AFI Docs 2016 — Highlights

The 2016 AFI Docs festival is over and the audience award winner was “Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise,” which will be featured on the PBS “American Masters” series.

This year’s AFI DOCS attendees included renowned filmmakers Judd Apatow, Ramin Bahrani, Heidi Ewing, Alex Gibney, Rachel Grady, Werner Herzog (this year’s AFI DOCS Charles Guggenheim Symposium honoree) and Barbara Kopple, along with documentary subjects Sharon Jones and Norman Lear. I was struck by the pair of films about the internet, Werner Herzog’s “Lo and Behold” and Alex Gibney’s Stuxnet film “Zero Days.” Other highlights included “Life, Animated,” the extraordinary story of a boy with autism who used Disney animated films to teach himself how to communicate (coming to theaters over the next few weeks), and “Gleason,” the story of football player Steve Gleason, who was diagnosed with ALS.