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Thought-Provoking Documentaries

Thought-Provoking Documentaries

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Thought-Provoking Documentaries
  • Museum Town

    Movie

    Directed by Jennifer Trainer • Documentary • 2019 • US • English
    Featuring Meryl Streep, Nick Cave, James Turrell

    With appearances by artists ranging from James Turrell to David Byrne and narration by Meryl Streep, this documentary uncovers the history of how MASS MoCA became the largest museum ...

  • The Messenger

    Movie

    Directed by Su Rynard • Documentary • 2015 • France, Canada • English, German, Dutch, French with English subtitles
    Featuring Bill Evans, Erin Byne, Peter Marra

    For thousands of years, songbirds were regarded by mankind as messengers from the gods. Under threat from climate change, pesticides an...

  • Running Off to the Circus: Paul Auster on Film

    Movie

    Directed by Spencer Ostrander, Theodore Rex King • Documentary • 2022 • US • English
    Featuring Paul Auster

    "Running Off to the Circus: Paul Auster on Film" is a career-spanning feature-length interview with the legendary author and director. In Part 1 Auster passionately discusses the formative ...

  • Makala

    Movie

    Directed by Emmanuel Gras • Documentary • 2018 • France • Swahili with English subtitles
    Featuring Kabwita Kasongo, Lydie Kasongo

    Winner of the 2017 Grand Prize and Golden Eye Special Mention for Best Documentary at International Critics Week in Cannes, "Makala" is Emmanuel Gras' powerful testa...

  • Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over

    Movie

    Directed by Beth B • Documentary • 2021 • US • English
    Featuring Lydia Lunch, Thurston Moore, Kembra Pfahler

    "Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over" by Beth B is the first career-spanning retrospective of Lydia Lunch’s confrontational, acerbic and electric artistry. As New York City’s preeminent No...

  • Lifeline: Clyfford Still

    Movie

    Directed by Dennis Scholl • Documentary • 2019 • US • English
    Featuring Jerry Saltz, David Anfam, Neal Benezra

    Jackson Pollock once said of Clyfford Still, “he makes the rest of us look academic,” Mark Rothko acknowledged him as a “myth-maker” and Clement Greenberg called him “an independent gen...

  • Love, Cecil

    Movie

    Directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland • Documentary • 2017 • US • English
    Featuring Rupert Everett, David Hockney, Isaac Mizrahi

    Oscar-winning set and costume designer, photographer, writer and painter Cecil Beaton was not only a dazzling chronicler, but an arbiter of his time. From the Bright You...

  • The Last Resort

    Movie

    Directed by Dennis Scholl, Kareem Tabsch • Documentary • 2019 • US • English
    Featuring Edna Buchanan, Gary Monroe

    By the 1970s, a number of New York Jewish retirees had turned from seasonal visitors to year-round residents of South Beach, making Miami home to a population that was primarily over...

  • Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

    Movie

    Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, Nicholas de Pencier • Documentary • 2019 • Canada • English, Russian, Italian, German, Mandarin, Cantonese with English subtitles
    Featuring Alicia Vikander

    Narrated by Alicia Vikander, this stunning sensory experience and cinematic meditation on h...

  • Landscape Film, Roberto Burle Marx

    Movie

    Directed by João Vargas Penna • Documentary • 2019 • Brazil • Portuguese with English subtitles
    Featuring Roberto Burle Marx, Amir Haddad

    A journey through the art and life of the Brazilian landscape architect and painter best known for the iconic black-and-white mosaic promenades that line Rio ...

  • Dawson City: Frozen Time

    Movie

    Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2017 • US • English
    Featuring Michael Gates, Kathy Jones-Gates

    Part fever dream, part historical record, this is the bizarre true story of some 533 silent film reels, buried for almost 50 years in a sub-arctic swimming pool, deep in the Yukon permafrost....

  • Jazz on a Summer's Day

    Movie

    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...

  • Invisible Valley

    Movie

    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...

  • The Raft

    Movie

    Directed by Marcus Lindeen • Documentary • 2018 • Sweden • English, Swedish, French, German, Japanese, Spanish with English subtitles
    Featuring Daniel Gimenez Cacho, Fe Seymour, Maria Bjornstam

    In the summer of 1973, a young international crew of six women and five men embarked together on an un...

  • M. C. Escher: Journey to Infinity

    Movie

    Directed by Robin Lutz • Documentary • 2021 • Netherlands • English, Dutch, Italian and German with English subtitles
    Featuring Stephen Fry, George Escher

    Equal parts history, psychology, and psychedelia, Robin Lutz’s entertaining, eye-opening portrait of M.C. Escher gives us the man through his...

  • In Case of Emergency

    Movie

    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...

  • Film, the Living Record of Our Memory

    Movie

    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, cur...

  • In Balanchine's Classroom

    Movie

    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...

  • Hitler's Hollywood

    Movie

    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 Goeb...

  • Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story

    Movie

    Directed by Daniel Raim • Documentary • 2017 • US • English
    Featuring Harold Michelson, Lillian Michelson, Mel Brooks

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

  • The Goddesses of Food

    Movie

    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...

  • The Force

    Movie

    Directed by Peter Nicks • Documentary • 2015 • US • English
    Featuring Sean Whent, Cat Brooks, Jonathan Cairo

    Winner of the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival "The Force" is a cinema vérité look inside the long-troubled Oakland Police Department as it struggles to confront federal dema...

  • Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen

    Movie

    Directed by Daniel Raim • Documentary • 2022 • US • English
    Featuring Jeff Goldblum, Norman Jewison, Topol

    Narrated by Jeff Goldblum and directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Daniel Raim, this documentary captures the humor and drama of director Norman Jewison's quest to recreate the lost world ...

  • The Wobblies

    Movie

    Directed by Deborah Shaffer, Stewart Bird • Documentary • 1979 • US • English
    Featuring Roger Baldwin, Sophie Cohen, Jack Fair

    Founded in Chicago in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) took to organizing unskilled workers into one big union and changed the course of American history....