AFI Docs 2015: The World’s Best Documentary Film Festival Begins Tonight in Washington DC

AFI Docs (formerly SilverDocs) begins tonight in Washington, D.C. with another spectacular slate of documentary films. The opening night festivities feature “The Best of Enemies,” a terrific film about the battle of the upper-class, socially connected, classically educated, hyperverbal writers and sometime candidates for election William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal. They had those qualities in common, but not much else. Politically, culturally, philosophically, and personally, they really could not stand each other. So when lowest-rated ABC, which could not afford the gavel-to-gavel coverage and gold-plated newsmen (they were all men in those days) of CBS and NBC, in desperation they decided to feature “commentary” from the right-wing Buckley and the left-wing Vidal. The filmmakers argue persuasively that this was the beginning of the highly partisan shriekfest that passes for television news today.

Some of the other films at the festival include Oscar-winner Alex Gibney’s “Steve Jobs,” “How to Dance in Ohio” (teens with autism prepare for a prom), “The Wolfpack” (kids kept inside their New York apartment by a controlling father spend their time re-enacting their favorite films), and three documentaries about significant magazines: “Very Semi-Serious” (New Yorker cartoons), “Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon,” and “Hot Type: 150 Years of the Nation.”

There are films about tennis star Althea Gibson, singer Nina Simone, and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, political protests, about the fallout (literal) from Chernobyl, and the psychological and political fallout from the “3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets” that killed a Georgia teenager.