From Jackson Heights to Capitol Hill: 5 Must-See Movies at the New York Film Festival

After dedicating a large part of her career to documenting Latin American political upheaval, filmmaker Pamela Yates turns the camera on her mentor and one of the United States’ most important cinematographers, Haskell Wexler. On the occassion of an important retrospective of his work, Yates interviews the 93-year-old cinematic titan and explores the impact of his influential and politically engaged documentary work, including an 1963 feature entitled The Bus, his 1969 countercultural milestone Medium Cool, and the Contra War-focused 80s classic Latino.

Co-starring John Leguizamo, Michael Almereyda’s latest feature recreates a Yale-based “obedience study” from 1961 that revealed in unsettling detail how normal human beings can be reduced to torturers and mass-murderers by merely following orders. Peter Sarsgaard plays professor Stanley Milgram, the social scientist who designed and implemented the experiments, while Winona Ryder plays his loving wife, through whose admiring eyes this difficult story is told.

Directors Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson build upon an extensive body of work documenting both sides of the struggle for immigration reform in this country with this profile of Illinois congressman Luis Gutiérrez. Born in Chicago to Puerto Rican parents, Gutiérrez has been one of the U.S. House of Representative’s most vocal voices for comprehensive immigration reform since he took office in 1993. Immigration Battle follows his astute political maneuvering during the attempted passage of a bi-partisan immigration reform bill that was sadly but unsurprisingly shot down by opportunist politicians feeding off of anti-immigrant sentiment.

In this personal essay film, Chilean documentarian and one-time political dissident Carmen Castillo explores 21st century political movements throughout Latin America and Western Europe with one pressing question in mind: what does it mean to be politically engaged in 2015? Employing the writings of her close friend and Marxist philosopher Daniel Bensaïd, Castillo takes us on an international journey from Mexico, to Brazil, to Bolivia, and finally to France in search of political meaning in a world where cynicism and pessimism apparently reign supreme.

Well into his 80s, American documentary master Frederick Wiseman’s still got what it takes to churn out a three-hour masterpiece that gets to the heart of the modern condition. Taking the predominantly Colombian-American neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens as his subject, Wiseman patiently and observantly documents a series of seemingly ordinary events – from an eyebrow removal specialist at work to a meeting of undocumented immigrants – and stitches them together to paint a broader picture of life in 21st century New York City, where unstoppable “economic development” weighs heavily but almost imperceptibly on nearly every aspect of our lives.