Palka said the process of making the film with Walker was like “facing a wave as opposed to letting it pummel you.”

“I lived in a world of words long before I was aware of it,” Ebert says in the beginning of the film, and as his health declined due to cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands, his communication tool became a synthesizer and a prized blog where he continued his work. Movie critic Richard Corliss says of the blog, “his voice was stilled but of course he’s talking more than ever.”

Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam challenges the dominant story told about the 1975 fall of Saigon when the last of the Americans in the country were ordered to evacuate without their allies, the South Vietnamese. The individual testimonies in the film are extraordinary on their own, but knit together with powerful unearthed footage and untold stories not just of bearing witness, but of active participation, is the momentum behind a remarkable film that left a full house at the DOC NYC screening wiping tears from their eyes.

Expressing themes of love, spontaneity, and authenticity, audience members were treated to a conversation with the legendary filmmaker Albert Maysles and DOC NYC Artistic Director Thom Powers before Friday evening’s screening of Salesman. Debuted in 1968, Norman Mailer saw the film and told Maysles he “thought it said more about America than any other film he’s ever seen.”

The steady, even-handed execution of the speaker’s testimonies–set against the backdrop of frenetically delivered images of the Vietnam War–spoke to the brutality, stress, intensity, and vulnerability of the time. EDDIE ADAMS: SAIGON ’68 powerfully contextualized Hal Buell’s opening remark: “The image summed up the whole war.”

When it comes to writing, Johnny Dark likes to go off on a tangent, saying that “the tangent is sometimes more interesting than the body you started off with.” And so it is with SHEPARD & DARK a film that became director Treva Wurmfeld’s tangent to what was originally going to be a documentary about playwright and actor Sam Shepard.  The film examines the nuanced relationship between Shepard and his longtime friend Dark, whose friendship formed back in the 1960s in Greenwich Village. Over the span of forty years, the two men wrote to each other about their “lives, fears, hopes, and problems in letters.”