Full Frame Picks By…

The 28th annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is just around the corner and ticket reservations are underway!

With more than 60 films across four programs to choose from, choosing which to see can seem a daunting task. We’ve recruited three friends of Full Frame—Mac McCaughan, Chris Vitiello, and Tom Rankin—to tell us about the documentaries they’re most excited to see this year.

Mac McCaughan

In 1989 Mac McCaughan co-founded Merge Records and the band Superchunk in Chapel Hill, NC. Since then he has released over a dozen albums with Superchunk, most recently 2025’s Songs in the Key of Yikes, as well as solo albums under his own name and the Portastatic moniker.

Watch Mac’s Video >>

Chris Vitiello

Chris Vitiello is a writer—and the current Durham Poet Laureate. As the Poetry Fox, he writes custom poems on typewriters at hundreds of events nationwide each year. His most recent books are Irresponsibility and Obedience and his art criticism won the 2017 Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism.

Read Chris’s Picks >>

Tom Rankin

A photographer, filmmaker, and folklorist who directs the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke, Tom Rankin has been documenting and interpreting American culture for more than twenty years. His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993), which received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Photography, ‘Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre’: Photographs of a River Life(1995), Faulkner’s World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain (1997), and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible (2000).

Get Tom’s Recommendations on Instagram >>