Movie MInute - Documentary Arts

 Alan Govenar is a uniquely interdisciplinary artist whose expansive career has focused on marginalized and overlooked voices across America. In 1985, Govenar founded Documentary Arts, a Dallas and New York based cultural organization that mines a broad range of media to catalyze creative activity, energize community engagement, and initiate social change around diverse cultures and regional heritage. 

Accompanying the world premiere of Govenar’s newest documentary film, Quiet Voices in a Noisy World, Documentary Arts will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a film retrospective featuring a selection of Govenar's earlier docs, with talkbacks at New York's Cinema Village, from November 14-20, 2025

The short docs Stoney Knows How, Cigarette Blues, Texas Style, and The Hard Ride will be shown in a collection called The Early Years: Shorts by Documentary Arts.

The feature films presented will be: The Devil’s Swing, exploring the culture and history of the La Junta de los Rios region of the Texas-Mexico border — sacred rituals, corridos, druglords, Pancho Villa, and the tragic killing of 19-year-old boy; The Beat Hotel, about a cheap hotel in Paris that became a sanctuary for American Beats; Master Qi and the Monkey King, following Chinese immigrants bringing their tradition of Peking Opera to the United States; Myth of a Colorblind France, about African American expatriates in France from the 19^th century through the present; Serving Second Chances, chronicling the lives of three clients of The Stewpot, a homeless services ministry; Looking for Home, a search for the deeper meaning of home, over a period of four years, interrupted by the profound effects of the Covid pandemic; and Tattoo Uprising, a sweeping overview of tattoo practices from antiquity to today’s tattoo explosion.

There will be four talkbacks during the week of screenings. 

• On Friday, November 14, director Alan Govenar will have a talkback following the 7pm screening of his film Quiet Voices in a Noisy World, joined by community organizer, activist, and social worker, Onaje Benjamin, who fights against the politics of erasure.
• On Saturday, November 15, after the 7pm screening of The Devil’s Swing, there will be a talkback with director Alan Govenar and progressive community activist D Matteson Pascal, who is featured in the film and is at the forefront of the immigration debate. 
• On Wednesday, November 19, following the 7pm screening of Tattoo Uprising, the director Alan Govenar and editor Jason Johnson-Spinos will be joined by NYC tattoo artists and historians Michael McCabe and Michelle Myles for a talkback. 
• On Thursday, November 20, after the 1pm screening of The Beat Hotel, director Alan Govenar will have a talkback with Regina Weinreich, a filmmaker and widely published Beat-culture critic who is featured in the film.

In conjunction with the film retrospective will be book signings and readings of Govenar's newest written works Come Round Right, Maud Stevens Wagner: The Mona Lisa of American Tattoo, Lotteva Wagner Davis: Hand Tattooist & Artist of the American West, Making Culture by Hand and art exhibits including The Center for Photography at Woodstock exhibitions featuring different aspects of Documentary Arts work over the last four decades: Everyday Culture: Seven Projects by Documentary Arts and Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive. (Kingston, New York through January 11, 2026)