Fresh Ideas and New Voices in Doc Film Making Top films from the Innagural Class of DOC NYC-U screened on closing night

Written by Tomas Salazar

DOC NYC-U, a new initiative launched this year, gave students from New York City’s leading film schools the opportunity to show their work to an esteemed panel of jurors, and on the closing night of the festival, a lucky audience at the IFC Center had the opportunity to see short films being made by some of the most promising documentary film makers in the city.

Before the screening, Juror and HBO’s Director of Documentary Programming Greg Rhem said a few words about the students whose work was screened as part of the DOC NYC-U Showcase. “From my experience, some of the students’ stuff is the best that you can see out there,” he said.  “They are not concerned too much about winning an award or being selected for a network, you are just going for really good ideas, finding great characters and exploring different techniques.”

That exploration and enthusiasm was projected directly onscreen through the winning filmmakers fresh and innovative work. The first screening and winner of the Spirited Storytelling prize was Alive and Kicking, by Lara-Ann de Wet of the New York Film Academy. Alive and Kicking is a beautiful, funny and very inspirational story about a group of South African grandmothers who made a soccer team not just to have fun, but also to survive. The winner of the Experimental Vision award went to Yuqi Kang of the School of Visual Arts for her film Last Days of Domino. Showing incredible cinematography skills, Yuqi makes a huge, abandoned, sugar factory “talk.”

Rongfei Guo of New York University earned the Best Film award for Fairy Tales. The documentary follows the dream of Fairy, a Chinese fashion designer who becomes famous through Weibo, one of the largest websites in China, and achieves her dream of being recognized as an artist. This is a story that has everything: great sense of humor, full of colors, freshness, melancholy and empathy.

The three featured films are a sample of what young film makers are exploring in their work, and the winners are worth remembering – with work this good, you’re likely to see their names on a movie screen again soon.

Tomás Salazar is a recent graduate of the New York Film Academy. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tomás is a screenwriter and documentary-lover. You can learn more about him and his work here.