The One Take Documentary Film Series stays present with stories 

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With everything going on in the world, the urge to escape through entertainment is understandable. But filmmaker and educator Linda Moroney, who programs the One Take Documentary Series, wants people to stay grounded in reality through non-fiction stories.

“The genre opens worldviews,” Moroney said. “There's places that we can't or maybe don't want to go to physically, but we can understand and relate to, and develop empathy.”

People used to think of documentary films as the vegetable at the filmmaking table, she added, "but documentary films now make you laugh, make you cry, and make you sit on the edge of your seat. They can be scary. It's really hard to pigeonhole them. It might be the most exciting time to be making and viewing these types of films.”

As a documentary filmmaker herself, Moroney believes the genre exists in a special place. Among many projects, she's the creator of the Emmy Award-winning doc "Turn the Page," which explores the fractured relationship between incarcerated parents and their children through a literacy program that seeks to assuage their rift.

“We work in that intersection of art and journalism,” she said. “You have to be really tuned in and highly aware of what is actually going on and let go of your preconceived ideas of what you thought (a) moment was going to be like, or what the answers in (an) interview were going to be.”

One Take began in the spring of 2012, and for years was presented as a monthly series with a single documentary screened monthly at The Little Theatre. Over time, the series became a four-day festival that included a block of short films by filmmakers based in Western New York. That festival was thwarted by COVID, and has been on hold since.

While Moroney hopes the festival will return in the future, for now One Take exists as a monthly feature of national and international documentaries and an annual screening of a selection of locally made shorts held each December.

“There are some amazing films being made locally, and I don’t think the community knows about them as much as we do the local musicians and artists,” Moroney said.

The lineup includes four documentaries that range from about 10 to 25 minutes in length, bringing to audiences the intimate inner lives of a woman who is aging creatively; Buffalo Bills super fans; a bereft family picking up the pieces; and an artist working to show those struggling with addiction as three-dimensional humans.

The following is a full lineup of the documentaries included in this year's screening:

“Learning to Dance” is a meditation on aging as a woman, with a twin emphasis on the feeling of being adrift and the wide-open freedom that this ambiguity can offer. The doc, directed by Cat Ashworth, focuses on her own journey at 70 years of age.

Widowed and retired from her work as a professor at RIT, Ashworth narrates her reflections on a life full of certitude in its seasons so far, and the process of reconciling what she calls “the age of loss” — the deaths of those with whom you have shared memories — with the need to to freshly define selfhood outside of her roles at work and as a wife. Inspired by a performance of the Latinx “mirror devil dance,” Ashworth creates her own masked costume and takes steps into the unknown.

The film is a moving, hide-and-seek look at the dispiriting-yet-freeing invisibility of older women, and making the choice to do whatever the hell you feel like doing, at last.

A film that will likely resonate deeply with local audiences is Logan Girdlestone’s “The Mafia,” a sweet vignette about the so-called 'Bills Mafia,' from the origin of that term in 2011 to the lifelong stans and growing family of football’s most beloved underdogs.

The film briefly explores how the fan base’s unrelenting, unabashed dedication — and unwavering faith in the Bills’ comeback — extends beyond tailgating and facepaint among a tight community of fans from all walks to coming together to raise funds when Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field in 2022.

Through a series of archival footage and interviews, Tayton T. Troidl’s “A Life in Boxes” unpacks the complicated relationships that Darryl Tarrance (d. 2021) had with his former partners, his children, and his neighbors. Directed by Tarrance’s son, the doc reveals a man who was known to some as a helpful, stand up guy and to others as volatile and abusive, and the chaotic and unresolved position his now-adult children are in as they try to piece together some meaning from their experiences and his legacy.

“Appalachia Heart” is Don Casper’s film about artist Charmaine Wheatley, a watercolorist who makes portraits of individuals who are part of one stigmatized group or another. This is Caper’s third film about Wheatley’s work, this time focusing on her portraits of addicts in recovery and their advocates in Appalachian communities — which, the film states, have double the national average of opioid deaths. The film follows Wheatley’s process of making portraits in eastern Kentucky, while listening to her subjects with a sensitive ear.

(CITY featured Wheatley in 2018, when she was an artist-in-residence at the University of Rochester Medical Center and creating portraits of people living with mental illness and people living with HIV.)

Moroney said the story is “about empathy and seeing people as who they are and where they're at in this moment as opposed to thinking about the crisis in terms of just numbers and percentages, which makes the humanity get lost.”

One Take will be held at The Little Theatre at 7:15 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 14, followed by a Q&A with all four of the featured filmmakers. There will be an encore screening at 3 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 16 (no Q&A). Admission is $10, $7 for students, seniors, and military. thelittle.org/one-take

Rebecca Rafferty is an arts writer at CITY and the producer-host of art/WORK, an arts conversation video series created in collaboration with WXXI. She can be reached at [email protected].