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Thought-Provoking Documentaries

Thought-Provoking Documentaries

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Thought-Provoking Documentaries
  • Defining Hope

    Directed by Carolyn Jones • Documentary • 2017 • US • English
    Featuring Rudolph Bilotti Sr., Berthold Cohen, Charlotte Cohen

    "Defining Hope" weaves the stories of patients with life-threatening illnesses, and the nurses who guide them as they make choices about how they want to live, how much m...

  • Denise Ho - Becoming the Song

    Directed by Sue Williams • Documentary • 2020 • US • English and Cantonese with English subtitles
    Featuring Denise Ho

    "Denise Ho – Becoming the Song" profiles the openly gay Hong Kong singer and human rights activist Denise Ho. Drawing on unprecedented access, the film explores her remarkable jo...

  • Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy

    Directed by Nancy Buirski • Documentary • 2023 • US • English
    Featuring Bob Balaban, Brian De Palma, Jon Voight

    This is not a documentary about the making of "Midnight Cowboy". It is about a humane and groundbreaking masterpiece and the flawed but gifted people who made it. It is about a trouble...

  • Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary

    Directed by Nancy Buirski • Documentary • 2015 • US • English
    Featuring Robert Redford, Ram Dass, Timothy Leary

    Robert Redford narrates this intimate portrait of Harvard psychology professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who began probing the edges of consciousness through psychedelics. Now...

  • Eldorado

    Directed by Markus Imhoof • Documentary • 2018 • Switzerland, Germany • English, German with English subtitles
    Featuring Markus Imhoof, Caterina Genta, Robert Hunger-Buhler

    "Eldorado" is a documentary inspired by director Markus Imhoof’s childhood relationship with an Italian girl just after Wor...

  • Epicentro

    Directed by Hubert Sauper • Documentary • 2020 • Austria, France • English, Spanish with English subtitles
    Featuring Oona Chaplin, Fena LeChuck, Juan Pedron

    Winner of the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, "Epicentro" is an immersive and metaphorical portrai...

  • Everybody Know… Elizabeth Murray

    Directed by Kristi Zea • Documentary • 2016 • US • English
    Featuring Meryl Streep, Elizabeth Murray, Chuck Close

    An intimate portrait of the groundbreaking artist Elizabeth Murray, this documentary explores the relationship between Murray’s family life and career as well as her place in contempo...

  • Film, the Living Record of Our Memory

    Directed by Inés Toharia • Documentary • 2023 • Spain, Canada • English, French, Japanese, Catalan, Arabic, Spanish with English subtitles
    Featuring Martin Scorsese, Jonas Mekas,Ousmane Sembene

    This documentary argues for the importance of film preservation through the voices of archivists, cura...

  • Filmworker

    Directed by Tony Zierra • Documentary • 2018 • US • English
    Featuring Leon Vitali, Ryan O'Neal, Stellan Skarsgard

    Leon Vitali was a British television actor when Stanley Kubrick picked him for a role in "Barry Lyndon". That first encounter with the auteur proved decisive—he swiftly resolved to ...

  • Finding Fela

    Directed by Alex Gibney • Documentary • 2014 • US • English
    Featuring Bill T. Jones, Paul McCartney, Questlove

    ​​Directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney, “Finding Fela” tells the story of Fela Anikulapo Kuti's life and how he created a new musical movement, Afrobeat, which he used to expres...

  • Fire at Sea

    Directed by Gianfranco Rosi • Documentary • 2016 • Italy • Italian with English subtitles
    Featuring Samuele Pucillo, Mattias Cucina, Pietro Bartolo

    An Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature and winner of the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, "Fire at Sea" takes pla...

  • George: The Story of George Maciunas & Fluxus

    Directed by Jeffrey Perkins • Documentary • 2019 • US, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Germany, Japan, Denmark, Italy, France, Netherlands • English
    Featuring Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, Nam June Paik

    This feature documentary is as mercurial as its subject, George Maciunas, impresario of the international...

  • The Goddesses of Food

    Directed by Verane Frediani • Documentary • 2017 • France • French with English subtitles
    Featuring Dominique Crenn, Barbara Lync, Alice Waters

    In the male dominated food universe, discover the women changing the game on all levels. "Goddessess of Food" presents the best female chefs, including...

  • Goya, Carrière & the Ghost of Buñuel

    Directed by José Luis López-Linares • Documentary • 2022 • France, Spain, Portugal • French, English, Spanish with English subtitles
    Featuring Jean-Claude Carrière, Nahal Tajadod-Carrière, Julian Schnabel

    In his last journey, prolific screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière returns to Spain and talks ...

  • Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami

    Directed by Sophie Fiennes • Documentary • 2018 • U.K., Ireland • English
    Featuring Grace Jones, Sly Dunbar, Jean-Paul Goude, Robbie Shakespeare

    Sophie Fiennes’s electrifying documentary is a journey through the public and private worlds of mega-icon Grace Jones that contrasts musical sequences ...

  • Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story

    Directed by Daniel Raim • Documentary • 2017 • U.S. • English
    Featuring Harold Michelson, Lillian Michelson, Bill Krohn, Mel Brooks, Danny DeVito, Francis Ford Coppola

    Movie fans know the work of Harold and Lillian Michelson, even if they don't recognize the names. Working largely uncredited in ...

  • Hitler's Hollywood

    Directed by Rüdiger Suchsland • Documentary • 2018 • Germany • German with English subtitles
    Featuring Udo Kier, Susan Sontag

    Narrated by Udo Kier, Rüdiger Suchsland's film suggests that the Third Reich was an immersive movie starring the German nation created by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebb...

  • In Balanchine's Classroom

    Directed by Connie Hochman • Documentary • 2021 • US • English
    Featuring George Balanchine, Jacques d'Amboise, Merrill Ashley

    "In Balanchine's Classroom" takes us back to the glory years of George Balanchine's New York City Ballet through the remembrances of his former dancers and their quest to...

  • In Case of Emergency

    Directed by Carolyn Jones • Documentary • 2020 • US • English
    Featuring Cathlyn Robinson, Michelle Lyon, Rabih Saad

    Following emergency nurses and their patients in seven unique settings across the U.S, this documentary sheds light on the biggest healthcare crises facing Americans today, and the...

  • Invisible Valley

    Directed by Aaron Maurer • Documentary • 2021 • US • English, Spanish with English subtitles
    Featuring Congressman Raul Ruiz

    "Invisible Valley" weaves together the disparate stories of undocumented farmworkers, wealthy snow- birds, and music festival-goers over the course of a year in California...

  • Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet

    Directed by Jesse Vile • Documentary • 2012 • US • English
    Featuring Jason Becker, Marty Friedman, Joe Satriani

    When doctors diagnosed 19-year-old rock star Jason Becker with Lou Gehrig's Disease, they said he would never make music again or live to see his 25th birthday. 22 years later, without...

  • Jazz on a Summer's Day

    Directed by Bert Stern • Documentary • 1959 • US • English
    Featuring Louis Armstrong, Thelonius Monk, Anita O'Day

    Filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and directed by renowned photographer Bert Stern, this film features intimate performances by an all-star line-up of musical legends includin...

  • Kaddish

    Directed by Steve Brand • Documentary • 1984 • US • English
    Featuring Yossi Klein, Zoltan Klein, Breindy Klein

    The story of the stormy yet loving relationship between writer and Jewish activist Yossi Klein and his father Zoltan, who had survived the Holocaust's devastation of Hungarian Jewry by ...

  • Keep Quiet

    Directed by Sam Blair, Joseph Martin • Documentary • 2016 • UK, Hungary • Hungarian with English subtitles
    Featuring Casanad Szegedi

    As vice-president of Hungary’s far-right extremist party, Csanad Szegedi espoused anti-Semitic rhetoric and Holocaust denials. But his life was upended when his gr...