Manuel Betancourt

Manuel Betancourt (he/him) is the Assistant Editor of Documentary magazine. Born and raised in Colombia, Manuel is a regular guest on FilmWeek with Larry Mantle (LAist), whose work has appeared in Variety, the Los Angeles Times, the AV Club, the New York Times, BuzzFeed Reader, Vulture, Film Comment, Esquire, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He’s the author of The Male Gazed: What Hunks, Heartthrobs and Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men (Catapult, 2023), named one of the best books of 2023 by Time magazine, NPR, and them, and Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies (Catapult, 2025). He’s a former contributing editor at Film Quarterly, where he published his column, “Cineando,” all about Latin American cinema. Manuel is a member of the board of jurors for the George Foster Peabody Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), and GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. In 2019, he was selected to be the Writer in Residence at the Sundance Institute’s Documentary and Story Edit Lab. From 2022 to 2025, he was an assistant programmer in the U.S. Narrative Features section of the Tribeca Festival. He holds a doctorate degree in English Literature from Rutgers University.