The Double Exposure Film Festival (DX) celebrates its 10th anniversary, from November 7 to November 10, 2024, under the theme ” In Flux | Out of Bounds”.
Double Exposure combines premieres of new investigative films—mostly documentaries—with a three-day professional conference for filmmakers and journalists.
Opening night kicks off on November 7 with the film Men of War by Jen Gatien and Billy Corben. Men of War is based on the true story of Jordan Goudreau, a former U.S. Green Beret, who was recruited to remove Venezuela’s president and after the mission fails, is pursued by the same government he faithfully served.
“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” by Academy Award-nominated director Raoul Peck (“I Am Not Your Negro”), who will be in attendance at Double Exposure for both the festival and the symposium – is the Spotlight film screening on Saturday November 9. The film follows Ernest Cole’s journey as the first Black freelance photographer in apartheid South Africa and his subsequent exile to the United States.
The festival’s Centerpiece Selection, “Dust to Dust,” from Kōsai Sekine, follows a celebrated designer, Yuima Nakazato, who travels to Kenya to see first-hand what happens to clothes discarded by consumers in the West. Aghast at the scale of waste and environmental damage, Nakazato races to incorporate what he discovers into his approaching show at Fashion Week in Paris, just a month away.
Additional highlights of this year’s festival include famed documentarian Errol Morris’ new film, Separated, an examination of the horrors and secrets of Donald Trump’s border separation policy. Daniel Freed’s I Hope This Helps!, is a documentary about his attempts to raise an army to fight in the coming war between A.I. and humans. An American Coup: Wilmington 1898 directed by Yoruba Richen and Brad Lichtenstein examines a white supremacist massacre of the Black residents of Wilmington, North Carolina at the end of the 19th century. An American Coup is slated to screen on November 10, the anniversary of the Wilmington uprising, and will also air on PBS’ American Experience in November. Finally, Acts of Reparation by Selina Lewis Davidson and Macky Alston follows two friends – one Black, one white – as they travel South to their ancestral lands to explore what reparations means to them.
Closing the festival will be Homegrown, a documentary by Occupy Wall Street organizer Michael Premo, that follows three right-wing activists who take to the streets after falling for Donald Trump’s election lies.
The lineup for the three-day professional symposium at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center is full of timely conversations and expert guests. Topics will include generative A.I. use in filmmaking, a pro bono legal clinic, filmmaker sustainability, regionalism in filmmaking, backpack journalism for visual storytellers, and much more. Featured speakers include Macky Alston (Sundance Film Festival winning filmmaker), Justine Bateman (actor, filmmaker, author), Nina Alvarez (Oscar-nominated journalist, documentarian and producer), Noland Walker (PBS’ Independent Lens), Bernardo Ruiz (three-time Emmy Award nominee, filmmaker), Emily Kassie (Peabody nominee, director of Netflix’s Explained series) and many more.
Double Exposure is a project of the nonprofit investigative news organization 100Reporters, co-founded in 2011 by Diana Jean Schemo and Philip Shenon, both former correspondents and overseas bureau chiefs of The New York Times. The festival was founded by Schemo and co-created with Sky Sitney in 2015. Past festivals have featured award winning films and luminaries of investigative film, tv and print such as David Simon, Ben Bradlee, Jr., Marty Baron, Alex Gibney, , Wesley Lowery and many more. Most of this year’s films will take place at the theater in the Naval Heritage Center (701 Pennsylvania Ave, NW), while the professional symposium will take place at newly-renovated Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center (formerly the Newseum) (555 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW). Additionally, DX will screen shorts films that are free to the public at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library
In honor of the festival’s 10-year anniversary, Double Exposure will create a new resource hub for investigative journalists and filmmakers called DX Square(d). That initiative will see the festival opening and making public the last decade of archived conversations, talks and panels with industry thought leaders to be used as a resource for both journalists and filmmakers.
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