Hamptons Take 2 Spring Doc Days Are Here

The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival, now in its 10th year, has brought not only a diverse selection of acclaimed documentaries to the South Fork every December but also award-winning filmmakers such as Alex Gibney, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Stanley Nelson, and Barbara Kopple.

For doc enthusiasts who can’t wait for December, the festival is presenting two Spring Doc Days, with “The Pulitzer at 100” to be shown Sunday at 2 p.m. at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor and “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City” set for April 30 at 2 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill.

On Sunday, Dava Sobel, the award-winning science writer and Pulitzer Prize nominee for her book “Galileo’s Daughter,” will lead a conversation with Kirk Simon, director and co-producer of “The Pulitzer at 100,” and Ron Simon, its co-producer and curator, at the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan.

Peter M. Wolf, a writer and an authority on land planning and urban policy, will discuss “Citizen Jane” with Roberta Brandes Gratz, author of “The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.”

“The Pulitzer at 100” was released in conjunction with the Pulitzer Centennial in April 2016. This film is told through stories of artists who have won the prestigious prize. The actors Helen Mirren, Natalie Portman, Liev Schreiber, John Lithgow, and Yara Shahidi read from Pulitzer works. Prize winners include the journalists Carl Bernstein, Nicholas Kristof, Thomas Friedman, and David Remnick, the authors Toni Morrison, Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz, Tony Kushner, and Ayad Akhtar, and the musicians Wynton Marsalis, David Crosby, and John Adams.

Kirk Simon has produced and directed documentaries for broadcast television and theatrical release for 30 years. He won an Academy Award for his short film “Strangers No More,” about the children of immigrant workers struggling for a new life in Israel. He has also received three additional Academy Award nominations in the Documentary Feature and Short Subject categories and has won the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton. 

“Citizen Jane: Battle for the City,” which will open tomorrow in theaters and on demand, is the story of two opposing forces: Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book, “The Death and Life of American Cities,” was a critical examination of how architects and planners have reconfigured urban areas, and Robert Moses, the “master builder” whose highways tore apart neighborhoods and displaced more than 250,000 residents.

The film retraces the protagonists’ battle for the city, elucidates Jacobs’s thinking and writing about cities, and examines contemporary urban life through the lens of one of its greatest champions.

Matt Tyrnauer, the director of “Citizen Jane,” won the top documentary prize at the Chicago Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination for his film “Valentino: The Last Emperor.” He is also a journalist and contributing editor to “Vanity Fair.”

Tickets for “The Pulitzer at 100” are $15. For “Citizen Jane” tickets are $20, $5 for Parrish members.