Documentarian Ken Burns won the Critics Choice Impact Award last month. Many attending the dinner at the Edison Ballroom could not resist joking about this filmmaker’s series – epic length, and irresistibly historic. Every worthy subject inspires long form story-telling.

Yet, more intimate films prevailed too: among many sweet moments at the 2025 ceremony was Mariska Hargitay picking up the statue for, My Mom Jayne, her documentary about her mother, the curvaceous platinum bombshell of the midcentury, Jayne Mansfield. Men may have the Freudian paradigm, the classic discovery of their fathers, but Hargitay’s story not only makes the tender mother-daughter connection for which the “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” star yearned, but packs a paternal surprise as well. In the true-life film world, it’s PG. That is, pure gold.

At DocHamptons, Chris Hegedus presented the Pennebaker Award, named for legendary cinema verite filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, to Alan Berliner. The audience of filmmakers at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater –including Susan Lacy, co-director and producer of Billy Joel: And So It Goes and Marisa Fox, producer and director of My Underground Mother, a film that explores her mother’s hidden journey through the Holocaust—viewed Berliner’s latest feature, Benita, about an artist and filmmaker who ended her life during Covid. Known for films about family members, Berliner focused on a friend who, much like his father and uncle, made for a fascinating and poetic vision on what it means to be alive.

Also screened: several films that have made their way through the festival circuit. My favorites: Cover-Up following Seymour Hersch’s fearless career in truth-telling journalism, and the beautiful and mythic The Tale of Silyan.

Ask E. Jean, directed by Ivy Meeropol, is more than just a profile about E. Jean Carroll, a writer and television personality who exposed Donald Trump for sexual assault in a Bergdorf dressing room, and then retried him for defamation. She won both court cases and still awaits settlement. Yet, money is beside the point. The film captures her contradictions, her bravado and fragility as an ambitious and talented woman in a culture of predatory men of power and their lies. Invisible to the outside world, the damage runs deep. 

Perhaps on the other end of women’s empowerment, Pretty Dirty: The Life and Time of Marilyn Minter, was a highlight of DOCNYC. Minter and Jane Fonda have a lively discussion about their sex lives. Who says women of a certain age are invisible?