Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton was hot on the trail of the next great American true crime documentary—a riveting account of a highway patrolman's quixotic effort to identify and capture the infamous Zodiac Killer. Shackleton devised a plan, began collecting interviews, and shot “evocative B-roll” footage of ghostly California freeways and parking lots where the killer may have once lurked. And then the project fell apart, leaving Shackleton with fragments of the unfinished film and time to ruminate on shortcuts and signifiers of the ubiquitous genre. A witty and beautifully assembled deep dive into our obsession with serial killers and the stories we tell about them, Shackleton’s ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT emerges  from the ash heap to probe and deconstruct the form with the incisive eye of a true crime connoisseur. Our guest Charlie Shackleton’s last project, the performance film As Mine Exactly, won the Immersive Art & XR Award at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival and went on to have extended runs at the Barbican Centre in London and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

As a young boy, H.N. Shantha Murthy ran away from home to escape the extreme poverty of his Indian village. He travelled the country in search of work, holding onto the belief that one day his life would change. It did, following a serendipitous encounter with a Texan couple. With a sponsored visa, he travelled to the US, but his American Dream was not to be fulfilled. Karla Murthy’s film weaves together home videos and phone conversations recorded during her father’s stint as a gas station attendant, while also reflecting on her own identity as a first-generation American. What emerges is an intimate love letter – a meditation on a complicated father-daughter relationship and a poignant tribute to the immigrant working class. - Emmy-nominated director Karla Murthy's The Gas Station Attendant, world premiering in Sheffield Doc/Fest's International Competition (as the only American film). Executive Produced by Carrie Lozano, Geeta Gandbhir (The Perfect Neighbor), Rekha Maholtra, Stanley Nelson, Marcia Smith, Stephen Gong, Donald Young. 

Winner of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Award winner (World Cinema Documentary) Co-directors Sara Khaki & Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks drops us into the world of the fearless mid-wife Sara Shahverdi, who among other things decides she wats to be the first woman to run for the local area counsil, not only does she win, she takes on the local patriarchy is her remote Iranian village, Sara fearlessly breaks traditions by training teenage girls to ride motorcycles and stopping child marriages. When accusations arise questioning Sara’s intentions to empower the girls, her identity is put in turmoil. Co-director /Producer / Editor Sara Khaki and co-director / Producer / Editor / Cinematographer Mohammadreza Eyni join us to talk about their eight year journey to document and bear witness to the fierce determination of Sara make the world a better place one young woman at a time.

Decades after the disappearance of her uncle during Argentina’s Dirty War, a filmmaker joins the Caravan of Mothers, a group of Central American women who travel by bus along the migrant route in search of their loved ones who have disappeared trying to reach the U.S. Their stories intertwine across generations and geographies, the film becomes a powerful testament to resilience, memory, hope, and solidarity. A PLACE OF ABSENCE is a lyrical and profoundly moving documentary that explores unresolved grief, boundless love, and the unbreakable strength of women. Director /Producer / Writer / Co-editor Marialuisa Ernst talks about the impacts of state sponsored terror, the societal, cultural and personal trauma that it caused and how these brave women set out on a dangerous journey to uncover the truth, begin their own healing process and help those they meet to do the same. A Place of absence is screening Monday, November 17 - 4:30 PM (EST) at Village East by Angelika followed by a Q&A with Director Marialuisa Ernst and with film participant Anita Zelaya. Also available on-line at DOCNYC.net (https://www.docnyc.net/film/a-place-of-absence/)

Currently screening at 2025 DOCNYC, FLOPHOUSE AMERICA places us in the middle of the ongoing housing crisis in the U.S.,where many people are forced to live in rundown hotels,  known as flophouses. Twelve-year-old Mikal shares a small, inexpensive room in one of these hotels with his parents and their cat, Smokey. Their home is marked by chaos and alcohol abuse, but also by love and the hope for a better future. Director Monica Strømdahl has spent years traveling across the U.S., documenting life in these hotels. Eight years ago, she met Mikal, one of many children growing up in this environment. Flophouse America is an exceedingly moving and meticulous coming-of-age documentary follows him over three years, capturing the pain of a fractured childhood alongside the warmth and complexity of family. Quoting the filmmaker, “Filming Mikal and his family came with immense responsibilities — both as filmmakers and as fellow human beings. Flophouse America captures a family facing hardship, often in difficult and vulnerable situations.” I urge anyone listening to our conversation to seek out this beautiful and moving film. 

Co-directors Peter Yost & Michael Rohatyn’s DROP DEAD CITY is the first-ever feature documentary devoted to the NYC Fiscal Crisis of 1975, an extraordinary, overlooked episode in urban American history that saw an already crumbling city of eight million people brought to the edge of bankruptcy and social chaos by a perfect storm of debt, greed, ambitious social policy and poor governance. Named after the famous New York Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” Drop Dead City overturns present day assumptions about politics and compromise, showing what bitter rivals achieved through shared sacrifice. . It examines the origins of the crisis and documents the increasingly desperate clashes of stakeholders - unions, banks, local, state and federal governments, and average citizens  - as, together, they slide ever nearer to the unthinkable - bankruptcy.  Co-directors Peter Yost & Michael Rohatyn join us to talk about their personal connection to the financial crisis and finding many of the key people who worked to get New York City back on solid financial footing, gathering together an amazing array of archival material and the satisfaction of telling a very complex story in a way that illuminates the past that offers a perspective on our own future. 

Co-directors Barbara Miller and Philip Delaquis WISDOM OF HAPPINESS shows us a timeless truth: happiness is still possible, even in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. This powerful message of hope is delivered as a personal audience with one of the greatest living thinkers, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Tenzin Gyatso, known to billions around the world as the Dalai Lama.  Speaking as a member of our single global community, he shares practical wisdom for finding peace, compassion, and hope in the midst of chaos. With disarming clarity and deep humanity, he invites us to imagine — and help create — a world where compassion is activated as our strongest force for change, and happiness is within reach for everyone. Co-director Barbara Miller (War Photographer, Domestic Violence) to talk about meeting the Dalai Lama in 1982, sitting down with one of the world’s greatest living thinkers the and 14th Dalai Lama for an on-camera interview, capturing the hardships that he and the people of Tibet have endured and working with Executive Producer Richard Gere.

Endlessly struggling to feel seen, David becomes infatuated with a mysterious company’s promise to transform people’s lives by permanently changing the color of their eyes. After traveling to India to get the controversial procedure, he begins to question if this artificial beauty will give him the fulfillment he truly seeks. CATERPILLAR explores the lengths that people are willing to go in pursuit of physical “perfection”. Award winning director Liza Mandelup joins us for a conversation on her “narrative” approach to documentary storytelling and how it informed Caterpillar. Her first film Jawline, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival,  went on to win the Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker. The New York Times called it "A Grey Gardens for Gen-Z”. She currently has a scripted TV show with A24 titled Lifted which explores the real and imagined lives of teenage girls looking for purpose and power. The show centers around an online community of Shoplifters and the young women's attempts to find themselves through the group's radical messaging. The Lifted pilot has been completed and is awaiting series order. 

THE WHITE HOUSE EFFECT is through the lens of entirely archival footage, and we're given an infuriating fly-on-the-wall perspective of the pivotal years surrounding climate change through the George H.W. Bush administration. A time when global warming was first introduced to the public with scientific-backing and as a non-partisan issue, but as chief of staff John Sununu used climate change to further relations with industry power brokers, the country and a hopeful EPA chief Bill Reilly rather found itself in a politicized world crisis sown with the seeds of disinformation, public confusion, and false promises. Now in 2025, as we live through the consequences of inaction during the 80s, such as extreme weather, rise in sea levels and a climbing world temperature — we continue to ask why it has taken so long to make a change and are we exactly where we started, but also with an inherent need to remember there’s still a fight to be had. With President Trump calling climate change a hoax just last week, this is more prevalent than ever.  A riveting look at a key moment in the history of the climate crisis, THE WHITE HOUSE EFFECT, from directors Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk, travels back in time to document how a crucial opportunity to take real action on global warming was not just squandered but deliberately undermined. 

PLAN C for CIVILIZATION tackles one of the most controversial approaches to mitigating and possibly reversing the dire impacts of climate change.  As emissions pour into the atmosphere and world leaders struggle for solutions to a climate emergency, the controversial climate-cooling technology called solar geo-engineering is entering the world’s stage. It’s an idea so powerful and full of uncertainty that even the proposal of research itself is seen as a dire risk by leading environmental activists and scientists. But for physicist David Keith, what matters is not what’s popular but what could help reduce the harms of a heating planet. And to learn more, he plans to launch the world’s first experiment into the stratosphere. Plan C for Civilization tackles the promise and peril of solar geo-engineering with exclusive verite access to its protagonist David Keith and the SCoPEx project as well as the rogue geo-engineers of Make Sunsets. From Bangladesh to Nevada, solar geo-engineering is emerging after more than 60 years in the shadows, and with it, a new chapter of the climate change saga. Our guest is Ben Kalina, (Can We Cool the Planet, Shored Up) an award-winning director and producer whose work centers on the collision between human nature and the force of nature.