A UVM professor’s acclaimed documentary detailing his grappling with grief, gender and rural family ties has been chosen as a “Critic’s Pick” by the New York Times.

“North by Current,” released by Department of Art and Art History professor Madsen Minax earlier this year, is a “drama of self-realization,” wrote Times critic Nicolas Rapold this month.

“This kind of personal film has often been attempted ... but rarely with this insight,” Rapold wrote of Minax’s genre-busting documentary film, which is currently up for an award at the upcoming International Documentary Association awards in February.

The film had previously been selected by the Berlin International Film Festival for inclusion in its prestigious summer lineup, where it was also nominated for “Best Documentary.”

Since that success, Minax’s film has premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and been nominated for “Best Documentary” at the Krakow Film Festival. PBS acquired the film for national broadcast in its program POV, and it can be watched free online.

Minax, who teaches time-based media courses, is a filmmaker who explores, combines, challenges and rejects many of the conventions of filmmaking and documentary storytelling in his art.

“In experimental avenues, the film is considered very conventional, and in documentary avenues, the film is considered very experimental,” Minax said in an interview in March. “This film is a weaving, tangential type of story moving from content to content, drawing allusions and parallels between different situations.”

In “North By Current,” Minax explores the relationality of family dynamics, brought to life on Super 8 recordings to show the difficulties of being in a family and what it means to grow up.

“It's a feature film about my relationship with my family that traces our relationships over the course of six years as I return home more regularly to take care of my family in the wake of my niece's death,” Minax said. The death, under questionable circumstances, is used as a “jumping off point” to examine family and family dynamics, he said.

“The intention of the film is to collapse different aspects of time and place, and think about generational passage in a more holistic way,” Minax said. “The film is pretty universal in that sense — that it's really about finding common ground with each other in the face of so many external differences.”

Unlike other long-term projects the filmmaker has completed in the past, which tend to be mapped out ahead of time, “North by Current” repeatedly changed direction during the course of its production.

“The film narratively changed many times over the last six years,” he said. “It wasn’t until the last year of editing that it really started to be a cohesive narrative.”

An important part of Minax’ filming process was how to portray the members of his family in a way that served the narrative and also gave them agency in their portrayal in the film. Madsen said he “spent a year just trying to warm my family up to the idea of having a camera around before I even started shooting.”

The film “really dives into some family history and it's intense and it takes up a lot of emotional space for everyone in it,” he said.

The International Documentary Association awards are set to be announced Feb. 5, 2022.

Ruben Trauba is a senior economics major.