Documentary
Years

Popular Documentary Movies

Mariner of the Mountains
Mariner of the Mountains
Using his personal background, Brazilian Karim Aïnous invites the audience to follow/discover an incredible journey through space and time, with an original and usually unknown prism/aspect : The strong bound between Algeria and Brazil, two countries with political and revolutionary strikes that mould their evolution.
Mariner of the Mountains 2023
Four Roads
Four Roads
The COVID-19 pandemic forced many to stay at home, preventing people from meeting each other in real life. In the absence of any physical connection, this short explores alternative forms of contact among neighbors by making use of an old 16mm camera, a zoom lens, and a few meters of expired film.
Four Roads 2021
A Dog Called Money
A Dog Called Money
Accompany PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy on a journey through the creative process behind PJ Harvey's new album, conceived by their travels around the globe.
A Dog Called Money 2019
Teenage
Teenage
Teenagers did not exist before the 20th century. Not until the early 1950s did the term gain widespread recognition, but "Teenage" offers compelling evidence that teenagers had a tumultuous effect on the previous half-decade.
Teenage 2013
Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story
Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story
The hilarious and bizarre story of Frank Sidebottom, the cult British comedian in a papier mâché head, and the secretive life of Chris Sievey, the artist trapped inside.
Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story 2019
Uppercase Print
Uppercase Print
In 1981, chalk slogans written in uppercase letters started appearing in public spaces in the Romanian city of Botoşani. They demanded freedom, alluded to the democratic developments taking place in Romania’s socialist sister countries or simply called for improvements in the food supply. Mugur Călinescu was behind them, who was still at school at the time and whose case is documented in the files of the Romanian secret police. Theatre director Gianina Cărbunariu created a documentary play based on this material.
Uppercase Print 2020
Moments Like This Never Last
Moments Like This Never Last
Dash Snow rejected a life of privilege to make his own way as an artist on the streets of downtown New York City in the late 1990s. Developing from a notorious graffiti tagger into an international art star, he documented his drug- and alcohol-fueled nights with the surrogate family he formed with friends and fellow artists Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen before his death by heroin overdose in 2009. Drawing from Snow’s unforgettable body of work and involving archival footage, Cheryl Dunn’s exceptional portrait captures his all-too-brief life of reckless excess and creativity.
Moments Like This Never Last 2021
Rocky Road to Dublin
Rocky Road to Dublin
Irish-born journalist Peter Lennon examines the contemporary (1967) state of the Republic of Ireland, posing the question, “What do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it?” It argues that Ireland was dominated by cultural isolationism, Gaelic and clerical traditionalism at the time of its making.
Rocky Road to Dublin 1968
The Other Side
The Other Side
In an invisible territory at the margins of society, at the border between anarchy and illegality, lives a wounded community that is trying to respond to a threat: of being forgotten by political institutions and having their rights as citizens trampled. Disarmed veterans, taciturn adolescents, drug addicts trying to escape addiction through love, ex-special forces soldiers still at war with the world, floundering young women and future mothers, and old people who have not lost their desire to live. Through this hidden pocket of humanity, the door opens to the abyss of today's America.
The Other Side 2015
The Gospel According to André
The Gospel According to André
From the segregated American South to the fashion capitals of the world, operatic fashion editor André Leon Talley's life and career are on full display, in a poignant portrait that includes appearances by Anna Wintour, Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Bethann Hardison, Valentino, and Manolo Blahnik.
The Gospel According to André 2018
Free Chol Soo Lee
Free Chol Soo Lee
On June 3, 1973, a man was murdered in a busy intersection of San Francisco’s Chinatown as part of an ongoing gang war. Chol Soo Lee, a 20-year-old Korean immigrant who had previous run-ins with the law, was arrested and convicted based on flimsy evidence and the eyewitness accounts of white tourists who couldn’t distinguish between Asian features. Sentenced to life in prison, Chol Soo Lee would spend years fighting to survive behind bars before journalist K.W. Lee took an interest in his case. The intrepid reporter’s investigation would galvanize a first-of-its-kind pan-Asian American grassroots movement to fight for Chol Soo Lee’s freedom, ultimately inspiring a new generation of social justice activists.
Free Chol Soo Lee 2022
M
M
Menahem Lang, an actor with an extraordinary singing voice, returns to Bnei Brak, the city in Israel where he grew up and a center of ultra-orthodox Judaism. Now in his 30s, Lang left the city at 20, following years of rape and sexual abuse by elder, devout family men in the community. Yet, Lang was far from being an isolated case: his conversations with other abused young men document a cycle of sexual predators and tormented lives.
M 2018
One Way or Another
One Way or Another
Against a backdrop of dismantled slums and new housing construction following the Cuban Revolution, a mulatta and a Black Cuban begin dating one another.
One Way or Another 1974
We
We
An urban train link, the RER B, crosses Paris and its outskirts from north to south. A journey within indistinct spaces known as inner cities and suburbs. Several portraits, all individual pieces that form a whole. We.
We 2022
A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.
A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness 2013
I Wish I Knew
I Wish I Knew
Focuses on the people, their stories and architecture spanning from the mid-1800s, when Shanghai was opened as a trading port, to the present day.
I Wish I Knew 2010
Beyond Clueless
Beyond Clueless
Narrated by cult teen star Fairuza Balk, Beyond Clueless is a dizzying journey into the mind, body and soul of the teen movie, as seen through the eyes of over 200 modern coming-of-age classics
Beyond Clueless 2015
Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth
Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth
Director Jeanie Finlay charts a transgender man's path to parenthood after he decides to carry his child himself. The pregnancy prompts an unexpected and profound reckoning with conventions of masculinity, self-definition and biology.
Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth 2020
Sheroes
Sheroes
Chantal Birman has devoted her life to defending abortion and the rights of women. At nearly 70 years old, she has no intention of retiring from her job as a midwife. From painful moments to joyful experiences, this road movie through the housing projects outside Paris offers a special take on the place of mothers in society and provides unique insight into that delicate moment of “going home”.
Sheroes 2021
Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema
Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema
With Taiwan remaining in the grip of martial law in 1982, a group of filmmakers from that country set out to establish a cultural identity through cinema and to share it with the world. This engaging documentary looks at the movement's legacy.
Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema 2014
Gay USA
Gay USA
Documentary about the gay rights movement during the year of 1977, capturing the intersections of diversity in queer life; from vox pop style interviews with lesbian feminists, street drag queens, and straight allies to taking a look at the fight against Anita Bryant and her notorious "Save Our Children" campaign.
Gay USA 1977
Talking About Trees
Talking About Trees
Filmmakers Ibrahim, Suliman, Eltayeb and Manar, close friends for many years, left their motherland in the sixties and seventies to study film abroad and founded the Sudanese Film Group in 1989. After years of distance and exile, they are reunited, hoping to finally make their old dream come true: to bring back cinema to Sudan by reopening the Halfaia Cinema, a dilapidated theater in Khartoum.
Talking About Trees 2019
A Night at the Opera
A Night at the Opera
A documentary view of the galas of Paris’s Palais Garnier in the 1950s and ’60s.
A Night at the Opera 2020
Again Once Again
Again Once Again
Romina returns to her roots to rediscover who she is. After the first overwhelming years as a mother, it's as if the mist starts to rise: she's a little too old for disco parties and hanging round with twenty-somethings, but still young enough to fantasise about others. Actress Romina Paula points the camera at herself, her son and her mother in this intriguing mixture of documentary and fiction.
Again Once Again 2019
Purple Sea
Purple Sea
Made from images filmed by the Syrian artist Amel Alzakout after the boat on which she was fleeing Syria sank off the coast of Lesbos, Purple Sea reports on the moment in which the co-director and the other passengers are floating in the sea in their lifejackets, waiting to be rescued. Her voice-over accompanies this extremely poignant experience.
Purple Sea 2021
Still Processing
Still Processing
A box of stunning family photos awakens grief and lost memories as they are viewed for the first time on camera.
Still Processing 2021
Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Exploring the pre-fame years of the celebrated American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and how New York City, its people, and tectonically shifting arts culture of the late 1970s and '80s shaped his vision.
Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat 2018
Corporate Responsibility
Corporate Responsibility
Images of Argentinian companies and factories in the first light of day, seen from the inside of a car, while the director reads out documents in voiceover that reveals the collusion of the same concerns in the military dictatorship’s terror.
Corporate Responsibility 2020
Mutzenbacher
Mutzenbacher
An audition for men aged between 16 and 99. There are no props nor make-up, just pure improvisation. All that is required is the willingness to engage openly with the topic and language of the words on the page. No small challenge, since the text in question is the scandalous novel published anonymously in 1906 “Josefine Mutzenbacher, or the Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself” which, as this film confirms, continues to be the subject of passionate and controversial discussions about desire, even today. What might be world-class pornographic literature for some is seen by others as an abusive depiction of child sexuality.
Mutzenbacher 2022
The Last Time I Saw Macao
The Last Time I Saw Macao
Part memoir, part city symphony, part noir-ish B-movie adventure, the new feature from critically acclaimed film-making duo João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata (To Die Like a Man) is a sensual, shape-shifting ode to one of the world's most mythic, alluring and exoticized cities.
The Last Time I Saw Macao 2012
My Stuff
My Stuff
Twentysomething Petri got over a break-up by pushing his credit card limit in order to buy stuff. Still, after three years, the anxiety remains, so all things must go into a storage container. For a year, Petri allows himself to retrieve only one item per day. New life begins naked next to a radiator.
My Stuff 2013
There Will Be No More Night
There Will Be No More Night
Images from helicopters. Video recordings from the American and the French military forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The intervention is taking place right before our eyes. How far can the desire to see lead to, when it has no limits?
There Will Be No More Night 2021
Chris the Swiss
Chris the Swiss
Croatia, 7th of January 1992: In the middle of the war, a young journalist's body is discovered dressed in the uniform of an international mercenary group. Twenty years later, his cousin Anja Kofmel investigates his story.
Chris the Swiss 2018
Feast
Feast
In FEAST, perpetrators, victims and their spectators become involved in a dramatic reconstruction of the Groningen HIV case. The film tells a story about power and surrender, the reversibility of truth and the desire to come home somewhere.
Feast 2021
The Makes
The Makes
An adaptation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s notes on un-made films published in “That Bowling Alley on the Tiber.” Starring French film critic Philippe Azoury in the role of “The Critic.”
The Makes 2009
Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
A documentary on the curious American domestic terrorist group, infamous for the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst 2004
The Endless Film
The Endless Film
Based on the remains of never-completed Argentine features from the archives of the film museum in Buenos Aires. The film is, as it were, a parallel film history: an essay like a cinematographic Frankenstein, that blows new life into images that once seemed unsuccessful and pointless.
The Endless Film 2018
Robinson in Space
Robinson in Space
Robinson is commissioned to investigate the unspecified "problem of England." The narrator describes his seven excursions, with the unseen Robinson, around the country. They mainly concentrate on ports, power stations, prisons, and manufacturing plants, but they also bring in various literary connections, as well as a few conventional landscapes.
Robinson in Space 1997
I Am
I Am
In the City of Angels, despair and heartache are the daily mail -- delivered with painful regularity whether we want them or not. Through I AM, we join an eclectic cast as they try to untangle themselves from the web of sin. All along the way, they are each joined by a mysterious companion -- ever present with a loving guidance without judgment for their actions. The more they attempt to fix their lives, the deeper they sink into chaos, pain, and loss. In addition, we discover that sin is a matrix connecting even the most remote of strangers to one another. It is at this breaking point when we see the presence of this companion was no accident. He was the ever-loving constant who refused to abandon His people -- even when they abandoned Him.
I Am 2010
A German Youth
A German Youth
At the end of the 1960s the post-war generation began to revolt against their parents. This was a generation disillusioned by anti-communist capitalism and a state apparatus in which they believed they saw fascist tendencies. This generation included journalist Ulrike Meinhof, lawyer Horst Mahler, filmmaker Holger Meins as well as students Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader.
A German Youth 2015