Alex Gibney, Raney Aronson-Rath And More To be Honored At DOC NYC

EXCLUSIVE: DOC NYC has announced a distinguished group of honorees for its upcoming 13^th edition, set to unspool in New York this November.

The annual Visionaries Tribute, to be held on the festival’s opening day at Gotham Hall in Manhattan, will see Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney and filmmaker-sound recordist JT Takagi honored with Lifetime Achievement awards.

Gibney, director of a highly anticipated film about Elon Musk that will premiere at the Venice Film Festival, has long been recognized as one of the nonfiction film industry’s leading figures. His numerous credits include the Academy Award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Primetime Emmy-winning Going Clear: Scientology & The Prison of Belief, and Primetime Emmy winner Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. At Sundance earlier this year, Gibney premiered his documentary Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie.

Takagi serves as executive director of Third World Newsreel, a progressive alternative media center, and teaches at The New School and City University of NY. Her filmmaking credits include Bittersweet Survival; Homes Apart: Korea; The Women Outside, and North Korea: Beyond the DMZ. “As a sound engineer, she has recorded numerous public television and theatrical documentaries that have earned Emmy and Cinema Audio Society awards,” notes a release, “including Yance Ford’s Strong Island and Stanley Nelson’s Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.”

At the Visionaries Tribute, DOC NYC will honor Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Stephen Maing with the Robert and Anne Drew Award for Documentary Excellence, named for the pioneering husband-and-wife filmmaking team. The award comes with a $5,000 cash prize furnished by Drew Associates.

Jill Drew, general manager of Drew Associates, said, “Observational documentary demands patience, perseverance, and precision planning. Stephen Maing has proven to be a master of the form. He is also a filmmaker for our times, focusing on characters who confront oppressive power structures. He has a gift not only for wielding a camera, but also for using it as a tool of empathy.”

Maing’s most recent film, The Great Experiment, which he directed with Eric Daniel Metzgar, premiered in March at the True/False festival in Columbia, MO. His previous films include Union, directed with Brett Story; Crime + Punishment; High Tech, Low Life, and The Surrender.

Oscar winner Raney Aronson-Rath (20 Days in Mariupol) will receive DOC NYC’s Leading Light Award, which honors “an individual making a critical contribution to documentary in a role other than as a filmmaker.”

Aronson-Rath serves as editor-in-chief and executive producer of Frontline, the PBS flagship investigative journalism documentary series. She also leads the GBH Documentary Unit, which encompasses Frontline, Nova, and American Experience. Among her recent credits is the Sundance award-winning documentary One in a Million, which Aronson-Rath executive produced.

“The Visionaries Tribute is an annual reminder of the breadth and depth of talent in our field,” commented DOC NYC co-founder and Director of Special Projects Thom Powers, who oversees the Visionaries event. “This year’s honorees exemplify a spirit of truth-telling against the odds. Alex Gibney has made several of the most attention-getting documentaries of the 21st Century. JT Takagi has a remarkable career as both a sound recordist and leader of Third World Newsreel. Stephen Maing has upheld a standard of excellence in observational filmmaking through his works. And Raney Aronson-Rath has led PBS’s Frontline to excel despite deep funding cuts to public television.”

DOC NYC’s competitive sections, as well as features and shorts named to its prestigious Short List section, and other news will be announced in the coming weeks. The festival takes place both in person and online: in-person events run from November 11-19 in New York City at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, and Village East by Angelika. The festival’s online presentations extend through November 29, with online screenings available to viewers across the U.S.