Two Documentary Experts Talk Film Tropes, Fight Club, Sand Mandalas (Ep. 50)
“You spend all this time and energy and thought on these things that are so ephemeral, right? It’s just like, oh, a film, cool, we loved it, boom. Maybe it’ll change something, maybe it won’t. Maybe you’ll laugh, maybe you’ll cry. Maybe that’s the joy of it, the Buddhist… what’re the things called? The sand paintings? It’s about that.”
Meet Samah and Brandon, two programmers for Doc NYC, New York City’s premier annual documentary film festival. As two of the city’s leading tastemakers in nonfiction cinema, Samah and Brandon have seen it all—and yet, not quite all of it! What’s it like to shoulder the responsibility of picking films to bring to the world? What’s the difference between reality TV and documentary? Does any art we make truly last?
For the 50th episode of Bar Talk, we’re shining a light on the form itself. For the last 18 months, we’ve devoted most of our waking lives to recording and editing the conversations that bring a night in New York to life, only to vanish in the long arc of our lives. Where did all those stories go? We created Bar Talk in the hopes of capturing enough of them to form an archive of our city’s community. As time presses on, and the city changes, and we change, the project is forever unfinished.
Tonight, we're kicking it at the beautiful and historic Off the Wagon bar in Greenwich Village! Just a few blocks south of Washington Square Park, there's no better place to catch your favorite sports team between a few brewskis and whatever shenanigans might ensue.
Samah Ali is a distributor and film programmer based in New York City. She is the Video Programming Manager at Stellar Entertainment, putting movies and television shows on airplanes around the world. She also programs for Academy Award qualifying festivals, San Francisco International Film Festival, DOC NYC, and Hot Docs Film Festival.
Brandon Harrison is a Development Executive at the non-fiction production studio Words + Pictures. He has curated documentary features, shorts, and series at Brooklyn Film Festival, Tribeca Festival, and DOC NYC, as well as served on various documentary juries and award committees.
Instagram & TikTok: @bartalkseries
/ bartalkseries
https://www.offthewagonnyc.com/
00:03 Intro
00:19 Films You Fight For
01:38 The Contestant
02:54 Do I Like Documentaries?
04:29 The Boy Who Lived
07:19 The Golden Age of Documentary
09:31 If I Could Make a Documentary...
11:58 The Newark Riots
13:10 Why'd You Get So Existential?
14:37 The Sands of Time
15:37 The Difference between Reality TV & Documentary
17:29 Are You Not Entertained?
#realitytv #nightlife #documentary #film #bartalk
Intro Song: "Brooklyn" by Glass Vaults