MoMA’s second-annual Documentary Fortnight offers some great films for the adventurous moviegoer.
The centerpiece of the Museum of Modern Art’s second annual Doc Month, a month-long festival of documentary films, is the Documentary Fortnight, where 50 new docs from around the world screen for the public and a jury. This year’s line-up is typically diverse, encompassing both short and feature-length documentaries from locations as nearby as Harlem and as far flung as China. The two-week competition began on February 11 and runs through the 25th. Here are a few choice highlights from the Fortnight’s programming schedule, all of which are screening at MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters and the Celeste Bartos Theater. Log onto moma.org for more info.
Super, Girls!
The phenomenally popular Chinese TV show Super Girl Singing Contest was modeled after American Idol. Shot before the show was banned for being “too popular,” this candid documentary follows four would-be contestants, ages seventeen to twenty, as they prepare for the pre-screening trials, revealing their inner thoughts, fears, and goals along the way. Their struggles reflect undercurrents within contemporary Chinese culture.
Screening Times: Saturday, February 14 at 1:30pm; Sunday, February 15 at 1:30pm
Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Film Project
A plea for the rights of African-American lesbians, the film follows the tragic story of Sakia Gunn, a fifteen-year-old hate crime victim who was murdered in Newark, NJ, after she rejected her killer’s advances. Although her attacker received a seventeen-year sentence, there was little media coverage of the trial.
Screening Times: Saturday, February 14 at 6pm; Monday, February 16 at 6pm
Third World Newsreel: New Filmmakers
This selection of films made in the U.S. between 2007 and 2008 includes Beyond the Music, about the Inspirational Choir of New York’s Riverside Church; Secondhand (Pepe), about the flow of used clothing from America to Haiti; Prime Time: Fighting Back Against Foreclosure, an explanation of the complexities of subprime mortgages; Excuse My Gangsta’ Ways, on a former leader of a Chinatown girl gang; Here to Stay, about a tenant organizer in Chinatown; In Bed with a Mosquito, about the antiwar protest group the Granny Brigade; and Our Queen of Harlem, in which parishioners protest the closing of their church in Spanish Harlem. Many of these works come from Third World Newsreel workshops for young filmmakers of color.
Screening Times: Saturday, February 14, 8pm; Monday, February 16 at 8pm
me broni ba (my white baby) and Barcelone ou la mort
Two short docs presented back to back. My white baby is a lyrical portrait of hair salons in Kumasi, Ghana, the tangled legacy of European colonialism in Africa is evoked through images of women practicing hair
braiding on discarded white baby dolls from the West. In Barcelone ou la mort, the fishing has died out and there are no jobs in Thiaroye, a suburb of Dakar, Senegal, so Modou crowds onto a small handmade boat with one hundred others bound for the Canary Islands—a journey that killed over three thousand Senegalese in 2006 alone.
Screening Times: Thurday, February 19 at 6pm; Friday, February 20 at 6pm
Brooklyn DIY
A long overdue examination of the creative renaissance in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Home to underground warehouse parties, anarchistic street creativity, and artist-run galleries and performance spaces, Williamsburg gave birth to one of the most vibrant and rebellious artistic communities to arise in the 1980s, permanently changing the city’s cultural landscape. Featuring interviews with a host of artists and neighborhood characters, the film captures life in a utopian universe made by artists, for artists—along with its inevitable decline in the face of real estate development, gentrification, and the post–September 11 market collapse.
Screening Times: Wednesday, Febraury 25 at 8:30pm
