One morning in early March, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival team is on its last mad programming dash.
"We're in a flurry," festival co-director Emily Foster says, gesturing at an oversized metallic bulletin board propped up on the table across from her. Founded in 1998 by filmmaker Nancy Buirski, Full Frame draws thousands of documentary lovers to downtown Durham each spring -- last year, the Oscar-qualifying event sold more than 17,000 tickets.
It's a month out from the event, now in its 27th year, and we're sitting in one of the festival offices at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies.
On the board, a Sharpie grid outlines the screening slots for the event's April 3-6 dates; inside the grid, dozens of pastel slips are scrawled with the names of documentaries, suspended in magnetic limbo until the screening schedule is finalized.
Choreographing a schedule of 49 films, each with its own team, over four days is akin to playing Jenga -- though the art here is in the stacking, not the disassembling.
"We want to meet filmmakers where they are in the life of their work," artistic and festival co-director Sadie Tillery says, reciting a list of considerations: "How big of a venue? What time of day? When is an artist available to be here? What do they imagine the conversation after the film looking like? All of that is part of our process, and that involves a lot of phone calls and emails and collaboration and compromise."
"I expect most filmmakers would want to screen at seven p.m. in Fletcher Hall, right?" Tillery continues. "That's not what we can offer in all cases, but we try to bring care and human connection to that process."
This year, the documentaries occupying those coveted evening slots are Prime Minister on opening night and SALLY on closing night -- two very different films, both about the complicated lives of brilliant women.
Prime Minister, from directors Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe, picks up a thematic thread from last year's opening film -- Girls State, a rousing documentary following a Missouri political leadership camp for girls -- with a look back at the five-year tenure of progressive politician Jacinda Ardern, who led New Zealand through a turbulent era as its 40th prime minister and the first PM to give birth while in office.
Cristina Costantini's SALLY, meanwhile, offers a portrait of Sally Ride, the first female astronaut to go to space, homing in on the 27-year romantic relationship Ride shielded from a homophobic public eye.
Were the federal government to be auditing the lineup, in this newly censored era, these films would likely trip multiple alarms -- not because they are narrow in identity scope but because they are representatively broad.
This year's thematic program, curated by filmmaker Yance Ford, is titled "The Weight of a Question: Documentary and the Art of Inquiry," and the films both within Ford's program (a set of eight features and three shorts that date back to 1956) and outside of it seem to thrive in a keen inquiry that sprawls borders.
The festival lineup ranges from films looking at the ordinary lives of Norwegian high school students (FOLKTALES) to films looking through the eyes of a Russian teacher exposing propaganda (Mr. Nobody against Putin). One film untangles the legacy of the sex sting operation show To Catch a Predator (Predators); another tracks the reintroduction of brown bears in a rural French Pyrenees community (The Shepherd and the Bear).
Tillery has now been with the festival since its early days -- starting as an intern in 2004 and serving as a director since 2008. One of the best parts of the festival, she says, is looking out into an audience and spotting documentary subjects.
"Our culture is so celebrity-focused," she says. "When we can hold real people up in that sort of light -- that feels really meaningful to me."
The net that Full Frame casts might be global, but its anchor is decidedly local.
Where other festivals tend to sprawl across zip codes, Full Frame is geographically dense, snugly tucked inside the Carolina Theatre and adjoining Durham Convention Center, lending the plaza in between the two the lively air of a European square. By design, events tend to have an unfussy Southernness compared to other festivals -- the closing night menu, for instance, is always barbecue. Since the festival's early days, prolific local restaurateur Giorgios Bakatsias has catered events, creating a vibe of familial continuity between years.
"Having hotels within walking distance, having so many great restaurants in Durham, being an exciting place to just walk around is part of the national and international draw of the festival," says Foster, the festival's co-director.
Filmmaker Ryan White (Pamela, a Love Story; Good Night Oppy) has screened multiple documentaries at Full Frame and is returning this year to screen Come See Me in the Good Light, a film about spoken word poet Andrea Gibson.
"I personally think it's the best film festival of the year," White says of Full Frame. "It's small enough and concentrated enough that it's easy to manage, but the programming team does such a great job with the lineup that it's one-stop shopping to see most of the best documentaries of the year."
In the years when the festival has not been held -- as with the pause between 2020 and 2023 that fans feared would be permanent -- downtown businesses have felt the impact. When local chef and restaurant owner Gray Brooks spoke to the INDY about the closure of Jack Tar in 2023, he recalled the lively foot traffic that the festival and events like it brought in prior to COVID-19: "Half the time we were full, it was people with lanyards around their necks," he said.
But the businesses that did survive the lean pandemic years, like Brooks's other downtown Durham venture, Pizzeria Toro, are beloved by returning festivalgoers.
"There are people who have raved for years about the kale salad at Toro," Foster says.
Foster and Tillery have tried to build on the community feel by holding free events throughout the year. This includes summer screenings in Durham Central Park (last year's had an unlucky streak of summer storms: "I applaud the 70-ish people who braved the rain," Foster laughs) and the Winter Road Show series, which returned this year, for the first time since 2019, at the Cary Theater.
At this year's festival, there are four free screenings (SALLY and The Apollo, as well as two free outdoor screenings in Durham Central Park), and a series of free-to-the-public "speakeasies" -- craft talks with filmmakers that take place just down the block, at the Durham Hotel. Full Frame's fellows program draws in students from universities ranging from NC Central University and Duke to NYU, giving students up-close access to filmmakers.
Ryan White first attended Full Frame as a freshman at Duke.
"I was rubbing shoulders with all of my heroes from the documentary field and it felt like heaven," White says. "I kept going back every year, and the film festival became like my de facto film school."
It's not easy for a large event, especially one inheriting the strained town-and-gown relationship of Duke and Durham, to be of a place and not just in a place, but over the years, Full Frame has struck that balance.
Maybe that is because, as curator Ford wrote in a press release for the festival, Full Frame exists as a singular space outside of market pressures, "[allowing] the work itself to drive conversation."
In Hollywood, documentaries operate on the margins. While this doesn't make the genre impervious to market forces -- streaming wars, AI sludge, and unmet union demands have landed the industry in crisis -- it makes them less vulnerable. Documentaries are used to being underestimated.
"Here, audiences and filmmakers engage with documentary as an evolving, urgent practice, creating an environment for meaningful dialogue that lingers long after the festival ends," Ford wrote. "I hope this program inspires viewers not just to watch, but to engage -- to sit with discomfort, question assumptions, and approach the present moment with fresh urgency and nuance."
Take No Other Land, a recent documentary directed by a collective of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers that follows the destruction of West Bank villages by Israeli forces.
Despite the documentary's popularity on the international circuit, no American distributor would take the film. You cannot find it on Amazon or Netflix or on any of the vowel-forward streaming platforms no one has heard of. Despite such staunch obstacles, just two weeks ago No Other Land managed to score the Oscar for Best Documentary -- a testament to the potency of its message and (possibly, optimistically) audience eagerness for films that cut through the noise and show something real.
"The images are bad for us," a first-term Donald Trump said of televised photos of crying children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Bad for us, or hard for us?
At their best, the documentary arts fill a gap unmet by print journalism or Hollywood, reeling our fragmented attention back to real-life subjects, big or small. Also at their best: documentaries of Full Frame'scaliber are not just blunt, virtuous objects of imagery -- they have storytelling range, vision, and depth. Many ways of seeing are revealed by examining many ways of being.
Two of the films in Ford's 2025 thematic program point to this: Harun Farocki's 1969 short Inextinguishable Fire and Brett Story's 2016 feature The Prison in Twelve Landscapes.
The former takes viewers to a Dow Chemical plant in Michigan during the Vietnam War that manufactures napalm. ("When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you'll shut your eyes," a voice-over states. "You'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close them to the memory. And then you'll close your eyes to the facts.") The 12 landscapes of the latter, meanwhile, don't feature actual prisons -- instead, they are prismatic snapshots of places impacted by the incarceration industry. Just as in real life, what happens just out of eyesight shapes our stories just as much as what is directly in view.
An appetite for those stories has kept crowds coming back to The Carolina Theatre every spring.
"To enjoy an indie or documentary film, you don't need an education in film," Foster says. "You don't need a degree in the medium to appreciate it. You just come into the movies, open and ready."