SFFILM’s Doc Stories Attracts Nonfiction Cinema’s Top Talents For Tightly Curated Event, With Big Impact On Oscar Race

SFFILM’s Doc Stories has reached its “tween” stage, having just wrapped the 11^th edition of the prestigious festival in San Francisco.

“We’re not quite at the teen [years],” jokes Anne Lai, SFFILM’s executive director. “We’re starting to get that wonderful energy and maybe aggressiveness that starts happening… We are starting to grow a little adolescent attitude. It feels really good.”

As has been the case since the festival’s inception, Doc Stories once again attracted many of the top talents in documentary, both emerging and established filmmakers: Oscar winner Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus (Cover-Up); two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot (The Eyes of Ghana); Oscar nominee Joshua Seftel (All the Empty Rooms), Emmy winner Mariska Hargitay (My Mom Jayne), Sepideh Farsi (Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk), Sky Hopinka (Powwow People), among others.

The festival is well timed to impact the Oscar race, coming at the height of campaign season – about a month before voting begins to determine the Academy Award shortlists for feature and short documentary.

“One of the original ideas behind creating Doc Stories,” notes SFFILM’s Director of Programming Jessie Fairbanks, “was about the opportunity to do something in the fall when there could be a showcase provided to documentary films at a time when they are really trying to garner attention, but also the opportunity that we have to provide platforms to titles that don’t have distribution, that are perhaps not as well known, that don’t have an engine of a major distributor behind them. And so, we really love the opportunity to do that.”

Farsi brought Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk to Doc Stories just as the documentary begins a U.S. theatrical release through Kino Lorber. The film introduces viewers to Fatma Hassouna, an incredibly vibrant and gifted Palestinian poet and photojournalist living day to day in Gaza during the catastrophic Israeli siege.

“The response of the audience is amazing because it is a real experience and very impacting,” Farsi told us at Doc Stories. “When you meet Fatma through the film, you make a friend. That’s what I hear. That’s what people tell me.”

The documentary largely unfolds in a series of video calls between Hassouna and Farsi; the filmmaker attempted to cross from Egypt into Gaza to film there but was prevented. Farsi would never meet her subject in person.

“This bonding [through video calls], which shaped very quickly and very deeply, all made it so at the same time beautiful and also hard because I worry for her,” Farsi explained. “And when the film was finished and it was selected for Cannes, I thought, ‘Okay, we made it.’ And I tell her and she says, ‘Yes, I’m coming. And I asked for the visa, everything.’ I mean it’s like it happens one after another. And literally the news of the selection [for Cannes], I got it the day I was pitching the film in Nyon at Visions du Reél in Switzerland, and they called me from Cannes. They say, ‘We’ve selected your film.’ And then I tell Fatma all of that, and then she gets killed the day after. She’s targeted by the Israeli army.”

Tamara Kotevska screened her Oscar-contending film The Tale of Silyan at Doc Stories after a world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It constituted a return trip to San Francisco for her. In 2019 she screened Honeyland, the documentary she co-directed by Ljubomir Stefanov, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, SFFILM’s “other” festival (in fact, the oldest film festival in the Americas). Silyan is set in Kotevska’s native North Macedonia, a place that reveres white storks which return to the country each year to raise their young. In the film, a man named Nikola who has been forced to give up his life as a farmer to work on a landfill discovers an injured stork picking through refuse and attempts to nurse the bird back to health.

“Once Nikola captured this stork and he made a decision to take care of it in front of our eyes, it started unraveling something that was just shocking and pure magic and something none of us has seen or witnessed before,” Kotevska told Deadline in San Francisco. “How would this wild animal, this wild bird, react to the circumstances and to this man? And it naturally took us to another year of shooting and to the third act of the film that led us to a hopeful ending of the film because we witnessed in real life, in real time the story of a man saving a stork and a stork saving a man.”

Doc Stories unspools over four days with a very tightly curated lineup – only 10 feature documentaries and two shorts programs, along with talks and panel discussions.

“It is much harder to do a smaller condensed program than it is when you have more time, more screens, more space. But I love the challenge of it,” said Fairbanks, SFFILM’s director of programming. Films in the program play consecutively – that is, they aren’t programmed “against each other” as at most other festivals where half a dozen films or more might screen at the same time.

“I really love the fact that this festival does not counterprogram,” Fairbanks commented. She added, “We’re very lucky that every single one of the feature filmmakers is here with us on the ground. Every single one. And all of the shorts films have representation of some sort, whether it’s the director or the producer or the financier, and they get to go see one another’s work. And that’s such a wonderful moment for them because a lot of them are in the middle of debuting their film and rushing from festival to festival. The documentary community is small, and it is tight knit. And so, to be able to sit in a theater and appreciate one another’s craft is something that people really look forward to at Doc Stories.”

Another thing filmmakers look forward to — Doc Stories’ renowned brunch, a gathering of many of the leading lights in documentary under one roof (in this case, the headquarters of KQED, the San Francisco public television station). Along with directors showing their work in the festival, the event brought together a huge array of U.S. and international talent, a group including Oscar nominees Petra Costa, Moses Bwayo, Jim LeBrecht, and Laura Nix, as well as Geeta Gandbhir, Glenn Kaino, Jeffrey Friedman, Tasha Van Zandt, Robb Moss, ITVS’ Lois Vossen and many others.

“It’s something that has built a really lovely reputation,” Lai, SFFILM’s executive director, says of the brunch. “The industry that is based here, the documentary filmmakers, the documentary industry, they will show up. They want to show up for their fellow filmmakers… We often get asked [by filmmakers], ‘When is it? I need to hold it in my calendar,’ in such a lovely way. It’s the best kind of feeling to have.”

Lai added, “I think for all of our events, for Jesse and I, we feel very strongly that it needs to feel warm and inviting. Nothing should feel intimidating. It doesn’t mean that the work is not challenging, but that the environment that audiences are coming into, the environment that filmmakers are coming into, that it should feel like it’s for them. It should feel like a space that feels open to conversation and openness also to anxiety and fear, which is like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to be able to do with this movie.’

“Doc Brunch definitely with mimosas is more celebratory, but hopefully channels that same thing, which is this is a place where we build it and it’s for you and we want you to feel joyful in this space and we want you to maybe make some new friends in the space. And if we can do that year upon year, then I think we’ve completed the assignment.”