New to New York, What DOC NYC's 2026 Program Looks Like Counted

DOC NYC, the documentary festival that started in 2010 and now reaches its 17th edition, opens its 2026 edition on Wednesday, November 11, and runs through November 29 at three Manhattan theaters and online. By our count of its film database, 127 distinct feature titles are on the program, and 94 of them carry a premiere label.

The headquarters is the IFC Center at Sixth Avenue and West Third Street. The volume is on Second Avenue, where Village East by Angelika, between 11th and 12th Streets, hosts the bulk of the screenings and the industry conference. The SVA Theatre on West 23rd Street hosts the closing-night film among others. Pass holders get a lounge at Bar Veloce, on the same Second Avenue block as Village East.

The festival's own program page sorts films into more than 20 sections but gives no totals. So we pulled every film page tagged for 2026 from the festival's public database on November 10 and counted them ourselves.

How Big Is the 2026 Program?

The database holds 247 listings for 2026. Some are not separate films. Six features are listed twice because they show in two sections, and 23 listings are shorts programs or bundles that package individual shorts already listed on their own. Take those out and the festival has 127 distinct features and 91 individual shorts.

The festival's All Film Pass listing promises more than 200 films. Our 218 sits comfortably inside that claim.

Venue tags show where the weight falls. Of the 127 features, 95 are also tagged for the online platform, so three in four can be watched from a couch anywhere in the country. In person, Village East carries 104 of the 247 listings and IFC Center 75. The SVA Theatre carries eight.

How Many Are Premieres?

Most of them, if you count the way festivals do. Each film's description opens with its premiere status when it has one, and we tallied those labels for every feature.

New York City premieres lead with 41 features, films that have played elsewhere but not here. World premieres come next with 25, counting one co-world premiere co-presented with Tanglewood and the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center. There are 12 U.S. premieres, 11 North American premieres and five international premieres.

The other 33 features carry no premiere label at all, and every one sits in a section built for films that already have a life. Fifteen are on the Short List, the festival's annual selection of awards contenders. Twelve are DOC NYC Selects titles, seven are in Winner's Circle and five are Selects encores. Ava DuVernay's 14th, which premiered at Alice Tully Hall last month, is one of them.

New York City premieres lead with 41 features, films that have played elsewhere but not here.

The result is a festival that works on two levels. About a fifth of the features are world firsts. Most of the rest are New York's first look at films that have already premiered somewhere else.

Which Films Are About New York?

The festival tags 21 of its 127 features with its own NYC label. Five of them make up the Metropolis Competition, the section reserved for New York stories.

Make Work follows choreographers through a 10-day creation process at New York City Ballet's Choreographic Institute, with archival clips of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, and it is a New York premiere. Romare Bearden: A Life in Collage follows the painter from his Harlem childhood to his studios. The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman, an international premiere, traces the founder of MAD magazine. The Darkest Light returns to the abuse allegations against Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach that surfaced after his death in 1994. Siri Hustvedt, Dance Around the Self, a North American premiere, sits with the novelist as she reflects on her life with Paul Auster as illness and grief entered it.

The centerpiece is a New York story as well. Barbara Kopple's Union Town follows Teamsters at UPS, Amazon workers trying to unionize and the largely Spanish-speaking delivery workers who carry the city's dinners up its stairs.

Several of the world premieres are local too. What Happened to Danny follows the family of Danny Chen, a 19-year-old from Chinatown who died while serving in Afghanistan, as they push for answers. Illuminations profiles Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, two experimental filmmakers who have shared their lives and their Bolex cameras for more than 60 years. All the Music in the World, the co-world premiere, follows the pianist Emanuel Ax, who has played Carnegie Hall and stages around the world for more than 50 years, from a New York childhood to his close friendship with Yo-Yo Ma, who brought Silkroad to Carnegie Hall last month.

How We Counted

We downloaded every film record tagged for 2026 from DOC NYC's public website database on November 10. We merged the six features listed twice, separated individual shorts from program bundles by their listings, and read the premiere label from the first line of each film's own description. Section and NYC counts use the festival's own tags. A film can sit in more than one section. Schedules change during a festival, so the numbers describe the program as published that morning.

The opening-night film, The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, about the Shipibo artist Sara Flores, screens on November 11. The festival closes on November 29 with Totality, a portrait of the 2024 eclipse made by 21 film teams under David Heilbroner and Kate Davis. In between are 19 days and 218 films, and most of them are new to this town.