LOS ANGELES, June 17, (RTRS): Last year, Michael Lumpkin arrived as director of Washington, D.C.’s, five-day AFI Docs Film Festival a mere six short months before his inaugural fest. For his second go-round, he has had the whole year to prepare and promises a festival that is more international and “diverse, in terms of the types of films, where they come from, and who’s making them.”

The festival, previously known as SilverDocs, also continues its gradual move from its first home in Silver Spring, Md, to a centralized hub in the heart of D.C. The vast majority of screenings will be held at the Newseum and the nearby Landmark E Street, opening with Alex Gibney’s “Zero Days” on June 22, and closing with Rachel Grady’s “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You” on June 26.

All told, the fest will screen 94 films from 30 countries, including Robert Kenner’s nuclear warhead expose “Command and Control”, Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio’s baseball doc “Doc and Darryl”, Toby Oppenheimer and Dana Flor’s “Check It”, and Nicole Opper’s “Visitors Day.” Werner Herzog will be on hand for a panel as the Charles Guggenheim Symposium honoree, followed by a screening of his internet-history film “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World” with additional panels scheduled to discuss diversity in documentary filmmaking, shortform docs and virtual reality.

As always, the festival boasts an unusual character thanks to its brief duration — less than half the allotment for its biggest counterparts, such as Amsterdam’s IDFA and Toronto’s Hot Docs — but the five-day span allows Lumpkin and his team to program with a mind toward thematic coherence.

Fit

“You have to say ‘no’ to films that you really, really love”, Lumpkin says. “So that forces you to really think about it and consider the entire program you’re presenting. Yes, all the films are great, but how do they fit in together as a festival?”

Despite taking place in the nation’s capital shortly before the two party conventions, Lumpkin says that the political atmosphere didn’t play an outsize role in programming. But as one would expect from a documentary festival, hot-button current events will rarely be far from the minds of those attending. (Speaking of which, the fest’s attendance rose from 11,000 to 15,000 from 2014 to ’15, and Lumpkin expects a “significant increase” this year.)

In particular, Lumpkin calls attention to the Newseum screenings of Kim A. Snyder’s “Newtown”, about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, and the Netflix-bound sexual assault documentary “Audrie and Daisy” directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk.

“They’re both very important films in terms of those issues, but they both approach the issues in very unique and different ways”, Lumpkin says. “This happened with a number of films this year, where you see the title and the short description, and you think, ‘Oh I’ve seen this film before.’ But you go in and watch it and say, ‘No, I haven’t seen this film, this is something I was not expecting at all.’ And that points to very good filmmaking.”

Lumpkin is also high on Vitaly Mansky’s “Under the Sun”, filmed in North Korea with the oversight of the country’s government, but which, he says, “plays with the format, and uses the actual frame of the image” to give a subtle but revealing glimpse of life in the inhospitable country.

“They were able to really uncover a truth about the culture and the people who live there that, if they had gone in and said, ‘this is what we’re doing,’ they never could have done. So it’s all in the filmmaking, about what they’re choosing to show you or not show you.”

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LOS ANGELES: The 37th Durban Intl Film Festival (DIFF) kicked off June 16 with a youthful and energetic doc that was warmly received on what’s celebrated across the country as Youth Day.

As South Africa commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, a series of student protests that were an emotional high-water mark of the anti-apartheid struggle, the festival opened with “The Journeymen”, a crowdpleaser by newcomer Sean Metelerkamp, who hit the road for seven months along with fellow photographers Wikus de Wet and Sipho Mpongo to shoot the documentary.

Filmed on three chest-mounted GoPros that chronicled their epic, 15,000-mile road trip across the country in 2014, “The Journeymen” offered a candid snapshot of a nation at a crossroads, with South Africans from a diverse range of backgrounds looking back on two decades of post-apartheid democratic rule.

Introducing the movie, acting festival director Peter Machen said, “It shows us how far we’ve come, and how far we have to go in fulfilling Nelson Mandela’s dream of...an equitable society.”

Machen struck a reflective chord early on, starting his speech by thanking all the “brave souls” whose work over nearly four decades have helped in “bringing this mighty DIFF train into the station.” It was a reminder that South Africa’s oldest film festival has faced its own struggles this year — an old but powerful locomotive solemnly chugging uphill.

For the organizers, the opening-night pageantry offered a chance to get beyond the embarrassing headlines of recent weeks, when a row involving the University of KwaZulu-Natal, whose Center for Creative Arts manages the festival, South African super-producer Anant Singh, whose “Shepherds and Butchers” was slated to bow this year’s proceedings, and fest manager Sarah Dawson put the fest in jeopardy.

When manager Dawson abruptly resigned last month, citing differences with DIFF management over the selection process that tapped “Shepherds” for the opening night, Machen stepped in to seize the reins of a festival whose credibility was at stake.

Addressing a controversy that spilled over into the headlines, Machen noted last night, “We need to have dialogue, not shouting matches.” Echoing the mood, newly appointed director of the Center for Creative Arts, David Maahlamela, channeled his inner Dickens, adding, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Yet for a festival born under the dark cloud of apartheid, when it offered a platform for controversial movies that were frequently banned by the government, DIFF continues to offer a bold voice for works from around the continent. This year’s edition will again have a strong local flavor, with nearly half of the 100 feature-length films screening in 15 venues across the city showcasing the works of African helmers.