This quarter’s Doc Film calendar has been one of the best yet, and Her Campus UChicago had the chance to speak with Nicky Dover, the general co-chair of Doc this year. He started off volunteering with Doc films every quarter since he started here as a first year. Eventually, he decided to run for the position of general chair with Alice Jo, and lo and behold, we now have Nicolas Cage staring at us from every bulletin board on campus. However, Nicky emphasizes that coming up with the calendar is a group effort.
“One thing that a lot of people don’t really know about our lineup is that it’s not actually decided by Doc Films as a board or anything. We host programming meetings where anyone who’s interested in Doc films can propose a series and then we’ll vote on them. That’s not to say the programming chair, who in this case is Daniel Frankel, doesn’t have an influence. But it’s reaching out to the community and having them come in and propose series that really made this quarter incredibly interesting. One of the great things about Doc Films is we get people genuinely interested in completely out there areas of cinema coming to our programming meeting and proposing film series. As a result of which you’ll have someone come in and propose something like the Latin American series, or the Sister Cinema series, though a lot of it’s influenced by who’s willing to help with our cinema.”
“As for the Nic Cage series, that was my baby. I proposed it, I convinced people to vote for it, and I now host the series every Thursday. I love watching Nicolas Cage. He’s absolutely wonderful in everything he’s in. No matter how bad the movie, if he’s in it, the movie’s fantastically fun to watch. And once it got past, it was obvious what was going to be on the calendar. The wonderful Anita To, our design chair, and projectionist for the Nicolas Cage showing, immediately sent out a message being like ‘Hey, what’s the best picture of Nicolas Cage for the calendar?’”
This year though, Doc is encountering some changes.
“In terms of things we hope to accomplish this year, despite being a 35mm film theater, we aim to be up to date in a lot of ways. In Spring Quarter of 2013, we did finish installation of a new, beautiful digital projector with DCP and Blu-Ray capability, helped with the generous donation of PCC money. However, we still aim to be a film theater, and use digital only when real prints are unavailable. We at Doc Films value film prints highly, and we keep quite a collection of our own film prints, some of which are incredibly rare. People can now buy passes via the internet, and we’re looking to eventually maybe expand it to tickets. We’re using the Logan Center’s Box Office for that, because they let us use their system for next to nothing. And Alice Jo and I are working to make sure we can accept credit and debit cards, which we’ll hopefully start doing before this quarter’s up, but if not by next quarter.”
Be sure to get over to Doc sometime this quarter and check out some of the great movies they’re showing! Take Nicky’s word for it. When asked which movie was his favorite, he said, “My tradition is, at the beginning of the quarter, to circle every movie I want to see on the print calendar. By the time I finished circling, I had circled 38 films. And I’ve already seen two films that weren’t circled.”