WASHINGTON, D.C.—When the days get muggy and the White House lawn is repurposed for a cage fight, “it must be time for DC/DOX,” said festival co-founder Jamie Shor on a Thursday night at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre on a particularly stuffy weekend in the nation’s capital (DC/DOX took place during June 11-14). Her jest drew cheers from a crowd that almost certainly recalled 2025’s iteration, when DC/DOX had to compete with a military parade on Constitution Avenue in honor of the president’s birthday.

“There’s one thing that remains a mystery, and that is a festival’s strange relationship to time,” added festival co-founder and director Sky Sitney that day. The team had been anxiously awaiting the festival, with Sitney adding that, as with most positive experiences, it would be over all too quickly. It was a reminder to be present, to be “here”—and to take in as many quality documentary films as possible.

Sitney then introduced the opening film, “Give Me the Ball!,” which traces the unusually extraordinary life of tennis champion and social advocate Billie Jean King, who was in attendance.

“In D.C. the ball that we are all too often used to is a wrecking ball” aimed at the arts and democratic institutions, Sitney said. However, “it can become an instrument of profound change [as] it did for Billie Jean King. Stepping onto a tennis court became a way” to lead on behalf of the LGBTQ community. “Give Me the Ball!” includes King’s inspirational win over Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” match in 1973, her campaign to ensure women earned as much as men in tournament purses as well as her decision to come out as a lesbian.

“If life hands you the ball, you have the responsibility to do something with it,” said Sitney. “But, more importantly, if life doesn’t hand you the ball, sometimes you have to demand it.”

For the post-screening panel, moderated by the Atlantic’s Sally Jenkins, King, now 82, said her philosophy is that followers choose leaders, not the other way around. The champion said she engaged in a great deal of reflection and prayer before agreeing to directors Elizabeth Wolff and Liz Garbus’s pitch for the doc.

“You have to be truthful to the people watching it,” the athlete said regarding the film’s inclusion of perhaps-unflattering information, such as her affairs with various women while still married to husband Larry King. “It’s only fair to the audience.” (Billie Jean has been married to her wife and fellow tennis player Ilana Kloss since 2018.)

King, who is now a part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, famously appeared on a Wheaties cereal box at the height of her fame. She said that her father, a preacher, incorporated sports into his sermons and told his daughter, “great athletes don’t drink or smoke.”

When asked what advice she had for bearing the second Trump administration, King, who admitted to wanting to be a lawyer in her youth, said it is important to follow your dreams and not take the critics to heart.

“Can you imagine what they used to say to us?” she said.

King closed out the event by hitting some of her trademark tennis balls into the appreciative audience with a racket.

“When a Witness Recants”

Among the most fascinating films I watched on day two were “When a Witness Recants” from Dawn Porter (“John Lewis: Good Trouble”) detailing a 1980s Baltimore case in which three African American teens were sent to prison for 36 years based largely on fraudulent eyewitness testimony. In the film’s most extraordinary scene, the exonerated men reunite with their former friend Ron Bishop, whose false testimony was crucial to their conviction. (Bishop, who was allowed to go free, maintains he was pressured by the authorities to lie in court.)

“Every time we look at [the film] it just makes me better,” said Alfred Chestnut, one of the three exonerees. “I don’t take [anything] for granted” in his post-prison life, he said.

“It gives me a platform to maybe help out other people as well,” added Andrew Stewart, who, like Chestnut, spent over three decades in prison for a murder he did not commit. Despite the unfairness and having a large part of his life stolen, Stewart hopes the documentary also demonstrates the power of using what remains of his life for positive ends. “Only God knew what He had intended for us,” Stewart said.

Director Porter said she reached out to both the judge and the prosecutor in the 1983 case; both declined to be filmed. It may be difficult for audiences to accept how often people lie in criminal investigations and even in court, and how frequently innocent people are sent to prison.

Porter also said she allowed the lengthy reunion scene—riddled with discomfort—to be as long as it needed to be.

My Saturday included a screening of “The Lake” at the Center for American Progress. This somewhat-mournful film about the overtaxed Great Salt Lake follows scientists and politicians fighting to keep it not only from disappearing but also stop the lakebed dirt—littered with carcinogens—from harming downwind residents. The film features interviews with Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R).

“There’s only room for building bridges. That is more evident in Utah because…it is a particularly conservative state [and] there’s no room for anything but collaboration,” said producer Fletcher Keyes, who is married to the film’s director, Abby Ellis. Keyes added that Cox, though a conservative, has been publicly on board with preservation efforts and the necessity of fighting climate change—perhaps unsurprising given that his most recent challenger for the governorship came from his right.

The Beehive State’s water laws were written back in the 1850s, when the Mormons first arrived from the Midwest, and have never been updated. Keyes is hopeful that, with politicians working across the aisle and taking the agriculture community’s concerns to heart, this can be changed. (He also shared that his family has moved to Utah’s higher elevations.)

Among day three’s most educational documentaries was “Soul Patrol” from J.M. Harper, detailing an all-Black special forces unit during the Vietnam War, long after the desegregation of U.S. armed forces. Harper acknowledged that while racial harmony was far from common in the service even during the 1960s, such animosity “melted away” in the elite LURP (Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol) units, where your life depended on the man serving next to you.

“We were too busy surviving to deal with racism,” said retired soldier Willie T. Brown, who appears in the film. Brown experienced prejudice and segregation during his young days in New York, “but when you get into special forces, and you’re out in the jungle with eleven other guys…you’re too busy surviving.”

Film subject Jesse Lewis, a longtime reporter for The Washington Post, sounded a note of warning in pointing to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent move to remove Pentagon promotions of several women and soldiers of color, particularly at a time of naval conflict in the Middle East.

Said Harper: “As we were editing the film…we realized that American history repeats itself. It’s in times like these that it’s very important to look back at those who survived it and learn what we can from their lives.”

The panelists agreed that the experience of African American soldiers in LURP units has been largely ignored, even now, and often disbelieved. “Soul Patrol” details not only that the soldiers rarely spoke of their service, but that they didn’t reunite until many decades later.

“The stories I wrote [for] The Washington Post were almost too raw [and perhaps didn’t] reflect the horror and the gore of war,” said Lewis, the nearly 90-year-old former reporter. “I don’t think the public is prepared for that.”

Brown, the former soldier, said he much prefers that, instead of saying “Thank you for your service,” the general public greets returning warriors with something even warmer: “Welcome home.”

“The Last First: K2 Winter”

Amir Bar-Lev’s harrowing “The Last First: K2 Winter” played on the large screen at the Navy Memorial Saturday, a thoroughly enveloping experience detailing several climbing teams’ attempts to be the first to reach K2’s summit during Pakistan’s punishing alpine winter. The film’s main subjects are Icelandic climber John Snorri Sigurjónsson and his guides, Muhammad Ali Sadpara and his son Sajid Ali. Sigurjónsson was motivated by what Bar-Lev termed “summit fever” and was “overmotivated” to get to the top of the world. We also see how the filmmaking process perhaps encourages bad decisions: One cameraman forthrightly says, “You hope something terrible happens.”

Bar-Lev was drawn to the material given that he is now a parent and was once fond of adrenaline-spiking activities in his youth. He labeled the story he tells “a perfect storm of mistakes.”

“When you hear about people who seem to be impervious to fear, or they cheat death…those are the heroes we paint on our cave walls and make science fiction movies about,” Bar-Lev said. “Social media and documentaries are just new ways of [making] cave drawings.”

“The Last First” will be out on Apple TV+ Oct. 2.

That sunday at the Regal Gallery Place in Chinatown, I watched “The Salisbury Poisonings: A Spy Next Door,” detailing Russian agents’ near-fatal poisoning of defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England. Executive producer Hamish Ferguson said that, nearly a decade later, the scandal looms large in the British psyche. (Though they both survived, the Skirpals have not been seen publicly since their recovery.)

“The pace of change in the world…means we might have waited fifteen, twenty years previously to examine major events like this. I think it’s important we look back quicker,” Ferguson said. “Apart from terror incidents, we haven’t been invaded or suffered the threat of land war [in 80 years], so there’s a kind of security that is false.”

That sense of security was further undermined during filming at the Salisbury Cathedral, where a pair of Mexican tourists approached the filmmakers. Ferguson said he later witnessed the same pair watching them film in London.

“The Salisbury Poisonings: A Spy Next Door”

“The Salisbury Poisonings” also tells the tragic story of Charlie Rowley, who accidentally gave his girlfriend, Dawn Sturgess, a bottle of Novichok poison hidden in a discarded perfume canister—tossed away by the Russians—that Rowley found in a dumpster. Ferguson said Rowley is “clearly marked by these events” and was only convinced to speak on camera after the filmmakers spent nine months with him over many cups of coffee.

“The geopolitical plates that move underneath this story are rather vast,” but it was the human element that most intrigued the team, Ferguson said. “The ambition was to put Charlie on the same footing as” world leaders such as former prime minister Theresa May and a onetime MI6 spy chief who appear in the film.

Rory Kennedy’s “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing” had its world premiere Sunday at the Navy Memorial. A follow-up to her 2022 film “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing,” the new doc outlines the results-at-all-costs culture at Boeing that led to rushed work and, inevitably, air disasters. The panelists all said they no longer fly on Boeing Max planes—and advised the audience to do the same.

“I kind of felt the documentary itself was a reckoning. There’s so many challenges in holding Boeing accountable [as a private corporation], so it’s really come down to the families who have been victims [and] the whistleblowers who are risking everything to speak up,” Kennedy said, heaping praise on former Boeing employee Merle Meyers, a prominent voice in the film.

Meyers, who now devotes his life to grief counseling, said that the common fate of whistleblowers is being downgraded and eventually fired. A third-generation Boeing employee, Meyers said that particular family tradition stops with him. The company, he alleges, performs a cost-benefit analysis but then continues cutting corners anyway. Meyers compared the situation to the scandal surrounding the exploding Ford Pinto of the seventies.

“There’s no incentive for them to change. This is institutional evil,” Meyers said, adding that because Boeing is so powerful, it doesn’t behoove congressional leaders of either party to insist on a greater reckoning of their own.

Kennedy, the director, shared that a Boeing executive once told her that “Downfall” was screened for members of the Boeing C-suite, and no one in the room “could find any fact that was incorrect.”

Closing-night film “The Lorraine” traces the history of the iconic Memphis hotel, a Black-owned establishment that hosted musicians, community leaders, and, most infamously, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the day he was assassinated. From its former glory, the hotel fell into disrepair and abandonment, but was saved from the wrecking ball and is now a centerpiece of the National Civil Rights Museum.

“It’s been such a whirlwind, but we are so extraordinarily grateful,” festival director Sky Sitney said at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre on the Sunday prior to the final film. “Few places carry the weight of history more profoundly than the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. More than a landmark, the Lorraine is a witness to tragedy…resilience…and transformation.”

Director Sam Pollard believes there really is no difference between African American history and American history. “America has a complicated history and a complicated racial history, and we shouldn’t forget this history,” he said.

“This was my first film, and sometimes I think being naive helped,” added Alvin Hall, the writer and executive producer. He shared that one of his college classmates helped out by donating funds for the rights to all of the songs in “The Lorraine.” (The filmmakers hope to screen “The Lorraine” at the Memphis museum in the near future.)

DC/DOX co-founder Jamie Shor shared parting thoughts, as well as “The Lorraine” closed the curtain on the fourth iteration of this thoroughly engaging festival in the nation’s capital.

“We are so grateful for the weekend, for the crowds, for the conversation,” Shor said. “We hope you saw things that made you laugh, made you think, made you cry.”

For the fourth year, I moderated several filmmaker panels at DC/DOX. Each time it is an energizing, stimulating and often fun experience—usually capped by hugs.

On the afternoon of June 12th, I moderated the “Sight and Sound” panel, encompassing six short films. Joining me onstage at the Woolly Mammoth were “Dark Knot at the Center” director Inês Pedrosa e Melo, James Pellerito, director of “I Wanted to Hear Your Voice,” and “Koki, Ciao” director Quenton Miller. We discussed how directors must know the difference between short-form and long-form documentaries.

Saturday evening was my chance to anchor the post-screening discussion for “Time Warp,” which traces South Carolina-born Kenny Starling McCormack’s attempt to stage a shadow cast of “Rocky Horror Picture Show” event at a small theater in tiny Rock Springs, Wyoming. Starling and director Allison Berg graciously invited a D.C.-area troupe to perform shadow performances onstage at the Woolly Mammoth, with Starling appearing in the guise of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, drag and all. In the film, Starling described such stagings as “queer joy,” and it could not have been more appropriate during Pride Month. Post-discussion, Starling also sang “I’m Going Home” from the musical film, still in costume as the good doctor.

My final panel was Saturday evening’s “Sight & Sound” event at the Regal. Having five filmmakers on the panel required a bit of a balancing act to ensure they each had time to speak their piece. It was then time for audience questions, and for which I deployed, as has become my annual tradition, my joke about running into the audience with a microphone “like Phil Donahue.”

Featured image: Billie Jean King on stage at DC/DOX (photo by Eric Althoff)