10 Years In, NHDocs Says Goodbye

After a decade-long run of bringing documentaries and filmmakers from all over the country and beyond to New Haven — and, for a brief time in October, turning the city’s downtown into a documentary lover’s paradise — the New Haven Documentary Film Festival has come to a close, and will have a final farewell screening on Wednesday, at the Cannon on Dwight Street.

“It’s definitely sad,” said filmmaker and NHDocs Executive Director Gorman Bechard. ​“It’s something I worked on for 10 years.”

Bechard co-founded NHDocs with Yale professor and film historian Charles Musser in 2014. It grew from a weekend-long festival run out of the Yale Whitney Humanities Center to an entire week spanning multiple venues across downtown New Haven. During the pandemic, there were monthly online screenings, and outdoor screenings with pizza. Last year was in many ways its most successful yet, with multiple sold-out screenings. But ​“I knew we were going to stop before the last one” was over, said Bechard.

The tipping point: the closing of Criterion Cinema on Temple Street in downtown New Haven. Bechard had found lots of venues to screen movies in, but the Criterion was, geographically and logistically, in the center of the festival’s programming. It’s difficult to run a film festival when ​“there’s no movie theater in New Haven,” Bechard said. To ​“add insult to injury,” Bechard said wryly, the day the Criterion closed — Oct. 12 of last year — was the festival’s opening night.

Bechard had heard rumors ahead of the announcement that the Criterion was closing, a rumor half-confirmed by the then-manager’s insinuations when Bechard asked about confirming his booking of the theater. Bechard rustled up more venues to fill the gap, from more branches of New Haven’s library system, to The Cannon and Witch Bitch Thrift and Gather, to getting more slots at Cafe Nine. ​“But it was really difficult,” Bechard said. The venues were all willing participants, but most didn’t have the infrastructure, the screens and projectors, to show movies. ​“We had to go in and set things up. We were all stretched very thin.” The wider geographical scope also meant that many festival goers started driving from place to place rather than walking.

“It was just really tough, even though we had some amazing turnouts, great films and great filmmakers,” Bechard said. But ​“it was a lot of wear and tear” to make it work.

The new problems of last year compounded the more perennial problems. ​“Fundraising in New Haven is not easy,” Bechard said; in talks with nonprofits, he found, some are as likely to compete as they are to collaborate, and ​“I didn’t really feel like playing that game.” Running the festival had ​“become a non-paying full-time job for four or five months,” taking time and energy away from Bechard’s own filmmaking projects.

Bechard and the festival crew got through last year, and at the end, some suggested that this year the festival could ​“take it out of New Haven,” Bechard said. But that went against Bechard’s conception of what made a successful film festival: that it was rooted in a small, urban space, with screenings close enough together to be walkable, to create more possibilities for chance encounters among filmmakers and festivalgoers.

“We started the festival in the hopes of giving filmmakers a place to connect,” Bechard said. Part of a festival is about professional networking; for some filmmakers, the dinner with a producer for a future project might be more important than a screening. Bechard himself with as a case in point. ​“Virtually everyone I’ve worked with on films for the past 10 years, I met through that festival,” he said. Bechard considered taking a year off just to regroup, but ​“finally realized we should just pull the plug,” Bechard said.

Letting go of the festival was difficult, however, ​“like putting your sick dog to sleep,” Bechard said. Over 10 years, Bechard figured they’d screened about 1,000 films. He’d brought several of his filmmaker heroes to the festival for screenings and talks, including Michael Moore in 2019. They kept ticket prices low. And they did it all ​“on a shoestring budget,” Bechard said.

As October rolled around, Bechard figured there was room for ​“our final screening” in conjunction with Compassionfest; hence, Humans and Other Animals at the Cannon at 135 Dwight St., on Oct. 9.

With the closing of the festival, Bechard has more time to devote to his own projects, including a documentary about Best Video that is well under way. He recently returned from a round of visiting a few of the dozen other places in the country that are like it, including Scarecrow Video in Seattle. He’s also working on a film about the Powder Ridge Music Festival, a 1970 music festival in Connecticut that went off the rails decades before the Fyre Festival did similarly in the Bahamas in 2017. He has also nearly completed work on Factory, detailing the storied history of the former New Haven Clock Company Factory, which served as a hub for New Haven outsider art for decades, and is now abandoned, slated for either development for demolition. Bechard is, in a sense, just waiting for current events to give his film its ending.

“Will it be the wrecking ball? Will the developer get his act together and sell it to the housing authority? Who knows?” Bechard said.

What About Film Culture?

The ending of NHDocs, with New Haven still without a first-run movie theater, is in some ways symptomatic of the larger film culture, from where Bechard is standing. The pandemic closed a lot of movie theaters, in New Haven and elsewhere. It also hurt film festivals across the country, including Sundance Film Festival in Utah — ​“the king,” Bechard said. Larger trends are at play as well. As with music, streaming services make it harder for filmmakers to make money. Distribution deals are harder to come by. The film industry is in many ways as tough as ever, if not tougher.

“A lot of filmmakers will ask me for advice,” Bechard said, and he finds himself telling hard truths, about the ​“59 no’s” that one has to hear about financing and distributing films before hearing one yes, and ​“waiting for that yes is excruciating.”

It’s not necessarily the end for film culture. As Bechard has found in working on his Best Video documentary, new video stores have opened in the past decade, some as recently as this year; as with record stores, it turns out there’s a small but reliable group of people who want physical media, whether it’s vinyl or VHS. Many towns have managed to hang onto their theaters, too. Bechard just visited Great Barrington, Mass., which has the Triplex Cinema. Madison has Madison Cinema. Durham, N.C., a town with many similarities to New Haven, has the Carolina Theater.

New Haven should also be the kind of place with enough people interested in movies to sustain a small business or a nonprofit. ​“How many colleges do we have in New Haven? And we don’t have a movie theater?” Bechard said. ​“I don’t know how Hartford has Real Art Ways but we have nothing.”

The New Haven area still has Best Video. ​“We need some small arthouse,” Bechard said, or perhaps a place that combines cinema with other art forms, like the United Theatre in Westerly, R.I. but with rents downtown a lot higher than they used to be and still rising, ​“you can’t afford to open a theater.” To Bechard, the turnover on Chapel Street and Broadway, where York Square Cinema used to be, is telling. If L.L. Bean couldn’t keep a storefront on Broadway, what chance does a movie theater have? ​“The first thing is finding a space,” Bechard said, ​“and we’re running out of space.”

Then again, perhaps there’s a whiff of the divine about New Haven’s movie luck. ​“It might just be that God said, ​‘you get pizza and no movies,’ ” Bechard joked. ​“Maybe that’s a fair tradeoff.”

Humans and Other Animals screens at The Cannon, 135 Dwight St., Oct. 9. Doors are at 6 p.m. The movie starts at 7:15 p.m., with Q&A to follow. Visit the NHDocs website for tickets and more information.