For five days at the end of October, the Ojai Playhouse belonged to nonfiction.
The inaugural Ojai Documentary Film Festival ran Oct. 26-30 at the restored downtown theater at 145 E. Ojai Ave., pairing new documentaries and series with revival screenings, filmmaker conversations and frank panels about the business — and the legal headaches — of making films about real life.
The festival came from a small group with deep roots in the form. Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride, the producing partners behind Tiger King, Chimp Crazy and HBO’s Monsters of God, own Hotel El Roblar, which co-presented the event.
David Berger, who bought and relaunched the historic Playhouse, was the third partner.
Producer Emily Osborne, who spent more than six years building A24’s nonfiction division, and filmmaker Keith Ochwat, whose company Show&Tell coaches documentarians on distribution and fundraising, rounded out the founding team. Daniel Forest served as curator.
Goode explained the thinking plainly.
“The best documentaries introduce you to a world you didn’t know existed, and usually the truth turns out to be stranger than anything you could make up,” he said.
His point was that documentaries take a lot of people to make, yet those people rarely get to sit in a room with the audience watching their work.
Ojai, a town that has always drawn artists and independent thinkers, seemed like the right place to change that.
The lineup leaned hard into range. Alex Gibney’s film Musk, made for HBO, shared the week with Everest: The Other Side from Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, and You Can See Everything, the A24 collaboration between Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.
John Wilson brought The History of Concrete. Quinn Wilson’s Jean-Michel Basquiat, from Netflix, screened alongside Once Upon a Time in Harlem, the project from William Greaves and his son, David Greaves, now released by Neon.
Several films arrived with their makers in tow. Jack Weisman and Gaby Osio Vanden, whose Nuisance Bear won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, appeared in person, as did the team behind Luke Lorentzen’s film Boatbuilders.
Tamra Davis presented The Best Summer, and Robb Moss sat down with fellow filmmaker Lauren Greenfield after The Bend in the River.
The program also included J.M. Harper’s film Soul Patrol, Barbara Forever from Brydie O’Connor, Remake from Ross McElwee; and the first three chapters of Mark Cousins’s epic The Story of Documentary Film.
The revival screenings gave the week a sense of where the form has been.
Greenfield returned for The Queen of Versailles, then signed copies of her new photography book, The Queen of Versailles: An American Allegory.
Joan Churchill, who shot the 1971 film, joined a screening of Punishment Park.
Matt Wolf introduced his Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, about the cellist and composer who never fit neatly into any scene.
Arthur Russell “didn’t follow the rules of genre or the conventional model of being an artist,” Wolf said, adding that he saw the same spirit in the festival itself.
Not everything happened on screen.
“See You in Court: Documentaries Under Fire” brought together attorneys Michael C. Donaldson, Diana Palacios and Russell Smith, moderated by Wade Gentz, head of U.S. litigation and patents at Netflix.
The conversation covered defamation, fair use in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. v. Goldsmith, and the risks of recording people without permission, all live issues for anyone working in nonfiction right now.
In “The New Financial Playbook,” journalist Kim Masters talked with producer Ted Hope about how independent documentaries actually get financed, made and sold today.
The festival also opened its doors to high school students from across the Ojai Valley, who attended screenings and talks throughout the week and got the chance to meet working filmmakers and industry professionals face to face.
For the organizers, the experience around the films mattered nearly as much as the films themselves.
McBride described the goal as taking the best documentary work of the year and presenting it in a thoughtful, experiential way, with food, drink and live music extending each night beyond the screen.
“We think of Hotel El Roblar and the Playhouse as one, so the night carries from dinner to the bar to your seat in the theater,” he said.
Berger, who restored the Playhouse — across the street from the hotel — with that kind of night in mind, put it more simply.
“There’s nothing like sitting in a dark room with your neighbors, sharing the same story at the same moment,” he said.
“That collective experience is why we brought this theater back.”
The festival was billed from the start as an annual event, which means Ojai should expect a second edition next fall.
