DOC NYC 2023: Dispatch One

While the Fall film festival season may have, for the most part, come to a close, one of the year’s most fascinating documentary festivals is just about to kick off. DOC NYC is an annual cross-section of the latest and greatest in non-fiction cinema, and with the 2023 edition coming in with 100+ films, it’s one of the densest festivals around. So where to begin? That’s what we’re here for. Here are some films from DOC NYC 2023 worth keeping an eye on as the festival runs 11/8-11/26.

Starting off this dive into DOC NYC 2023 is one of the festival’s Short List entries. Entitled American Symphony, the film comes from director Matt Heineman (Cartel Land), and follows beloved musician/composer Jon Batiste as he both attempts to write a new symphony as well as help his wife, writer Suleika Jaouad, as she copes with a cancer that’s returned after years in remission. A startlingly beautiful piece of documentary filmmaking, American Symphony is a touching meditation on love, art and grief that’s as much a portrait of an artist’s creative process as it is the interplay between two people within a relationship as the world is thrown into chaos.

Originally intended to see Batiste travel the country and draw inspiration from the artists he’d encounter along the way, Symphony (but utter necessity) becomes a film much more about a specific moment in the lives of these two artists. Therefore, those looking to learn a great deal about Batiste himself may be disappointed. It’s less an artist portrait than it is a sort of “year-in-the-life” style, fly on the wall documentary. That said, Heineman makes a profoundly compassionate character study, a film that is as personal as it is quietly moving.

Next up is one of the Winner’s Circle entries, a film that’s garnered various awards through its lengthy film festival run. Entitled Kokomo City, the film is directed by D. Smith, and is an essential and provocative dive into the lives of four transgender sex workers, exploring their relationship to the larger black community as a whole. Smith’s debut feature, Kokomo City is a gorgeous, black and white exploration of the area between race and sexuality, exploring the dichotomy between the Trans and Black communities as told through the eyes of these four sex workers from across the country.

For a debut feature, this a rather impressive effort. The film rightly gives its subjects room to breathe, allowing each woman time and space to explain their lived experiences with empathy and nuance. The film portrays a community that’s at constant conflict between traditional values and a world that’s endlessly evolving, using these four specific experiences of life on the periphery to discuss any and all topics. The real beauty of the film comes from its lack of “polish,” with Smith giving her subjects the chance to speak freely and openly, with the hopes of creating an urgent and intimate documentary. There’s a tactile humanity here that’s rather startling, with each subject speaking with shocking candor. This is a must-see documentary.

Finally, rounding out this first piece on this year’s DOC NYC lineup, we look at one of the more hotly discussed biographical documentaries in this slate. Little Richard: I Am Everything comes from director Lisa Cortes, and attempts to bring to screen the life and times of the beloved entertainer Little Richard. Following its debut as the opening night film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, I Am Everything is a properly raucous journey into the life of one of the more influential rock stars of all time, and inarguably one of 2023’s most energetic pieces of non-fiction storytelling.

Cortes’ film is very much in the vein of the modern bio-doc, a poppy piece of filmmaking that pairs glowing interviews with family, scholars and contemporaries with archival material and footage that adds a great deal of depth to what could have easily been a glossy, broad documentary. Instead, Cortes crosses the life and work of Little Richard with his role in both the Black and queer communities, and the ground he broke as a member of both of them. A profoundly complicated figure, I Am Everything feels very much like the right title, with Cortes considering Richard in a startlingly holistic manner, contradictions and all. Easily one of the better biographical documentaries of 2023.