Where to begin? The N-E-X D-O-C-S series, which features innovative documentaries from around the world, is simply packed with brilliant things, striking images, innovative narrative forms. We can, I suppose, enter a park in Chengdu, a city that’s the administrative center of Sichuan Province in China, a city with a population of 14,000,000 souls, a city that’s 2,000 years old. The park in Chengdu is the star of an incredible documentary, People’s Park, by Libbie D. Cohn (a Chinese American) and J. P. Sniadecki (a white American). The documentary, which was shot in July 2011, consists of one take through the park on a very busy day. The camera begins with the leaves of a tree, slowly pans down, and then pushes through a group of men and women who are dancing to high-energy music. The camera passes swaying hips and turning waists, turns, and proceeds down a path. We see people watching the dancers, people walking away from us, people sitting at tables. We go deeper and deeper into the park, passing more and more people. Occasionally, we reach the park’s border and see office towers rising above the trees; the camera then turns and takes another path into the park. There’s more dancing, more singing, more children, more lovers, more teenagers on cell phones. Some look into the camera; others don’t even notice it. One type of music here (traditional Chinese songs) clashes with another there (Euro disco), and during the whole movie, the din is constant and wonderful. This is the human hive; this is the park in a state of democratic perfection.
In another documentary, Trash Dance, we enter a strange situation in Austin, Texas. Here, Allison Orr, a white woman and modern-dance choreographer, talks a crew of black American and Latino trash collectors into performing a dance for the public with their bodies and their trucks. The amazing thing is not that she succeeds in doing this without embarrassing herself (middle class) or the trash collectors (working-class minorities), but that she opens up a world that we almost never see in the news: hardworking black Americans. These people are not fucking around; they know their job stinks, they know that society has a low opinion of the work they do, but nothing—not even smelly dead animals or vomit in trash cans—will stop them from achieving the good life, the health benefits, the money to pay their mortgages. Indeed, almost all of them maintain part-time jobs on the side. Sure, the dance performance is great, but we always see blacks dancing on TV. What we don’t see often enough are blacks doing backbreaking work so they can enjoy the quiet of a garden, or perfect their skills on a barbecue, or lavish money on their children.
I have run out of space. But there’s also the fucking amazing Public Hearing, which is a reenactment of the minutes from a public hearing concerning the zoning of a Walmart expansion in a small town in New York, directed by James N. Kienitz Wilkins. The whole affair will break your heart. America can be so cruel sometimes. 
N-E-X D-O-C-S runs June 21—26 at Northwest Film Forum. Full info at nwfilmforum.org.
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