The fourth annual DOC NYC festival is upon us and this year's edition includes 73 features, most of which are seeing their New York or World Premieres, making it the largest iteration yet.

Scanning through the lineup, I don't see any biographies of famous scientific figures, or films that track the course of a major invention/discovery. There are, however a couple of films that might interest readers of this blog. Trailers and ticket links below.

URANIUM DRIVE-IN

This film, which might be more properly described as "environmental" than scientific, looks at at an economically starved Colorado  town pushing to re-open a closed uranium mine, even though many of the area's residents still suffer ill health effects from the mine's last go-around. Intense push-back from a nearby resort community opens up the jobs vs. environment debate as well as a question that underlies almost all of scientific discovery: just because we now can do a thing (like mine for uranium), does it mean we should?

THE FINAL MEMBER

There are many museums devoted to the odd and unusual, but the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which maintains a nearly complete collection of mammal penises, is surely among the oddest. This melancholic doc tracks Siggi, the museum's curator, in his quest to finish the collection by adding a human member, and his two best candidates: an aging Icelandic adventurer and an American narcissist with a somewhat unhealthy relationship to his penis.