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At NHDocs, June 2-12: Films About Newtown, One By Former Resident, Among Festival Selections

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NEW HAVEN - The New Haven Documentary Film Festival (NHDocs) has expanded this year to present 15 documentary features and 26 shorts over 11 days, June 2-12. Screenings take place at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center auditorium, 53 Wall Street; and New Haven Free Public Library, 133 Elm Street.Lloyd Kramer's Midsummer in NewtownNHdocs will feature a number of Connecticut premieres, including the June 2 opening night feature, We Are All Newtown and Notes from Dumblane, and Sue Roman's Team 26.Miss Sharon Jones! directed by Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple, which follows the R&B queen while she battles with cancer and struggles to keep her band together. It will be accompanied by a documentary about local musical icon Billy Fischer, who will perform following the films.Who is Lydia Loveless? looks at a rising star and the difficulties of surviving in today's music world. After the screening, Lydia Loveless will perform a free solo show at Café Nine, 22 State Street.Be a Man (2015).VHS Massacre (2016) and the world premiere of David Pilot's Skin of the Game: The Raven Riley Story (2016), which follows the roller-coaster trajectory of an Internet porn star. (The festival has rated the film NC-17.)Mayday (May 1st Media, 1970) and Elihu Rubin and Elena Oxman's Next Question': The May Day 1970 Oral History Project (2002,). The latter will be followed by a Q&A with Rubin and former Panther George Edwards.We Out Here: A Film About Race at Yale (2016), are also on the screening schedule.The Champions (2015), about the pit bulls rescued from NFL star quarterback Michael Vick's dogfighting ring, will benefit the New Haven Animal Shelter. The screening will be followed by a discussion on animal law with State Representative Diana Urban and Prosecutor Joseph LaMotta.Ireland's Great Hunger and the Irish Diaspora (2015), which explores the historical and socio-political circumstances leading to potato failure, mass starvation, and death in Ireland; and former Newtown resident Karyl Evans' Letter from Italy, 1944: A New American Oratorio (2015), which focuses on the creation of a musical drama by two sisters, Sarah Meneely-Kyder and Nancy Meneely, about their father, a WWII Yale-trained medic who returned home to his family with post-traumatic stress disorder.The Angel of Nanking (2015), in which a man patrols a bridge over the Yangtze River in China, trying to prevent jumpers from ending their lives.Radical Hospitality (2016), which looks at the Karen refugees sponsored by the Mennonites of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and by Kelly Colbert's His Name is Midnight (2015), a prince-to-pauper story of a rodeo horse with an unstoppable will to survive. The filmmakers will be at all the screenings.Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), with his Oscar-winning Taxi to the Darkside (2007), which explores the American military's use of torture by focusing on the unsolved murder of an Afghani taxi driver.Client 9: The Rise and Fall Eliot Spitzer (2010), which explores the hidden contours of hubris, sex and power that led to the former New York governor's downfall; and The Armstrong Lie (2013), which looks at the fall from grace of sports legend Lance Armstrong.Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015), an investigation of The Church of Scientology. The Gibney retrospective concludes with a panel discussion with Gibney, journalist Jake Halpern, and novelist Chandra Prasad.nhdocs.com.

All of the screenings are free and open to the public.

(2016), about a theater production done in Newtown with the goal of healing the hearts and minds of a community devastated by a school shooting.

A set of Newtown-related shorts will have their world premieres on June 8: Kim Snyder's

The festival will also feature three music documentaries:

Festival co-director Gorman Bechard's

The world of performance is the topic for the autobiographical documentary of Connecticut-raised, Rhode Island-based comedian Ray Harrington,

NHdocs will explore horror and other cult films that went straight to VHS with Tom Seymour and Ken Powell's

Short subjects will include New Haven perspective on the Black Panthers with a screening of the recently restored

Three documentaries about student life at Yale, including the first public screening of Alex Defroand's

Darcy Dennett's

Documentaries by NHdocs veterans include Rebecca Abbott's

Both filmmakers will also discuss their films and the challenges of addressing trauma in their work.

NHdocs will unveil the prize-winning film festival documentary

That screening will be followed by the world premiere of Amanda Chemeche's

Finally, NHdocs will join forces with the International Festival of Arts and Ideas to present a three-day retrospective, June 10-12: "Revealing Scams, Lies, Trickery and Deceit: The Documentaries of Alex Gibney."

Friday evening pairs Gibney's breakthrough hit,

Gibney will conduct Q&As following the screenings of

Sunday afternoon will feature the Emmy Award-winning

The expanded 2016 set of screenings is the third annual program by the New Haven Documentary Film Festival. NHdocs came together in 2014 when four filmmakers from New Haven gathered together for the first time at the Big Sky Documentary Festival in Montana.

Despite being from the same town, the four had never met before, and festival co-founders Charles Musser and Gorman Bechard decided New Haven needed a film festival that could bring filmmakers together and help build community.

Complete schedule information is available online at

Documentaries concerning Newtown, as well as an award-winning effort by a former resident, are all included in the third New Haven Documentary Film Festival, or NHdocs. The event has expanded to 15 documentary features and 26 shorts over 11 days for this year's presentation. (NHdocs image)
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