New York Film Festival Plays Long Game With Supersized Documentaries
deadline.comThe long-running New York Film Festival, now in its 62nd year – one of the longer film festivals, with a span of more than two weeks — is showcasing some of the longest documentaries on record.
My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, directed by Julia Loktev, measures almost 5.5 hours long. Taken together, Wang Bing’s Youth (Homecoming) and Youth (Hard Times), both playing at NYFF, run over 6 hours.
That’s brief compared to exergue, the documentary directed by Dimitris Athyridis that clocks in at 14 hours. Exergue, which premiered at the Berlinale in February before playing at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece, explores the 14th iteration of Documenta, the quinquennial event that is considered the most important contemporary art exhibition in the world. “There’s something about the way that film really digs into this extremely fascinating process of making an art exhibition,” says Dennis Lim, artistic director of the New York Film Festival. “But it’s also very clear from the start that it’s a film that’s not just about contemporary art, but really about the intersection of art and money and politics.” “There’s no easy way to program a 14-hour film,” Lim continues, noting the initial NYFF screening unfolded over three nights, “so chunks of about between four and five hours.
And then on the final weekend, we’re doing it over two daytime screenings, so about seven hours each stretch, with an intermission.
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