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Thought-Provoking Documentaries

Thought-Provoking Documentaries

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Thought-Provoking Documentaries
  • Goya, Carrière & the Ghost of Buñuel

    Movie

    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 ...

  • The Changin' Times of Ike White

    Movie

    Directed by Daniel Vernon • Documentary • 2019 • UK • English
    Featuring Ike White, Lana Gutman, Greg Errico

    Serving a life sentence for murder, music prodigy Ike White had plenty of time to perfect his musical talent. Ike's skills were so exceptional that his story captured the media's attention...

  • Epicentro

    Movie

    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...

  • Bill Cunningham New York

    Movie

    Directed by Richard Press • Documentary • 2010 • US • English
    Featuring Bill Cunningham, Anna Wintour, Iris Apfel

    A delicate, funny and often poignant portrait of bicycle-riding octogenarian Bill Cunningham, the beloved 'New York Times' style photographer who was famous for his weekly columns "...

  • Beuys

    Movie

    Directed by Andres Veiel • Documentary • 2018 • Germany • English, German with English subtitles
    Featuring Joseph Beuys

    A chronicle of the life and work of the iconoclastic, 20th-century German sculptor and performance artist Joseph Beuys. This documentary is not a portrait in the traditional se...

  • Portrait of Jason

    Movie

    Directed by Shirley Clarke • Documentary • 1967 • US • English
    Featuring Jason Holliday, Shirley Clarke

    In 1966, director Shirley Clarke spent twelve hours with the one-and-only Jason Holliday where she confronted the iconic performer about his good times and bad behavior as a gay hustler, on-an...

  • Milton Glaser: To Inform & Delight

    Movie

    Directed by Wendy Keys • Documentary • 2008 • US • English
    Featuring Milton Glaser

    For many, Milton Glaser is the personification of American graphic design. Best known for co-founding "New York Magazine" and creating the enduring "I Love NY" campaign, the full breadth of Glaser's remarkable art...

  • Kamikaze Hearts

    Movie

    Directed by Juliet Bashore • LGBTQ+ • 1986 • US • English • Mature Content
    Featuring Tigr, Sharon Mitchell, Jon Martin

    Alternately distressing, instructive, contestable, and fascinating, Juliet Bashore’s quasi-documentary plunges into the 1980s porn industry and takes an unsparing look at issues...

  • George: The Story of George Maciunas & Fluxus

    Movie

    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...

  • Everybody Know… Elizabeth Murray

    Movie

    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...

  • Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary

    Movie

    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...

  • Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq

    Movie

    Directed by Nancy Buirski • Documentary • 2013 • US • English
    Featuring Tanaquil Le Clercq, George Balanchine

    A mesmerizing portrait of legendary ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, muse to both George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, whose career was cut short by polio at the age of 27. This is a story...

  • Licht-Stockhausen's Legacy

    Movie

    Directed by Oeke Hoogendijk • Documentary • 2022 • Netherlands • English, Dutch with English subtitles
    Featuring Johanna Stephens-Janning, Doris Stockhausen, Julika Stockhausen

    Brilliant...Megalomaniac...Unstageable – these are just some of the words that have been used to describe the mammoth a...

  • When the Beat Drops

    Directed by Jamal Sims • Documentary • 2018 • US • English
    Featuring Anthony Davis

    Drop into the electric and subversive underground dance scene known as bucking. As voguing exploded out of the ballroom scene of NYC, bucking was boldly pioneered in the clubs of the Deep South as a new form of se...

  • Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters

    Movie

    Directed by Rosalynde LeBlanc, Tom Hurwitz • Documentary • 2020 • US • English
    Featuring Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane

    Reaching beyond the world of dance and the remarkable legacy of renowned choreographer-dancer-director Bill T. Jones, this Peabody Award winning documentary touches the essence of c...

  • Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

    Movie

    Directed by Matt Wolf • Documentary • 2019 • US • English
    Featuring Marion Stokes, Anne Stokes Hochberg, Frank Hollman

    Matt Wolf’s documentary delves into the strange life of Marion Stokes, who obsessively and privately recorded American television news twenty-four hours a day. A civil rights-e...

  • Say Amen, Somebody

    Movie

    Directed by George T. Nierenberg • Documentary • 1983 • US • English
    Featuring Thomas A. Dorsey, Willie Mae Ford Smith, Delois Barrett Campbell

    One of the most acclaimed music documentaries of all time, "Say Amen, Somebody" is a joyous, funny, and deeply emotional celebration of Gospel music fro...

  • Heartworn Highways Revisited

    Movie

    Directed by Wayne Price • Documentary • 2016 • US • English
    Featuring Guy Clark, David Allan Coe, Justin Townes Earle

    2021 marked the 45th anniversary of the seminal music documentary "Heartworn Highways", a film that captured the nascent roots of the Outlaw Country movement in the mid-70s. Toda...

  • Ornette: Made in America

    Movie

    Directed by Shirley Clarke • Documentary • 1986 • US • English
    Featuring Ornette Coleman, William Burroughs, Yoko Ono

    Ground-breaking filmmaker Shirley Clarke combined forces with Ornette Coleman to create this dazzling window into the life of the great jazz artist and innovator. Documentary foo...

  • Zen for Nothing

    Movie

    Directed by Werner Penzel • Documentary • 2017 • Germany, Japan • English, German, Japanese with English subtitles
    Featuring Sabine Timoteo, The Sangha Community of the Antaiji Zen Monastery of Japan

    A masterly immersion into life at a Japanese Zen monastery that is both simple and beautifully f...

  • A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China

    Movie

    Directed by Philip Haas • Documentary • 1988 • US • English
    Featuring David Hockney

    Painted by Wang Hui and his assistants, the seventh scroll of "The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour" contains over 72 feet of beautiful and minutely detailed artistry. Director Philip Haas and famed arti...

  • Boatman

    Movie

    Directed by Gianfranco Rosi • Documentary • 1993 • Italy • English, Hindi, Italian with English subtitles

    Academy Award Nominee Gianfranco Rosi has emerged as one of the most awarded and provocative documentarians working today. His observational films artfully and sympathetically depict the liv...

  • Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet

    Movie

    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...

  • The War Tapes

    Movie

    Directed by Deborah Scranton • Documentary • 2006 • US • English
    Featuring Zack Bazzi, Duncan Domey, Ben Flanders

    Immediate, raw, and direct, “The War Tapes” is the first film shot by the soldiers themselves, bypassing the embedded reporter filter and providing an intimate front-row look at how ...