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.

The Fast and the Furious is turning 25, and to celebrate, the cast is dropping some franchise updates.

After a buzzy midnight screening at Cannes earlier this year, Universal is keeping the party going for the 2001 movie that started it all, including re-releasing The Fast and the Furious in theaters and hosting a special event in L.A. on Monday.

Looking back at the Cannes screening, Michelle Rodriguez told The Hollywood Reporter that she was “in awe at all the love that we got,” joking it was particularly powerful “with the studio heads present.”

“Sometimes you fight over things [with the studio] that seem silly, like standing your ground on ethics or morals. From a studio perspective or from a broad macro perspective, it’s like ‘Oh these guys are just criminals, what do we care if they have morals?’” she explained. “We fight for you to understand that it’s not always back and white, there’s always a grey area, and life is like that. All those fights kind of felt worth it” seeing the fan reaction, and long standing ovation, in France.

And after 10 movies over the last two and half decades, there’s an 11th — and allegedly final — on the way, set for release in March 2028. Star and producer Vin Diesel has already publicly gushed about the film, titled Fast Forever, online, calling it “the best script I have read in decades. I am still crying.”

Rodriguez said she has not yet read the script, but “if I have any wish for the last one, it’s that they bring it back to the community because that community has kept us alive for 25 years; it’s a global community, and it has to do with cars, not this 007, bring your cars to space shit,” referencing a plot line from F9. “Let’s get back to what it all started as — an article in the paper about the race scene, let’s go back there.”

Jordana Brewster echoed that she’s talked to Diesel about the new movie but hasn’t seen the script, with hopes that “we kind of go back to L.A., that would be really cool.” And as for if this final movie will really be the end of the film franchise, Rodriguez said, “It’ll be maybe the last one for us; we’re like a bridge to another generation, we’re passing the baton on. But I don’t know, you talk to Vin and maybe it’ll never end.”

On top of Fast Forever, there is also at least one Fast & Furious TV series in works, which will expand on the legacy characters. Brewster said of the pivot to TV, “I so admire the Taylor Sheridan universe, so I feel like we can really do that with television too.” She already has a series pitch ready, suggesting that her and Paul Walker’s characters “have a son and a daughter so I’d love to follow their trajectory and see what hell it is to raise kids that have Mia’s genes, Brian’s genes and Dom’s genes.”