Heartbroken Over the Departure of AFI Docs, Two of Its Alums Are Launching DC/Dox Fest With ‘Joan Baez: I Am a Noise’
variety.comAddie Morfoot Contributor When the American Film Institute announced last year that it was merging AFI Docs, the organization’s annual Washington, D.C., documentary film festival, into the Los Angeles-based AFI Fest, Jamie Shor called Sky Sitney.Shor, president of PR Collaborative, and Sitney, director of the film and media studies program at Georgetown, had both previously worked for AFI Docs.
Shor’s publicity firm had done work for the former festival, previously known as Silverdocs, while Sitney served as AFI Docs festival director from 2005-2014.“Sky and I were both thinking to ourselves that Washington, D.C., was not going to have a doc presence,” says Shor. “It collectively broke our hearts.”So, the duo spent the last year and a half creating and building DC/Dox, a new nonfiction film festival based in the nation’s capital.
The inaugural four-day festival kicks off on June 15 with the D.C. premiere of “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise.”In all, 31 features and 21 shorts from eight countries will screen during DC/Dox in venues including the Martin Luther King Jr.
Memorial Library, the National Archives’ William G. McGowan Theater and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.Four films will be making their world premiere at DC/Dox, including Dawn Porter’s “Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court.” Part one of the four-part Showtime series will screen on June 18.
Read more on variety.com