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DOCUMENTARY ROUNDUP
Listing the Documentaries Around the DC Metro Area Provided in Partnership with WIFV-DC’s Documentary Roundtable.
Special thanks to Matthew Radcliff of the Doc Roundup blog for compiling and updating this list every week. |
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| Film Name | Venue | Dates | Description |
| Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance | West End Cinema and AFI Silver | 1/28, 1:30pm and 1/29, 11am | The Joffrey Ballet is the groundbreaking cultural treasure known as the first truly American dance company. The film documents how the Joffrey revolutionized American ballet by daringly combining modern dance with traditional ballet technique, combining art with social statement and setting ballets to pop and rock music scores. The film features rare excerpts from many seminal Joffrey works including Astarte, Trinity and Billboards. |
| King, A Filmed Record: Montgomery to Memphis | Library of Congress Packard Campus, Culpeper, VA | 1/28, 7:30pm | A riveting compilation of documentary footage of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from the Montgomery bus boycott to the “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, from the dogs of Selma to the Nobel Prize and the fateful motel balcony in Memphis. FREE |
| Released to Life | GWU, Cloyd Heck Marvin Center Ampitheater, 800 21st St NW, 3rd floor | 1/30, 1pm | Mayor Gray and Mr. Leonsis will announce the winners of the Washington’s Best Film contest and introduce a special screening of Released to Life, which follows the lives of several recently released ex-offenders as they struggle to redline themselves in a society that they no longer know. |
| Salvador Dawning | BloomBars | 1/31, 7pm | Captures the diverse perspectives of Afro-Brazilian mobilization from Brazil’s own Afro-descendant leaders, legislators, and activists. Afro-Brazilians number about 70 million, approximately 47% of Brazil’s total population and comprise the largest group of Afro-descendant people outside of Africa! Yet despite Afro-Brazilian’s tremendous contributions to Brazil’s culture, society and economy, they face disproportionate social and economic barriers. |
| Home Key | Goethe-Institut Washington | 2/1, 6:30pm | Follows the last 48 hours of a group of Palestinians in the refugee camp of Al-Rweished, on the border between Jordan and Iraq, before leaving for Brazil. They leave behind family, friends and a past full of memories. Nine months later, the film follows five of them in different points of Brazil, showing their adaptation issues, their fears for family safety, for the ones that were left behind in the Middle East, the country, the uncertainties and hopes for a new future. Part of Best of INPUT festival. |
| Warrior Champions | Avalon Theatre | 2/1, 7:30pm | Four Iraq War veterans strive to turn the nightmares of war into Olympic dreams. After losing limbs and suffering paralysis fighting for their country, they set out to do what many thought impossible . . . but will they make the cut? Part of ReelAbilities Disabilities Film Festival. |
| This Is Where We Take Our Stand | Busboys and Poets | 2/2, 6pm | The story of hundreds of veterans who risked everything to publicly tell their accounts of the horrors they witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March of 2008, two hundred and fifty veterans and active-duty soldiers marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by gathering in Washington, DC, to testify from their own experience about the nature of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. It was chilling, horrifying, and challenging for all who witnessed it. Against tremendous odds, they brought the voices of the veterans themselves into the debate. |
| The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers | The Hill Center | 2/2, 7pm | In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a leading Vietnam War strategist, concludes that America’s role in the war is based on decades of lies. He leaks 7,000 pages of top-secret documents to the New York Times, a daring act of conscience that leads directly to Watergate, President Nixon’s resignation, and the end of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg and a who’s-who of Vietnam-era movers and shakers give a riveting account of those world-changing events in this production. Part of Best of INPUT festival. |
| Addiction Incorporated | Landmark E Street | OPENS 2/3 | Victor DeNoble was funded in the 1980s by a major tobacco company to invent a safer form of nicotine, and he succeeded. But he inadvertently created something the tobacco companies had been avoiding for years: indisputable scientific evidence that nicotine was addictive. Their reaction was swift. His position was terminated, his lab was closed, and both his research and his “safer cigarette” were buried in the vaults and kept from the public . . . until he broke his confidentiality agreement and became the ultimate whistleblower. Straight from the mouths of the key players behind the scenes, this film reveals exactly how the tobacco industry achieved behemoth power through scientific secrecy and what their next move may be. |
| Henry O! | DC JCC, Cecile Goldman Theater, 1529 16th St NW | 2/3, 1pm | Enrique “Henry” Oliu has been blind since birth, but that didn’t stop him from making his major league baseball dream come true–being a color commentator for Florida’s Tampa Bay Rays. Part of ReelAbilities Disabilities Film Festival. |
| Nora | WHUT 2222 4th St NW DC | 2/3, 8pm | Shot in Southern Africa, Nora is based on childhood memories of the self-exiled dancer Nora Chipaumire who was born in Zimbabwe in 1965. Using performance and dance, she brings her history to life in a swiftly-moving poem of sound and image. Part of Best of INPUT festival. |
| Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story | AFI Silver | 2/4, 9pm | a film about the short yet extraordinary life of this soldier and poet by Silver Spring’s own Ari Daniel Pinchot and Jonathan Gruber. Get your tickets here. |
| Shameless | Cinema Arts Theatre | 2/5, 10:30am | A comedian, poet, dancer and other artists with diverse disabilities gather for a pajama party and decide to turn the tables on Hollywood stereotypes of people with disabilities, intent on creating their own images outside of The Monster, The Saint, The Psycho and The Poor Little Crippled Girl. Part of ReelAbilities Disabilities Film Festival. |
| Shooting Beauty and Crooked Beauty | DC JCC, Cecile Goldman Theater, 1529 16th St NW | 2/5, 11am and 2/7, 7:30pm | “Shooting Beauty: Fashion photographer Courtney Bent’s career and views on art take an unexpected turn when she discovers a hidden world of beauty at a center for people living with significant disabilities
Crooked Beauty: Artist-activist Jacks Ashley McNamara takes a transformative journey from troubled childhood to psych ward patient to pioneering mental health advocate, reshaping mental health stigmas while re-approaching madness as a tool for creativity, inspiration and hope. Part of ReelAbilities Disabilities Film Festival.” |
| Henry O! | Artisphere | 2/5, 1pm | Enrique “Henry” Oliu has been blind since birth, but that didn’t stop him from making his major league baseball dream come true–being a color commentator for Florida’s Tampa Bay Rays. Part of ReelAbilities Disabilities Film Festival. |
| Praying with Lior | JCC of Northern Virginia | 2/5 and 2/6, 7:30pm | Lior has Down Syndrome and has spent his entire life praying with utter abandon. As he approaches Bar Mtizvah, the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony, parents, teachers, friends and Lior himself explore difficult questions such as what is “disability” and who really talks to God. Part of ReelAbilities Disabilities Film Festival. |
| Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action | BloomBars | 2/7, 7pm | Nearly all Indian lands in the U.S. face grave environmental threats, including toxic waste, strip mining, oil drilling and nuclear contamination. But a handful of activists are fighting back. Filmed against some of America’s most spectacular backdrops, from Alaska to Maine and Montana to New Mexico, Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action profiles the against-all-odds struggles of Native American leaders who are taking on powerful energy companies and government agencies to protect the environment for all Americans. |
| Shark Week with EP Brooke Runnette | Wechsler Theater (3rd floor of Mary Graydon Center, AU) | 2/7, 7pm | Brooke Runnette, the key person behind Discovery Channel’s famed Shark Week annual event, will show clips while explaining why Shark Week is so successful, what is does for shark conservation, and the challenges she faces in producing the programs. |
| Le Mystere Picasso | National Gallery of Art | 2/8, 2:30pm and 2/9-10, 12:30pm | The classic 1956 film by Henri-Georges Clouzot: an imaginative homage to his friend Picasso as the maestro paints before the camera |
| We Are Egypt | Takoma Park Community Center, 7500 Maple Avenue, Takoma Park, MD | 2/9, 8pm | Months before 2011′s momentous uprising in Egypt, many talked of a revolution – but no one knew when that day would come. The 85-minute film showcases Egypt’s passionate democracy activists who toiled for years before seeing success from their sacrifice. It is an account of their struggle against extraordinary odds to remove an uncompromising authoritarian regime determined to stay in power. This is the story behind the story of the Arab Spring. FREE |
| Oscar Documentary Shorts | West End Cinema | OPENS 2/10 | Showing: The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement
God Is Bigger Than Elvis Incident in New Baghdad Saving Face The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom |
| DDR/DDR | National Gallery of Art | 2/11, 2:30pm | Before-and-after traits of a once divided and then reunified Germany are seen through the filmmaker’s steady and assured perspective as an outsider assuming various roles as ethnographer, actor, and collector. Verite interviews mix with feigned dialogue to excavate East German traumas associated with both the socialist state and reunification. |
| Fly By Light | Goethe-Institut Washington | 2/12, 10:30am | Work-in-progress screening: In the summer of 2011, fifteen high school students from diverse neighborhoods across Washington DC were uprooted from the hustle of inner-city life to beautiful mountain vistas and springs of West Virginia. For many of the teenagers, this was their first time leaving the concrete confines of the city. Part of Our City Film Festival |
| More Than A Month | Busboys and Poets | 2/12, 1pm | Should Black History Month be ended? That’s the question explored by African American filmmaker Shukree Hassan Tilghman as he embarks on a cross-country campaign to do just that. Both amusing and thought provoking, More Than a Month examines what the treatment of history tells us about race and power in contemporary America. |
| Eames: The Architect and the Painter | National Gallery of Art | 2/12, 4:30pm | The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during WWII, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life, from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age, has been less widely understood. |
| Upcoming Film Festivals Around Town | |||
| Banff Mountain Film Festival | National Geographic | 1/31-2/4 | For 36 years during the first week of November, thousands of extreme-sports enthusiasts and filmmakers have descended on the little town of Banff, in the Canadian Rockies, to savor the world’s top films on mountain sports and cultures. See the best of that gathering at this popular Nat Geo Live event. |
| Our City Film Festival | Goethe-Institut Washington | 2/11-2/12 | The only festival that showcases DC-focused films. We encourage filmmakers to make films that will bring our communities together and celebrate the rich cultures, stories and scenes that make up Washington, DC. |
| DC Environmental Film Festival | various venues | 3/13-3/25 | The critical role that the environment plays in human health has inspired the theme of the 2012 Festival. Our films will address the relationship between the environment and human health and look toward solutions to ensure a healthy population and environment with the understanding that whatever we do to the environment, we do to ourselves. |
