisa Molomot came together at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and decided to create a documentary film festival in New Haven that would “build a sense of community among documentary filmmakers from the greater New Haven area.” In 2014, the four filmmakers each showed one of their recently completed documentaries, three of which had just played at the Big Sky.
When Brica and Molomot left Connecticut to teach at University of Arizona, Bechard and Musser assumed the role of co-directors and programmers for NHdocs. The 2015 festival displayed over 20 documentaries including "first looks" at two nearly completed: Richard Wormser's NEH funded American Reds; What Must We Dream Of? and Audrey Appleby's Tiny Miracles-Awakening Memory and Emotion in an Alzheimer’s World. Brendan Toller's rock doc Danny Says, about music industry executive Danny Fields, was moderated by Timothy Young of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which had recently acquired Fields' papers, and Gorman Bechard's animal welfare feature A Dog Named Gucci. Many of the films look at New Haven in terms of its openness to immigrants, the history of the New Haven Green, and efforts to combat homelessness.
In 2016, the festival grew to 11 days, featuring over 40 films, including Midsummer in Newtown, The Champions, and co-founder Bechard's own Who Is Lydia Loveless? Three Newtown/Sandy Hook-related shorts had their world premieres at the festival: Kim A. Snyder’s #WeAreAllNewtown, Notes from Dumblane and Sue Roman’s Team 26. The festival also paid tribute to documentarian Alex Gibney, with a three-day retrospective: “Revealing Scams, Lies, Trickery and Deceit: The Documentaries of Alex Gibney.” screening 5 of his feature films. Gibney himself was present for Q&A sessions, and lead a panel on filmmaking.
The Fourth Annual New Haven Documentary Film Festival has been announced for June 1–11, 2017. The second weekend will conclude with a retrospective of work by D. A. Pennebaker and Chis Hegedus, including Unlocking the Cage.