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The 2024 Doc NYC festival has unveiled its winners.

The critically acclaimed festival, which is the largest documentary festival in the U.S., marked one of its most successful in-person editions yet, with more than 20,000 viewers having watched films over nine days in New York alongside more than 1,500 filmmaker and industry guests participating in screenings and panels.

The juries for each respective award, along with the coveted Audience Award, had tough competition among this year’s festival.

Among eight international features, Areeb Zuaiter’s feature debut “Yalla Parkour” was selected as the winner. “Yalla Parkour” had its world premiere at the festival, and centers on young parkour athletes in Gaza who practice the sport on a “conflict-scarred” landscape.

“The jury was unanimous in its choice for best international documentary,” the Doc NYC international jury, consisting of “Bobi Wine: The People’s President” filmmaker Moses Bwayo, “Little Richard: I Am Everything” director Lisa Cortes,...

Exclusive: Doc NYC today unveiled its main slate for the 15th anniversary of America’s biggest documentary festival, a lineup that includes 31 world premieres and 24 U.S. premieres.

The festival, running from November 13-21 in Manhattan (and continuing online until Dec. 1) will open with the U.S. premiere of Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story, directed by Sinead O’Shea, a portrait of the acclaimed Irish writer who died in July at the age of 93. Closing the festival on Nov. 21 will be the world premiere of Drop Dead City – New York on the Brink in 1975, directed by Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn, “a look back at the circumstances and players involved in NYC’s mid-70s financial crisis.” (The film’s title refers to a legendary headline in the New York Daily News reporting on then-Pres. Ford’s promise in October 1975 to veto any federal bailout of the Big Apple...

Poster for ‘Family Secrets The Disappearance of Alissa Turney’

Activist Sarah Turney would not allow her sister’s disappearance to be forgotten. Oxygen True Crime’s Family Secrets: The Disappearance of Alissa Turney dives into the murder case and Sarah’s unwavering commitment to obtain justice.

Jesse Sweet and Ricki Stern direct and serve as executive producers along with Sarah Turney, Dan Cogan, Liz Garbus, Jon Bardin, Kate Barry, and Mala Chapple.

“As filmmakers, we wanted to explore the shifting nature of truth and how someone who had been groomed to believe one version of reality could relearn her own memories,” stated directors Ricki Stern and Jesse Sweet. “We crafted the film to embody Sarah’s journey of excavating the truth about herself, her family and what happened to her sister. We are grateful to Sarah for welcoming us into her life and opening up her family archive in support of this vision.

The trailer for Netflix’s Unknown: Cave of Bones opens with the news that 1,500 bones have been discovered in a South African cave. Most importantly, the bones aren’t human.

Cave of Bones is part of a four-part documentary series premiering on the streaming service in July 2023. The four episodes will be released once a week over a four-week period. Part one, The Lost Pyramid, premiered on July 3rd, followed by Killer Robots on July 10th. Cave of Bones streams on July 17th, and the docuseries finishes up with Cosmic Time Machine on July 24th.

Netflix offered this description of the Cave of Bones episode:

“In South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind, Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger has found the world’s oldest graveyard – and it’s not human. If Lee and his team can prove that this ancient, small-brained, ape-like creature practiced complex burial rituals – it will change everything we know...

Exclusive: Netflix has set a July 3rd global premiere for Unknown, a new four-part docuseries on which it’s partnered with Liz Garbus and Dan Cogan’s esteemed production company Story Syndicate that will have new films debuting weekly.

Unknown is said to tell breathtaking stories of adventure and exploration in awe-inspiring uncharted territories. Each film in the series pushes the boundaries of knowledge, ventures into unexplored regions, and unlocks the secrets of our world through the stories of remarkable people and places never before captured on camera.

The show’s first episode, “Unknown: The Lost Pyramid,” takes viewers to the desert sands of Saqqara, the latest hotspot of Egyptian archaeology, where two of the world’s most famous Egyptologists seek to unearth ancient treasures. The legendary Dr. Zahi Hawass hunts for the long-lost pyramid of a forgotten Egyptian king while his protege and rival, Dr. Mostafa Waziri, searches for...

ABC News Studios unveiled a slate of narrative non-fiction projects as part of its official launch, with three feature documentaries and 15 series and specials in production.

Plans are to produce more than 100 hours of programming for ABC, Hulu, Disney+, National Geographic and other platforms in 2022. Dawn Porter; Irene Taylor, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard; and Stanley Nelson are among those attached to projects.

Reena Mehta is senior vice president of streaming and digital content, and Mike Kelley, the vice president and ABC News Studios lead, will oversee the creative and business direction of the unit.

David Sloan will serve as senior executive producer and creative lead of ABC News Studios, while Jacqueline Glover is head of documentary for Onyx Collective and oversaw the initial slate of feature documentary films for ABC News Films.

“We’ve been creating longform for quite a while, but we are really formalizing it under the ABC News umbrella,...

Doc charts turf war between ultra-orthodox Jewish community and secular neighbours.

Samuel Goldwyn Films has picked up Us rights to Jesse Sweet’s documentary City Of Joel, on which Halloween director David Gordon Green and Visit Films chief Ryan Kampe served as executive producers.

City Of Joel centres on an ultra-orthodox Hasidic sect occupying the titular 1.1-square mile plot of land 50 miles north of New York City who are locked in a turf war with their secular neighbours.

As the 22,000-strong population outgrows the their religious haven, the residents devise a plan to double the size of the footprint, sparking...

Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite and Marielle Heller’s Melissa McCarthy-starrer Can You Ever Forgive Me? will get Centerpiece slots at next month’s Hamptons Film Festival.

The fest released its full line-up today, adding Steve McQueen’s Widows and the East Coast premiere of Felix Van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy to the previously announced slate.

Lanthimos’ The Favourite stars Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman in the tale of two cousins fighting to be the court favorite of Queen Anne. The film will be the fest’s Friday Centerpiece, while Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? takes the Sunday Centerpiece slot.

The Hamptons fest runs Oct. 4-8.

In addition to the previously announced films, the Narrative Competition films will include the New York Premiere of Yen Tan’s 1985, the U.S. Premiere of Eva Trobisch’s All Good, Ali Abbasi’s Border, the U.S. Premiere of Zsófia Szilágyi’s One Day,...

ESPN Films will make all six episodes of its new docuseries “Enhanced” available on Monday, July 16, exclusively on its streaming service ESPN+. Executive produced by Academy Award and Emmy-winning filmmaker, “30 for 30” alum Alex Gibney (“Catching Hell”), as well as Stacey Offman, Brad Herbert, Issac Bolden, and Rich Perello. The series includes offerings from filmmakers like Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Alison Klayman, and Paul Taublieb, all focused on some of the more controversial elements of modern sports.

The series, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, aims to take viewers “inside the secret world of modern sports training, technology, recovery and more, and raises questions about the characters, power struggles, and breakthrough innovations that are driving the greatest performances on the planet. The docuseries weaves together moments of greatness, inspiration, and heartbreak with behind-the-scenes looks at the laboratories, institutes ,and academies trying to turn athletic dreams into reality, and big bucks.

Talks to continue on Behold My Heart, Madeline’s Madeline.

Ryan Kampe’s Visit Films heads to the Croisette with a sales slate that encompasses SXSW selection 1985, Tribeca entries Maine and Slut In A Good Way, and documentary City Of Joel, among others.

Kampe and his team will continue talks on Behold My Heart starring Marisa Tomei, and Sundance and Berlinale selection Madeline’s Madeline.

1985 (pictured) stars Cory Michael Smith, Virginia Madsen (Sideways), Michael Chiklis, and Jamie Chung and follows a closeted young man returning to his Texas hometown for Christmas during the first wave of the AIDS crisis.

Burdened...

Time’s Up will host what it’s calling its inaugural New York event during the Tribeca Film Festival, featuring a program of conversations with organization supporters including Ashley Judd, Julianne Moore, Sarah Jessica Parker, Amber Tamblyn, Marisa Tomei, among others.

In addition to the actresses, the April 28 Time’s Up event will include activists and business leaders (see below for complete list).

“In response to the growing national movement, Tribeca Film Festival has partnered with Time’s Up to host a day of conversations with the outspoken women playing a pivotal role in raising awareness about inequality in the workplace,” the fest announced today in a statement. “Activists, storytellers, business leaders, filmmakers, lawyers, media figures, and more share their stories, seek next steps to establish the parameters for lasting change across industries and the pay spectrum.”

The day-long even “will explore how we got here, the women who came...

On the heels of the 39th edition of the Toronto Int. Film Festival (Sept 4-14), Ifp’s Independent Film Week is where a plethora of fiction, non-fiction and new this year, web-based series from the likes of Desiree Akhavan and Calvin Reeder find future coin. Sectioned off as projects at the very beginning of financing to those that are nearing completion, there happens to be tons of Sundance alumni in the names below. Among those that caught our attention we have Medicine for Melancholy‘s Barry Jenkins’ sophomore feature, produced by Bad Milo!‘s Adele Romanski, Moonlight is about “two Miami boys navigate the temptations of the drug trade and their burgeoning sexuality in this triptych drama about black queer youth”. Concussion‘s Stacie Passon digs into the thriller genre with Strange Things Started Happening. Produced by vet Mary Jane Skalski (Mysterious Skin), this is about “a woman who has...

Luke Greenfield's film credits are kind of all over the place. The writer-director should be best known for his underrated 2004 cult hit The Girl Next Door, starring Elisha Cuthbert, Emile Hirsch and Timothy Olyphant, but it's hard to overlook his first feature, The Animal, or his latest, Something Borrowed. In the middle of a story about Greenfield signing a new network deal at ABC, having directed the pilot for the their upcoming comedy Prairie Dogs, two new feature film projects emerged as also on tap for the filmmaker and his WideAwake production company. Variety reports that Greenfield is developing two movies including new dramedy called The Last Bachelor and an untitled action-comedy at 20th Century Fox. Co-written by the director and Nicholas Thomas, Taylor Hamra and Jesse Sweet, The Last Bacheloris about a 30-something man who puts his life on pause in order to find the one. When the...

Phase 4 Films has acquired North American rights to Nate Meyer's romantic drama "See Girl Run," starring Robin Tunney and Adam Scott. The film made its world premiere at this year's SXSW Film Festival and is having its market premiere this week in Cannes. The company plans to release it on VOD and theatrically later this year. In the film, Tunney stars as a 30-something woman who digs deep into her romantic past to invigorate her present. Full release below: Phase 4 Films Acquires North American Rights To Nate Meyer’S See Girl Run Los Angeles, CA (May 16, 2012) – Berry Meyerowitz, President & CEO of Phase 4 Films, announced today that the company has acquired North American rights to writer-director Nate Meyer’s romance See Girl Run. The film stars Robin Tunney (The Mentalist) and Adam Scott (Parks and Recreation). Jesse Sweet, Derrick Tseng and Meyer produced the project, with David Gordon Green (Pineapple.

#55. See Girl Run - Nate Meyer Nate Meyer's 2007 debut Pretty in the Face appeared at the SXSW so the big question is with a name cast in Robin Tunney (see unrelated pic above) and Adam Scott, bigger indie budget and some great producing help with See Girl Run find a spot? Quite possibly. Worth noting: fellow North Carolina folk David Gordon Green and Lisa Muskat are executive producers on the project. Gist: This involves a woman who gets caught up in "what ifs" that cause her to dig back into her romantic history. Scott will play a local hero who stayed in their hometown to become an artist and illustrator and pine for his high school love. Producers: Nate Meyer, Jesse Sweet and Derrick Tseng (Dark Horse)(Ioncinema.com Preview Page // IMDb Link)  ...

Prior to his appointment as Assistant City Manager on the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation, Adam Scott already has had grabbed people’s attention with roles in High Crimes, Torque and The Aviator, and easily turned himself into a viable action hero in last summer’s Piranha 3D.

He has just seized two roles in two upcoming projects, My Mother’s Curse and See Girl Run.

My Mother’s Curse is based on Seth Rogen‘s character, an inventor who plans to take his mother (Barbra Streisand) on a road trip to try to market and sell his latest invention. He also has a learned motive to rejoin her with a long-lost love. It isn’t known with certainty what role Scott will play. Colin Hanks and Yvonne Strahovski are also starring. Anne Fletcher is helming My Mother’s Curse from a script by Dan Fogelman.

See Girl Run comes...