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Thought-Provoking Documentaries

Thought-Provoking Documentaries

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Thought-Provoking Documentaries
  • The Land of Azaba

    Movie

    Directed by Greta Schiller • Documentary • 2020 • US, Spain • English, Spanish with English subtitles
    Featuring Carlos Sanchez Martinez, Jon Teixeira Casado, Francisco Jose Iglesias

    Ecological restoration is a worldwide movement intended to turn back the tide of mass extinction and restore plane...

  • The Gospel of Eureka

    Movie

    Directed by Michael Palmieri, Donal Mosher • Documentary • 2019 • US • English
    Featuring Justin Vivian Bond, Anita Bryant, Lee Keating

    Welcome to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a one-of-a-kind oasis in the Ozarks where Christian piety rubs shoulders with a thriving queer community. This lushly photo...

  • American Yogi

    Movie

    Directed by Steven Newmark • Documentary • 2018 • U.S. • English
    Featuring Ram Dass, Neem Karoli Baba aka Maharaj-ji

    "American Yogi" is a delightful autobiographical documentary about a nice Jewish boy from Miami who travels to San Francisco for the “Summer of Love” and returns a hippie. Later, ...

  • Against the Current

    Movie

    Directed by Óskar Páll Sveinsson • Documentary • 2021 • Iceland • Icelandic with English subtitles
    Featuring Veiga Grétarsdóttir

    Veiga Grétarsdóttir is the first person in the world to attempt to kayak over 2,000 kilometers around Iceland, counter-clockwise and “against the current.” Veiga’s per...

  • Sembene!

    Movie

    Directed by Samba Gadjigo, Jason Silverman • Documentary • 2015 • US, Senegal • English, French, Wolof with English subtitles
    Featuring Ousmane Sembene, Mbissine Therese Diop, Samba Gadjigo

    In 1952, Ousmane Sembene, a dockworker and fifth-grade dropout from Senegal, began dreaming an impossible ...

  • Concerning Violence

    Movie

    Directed by Göran Hugo Olsson • Documentary • 2014 • Sweden, US, Denmark, Finland • English, Swedish, French, Portuguese with English subtitles
    Featuring Lauryn Hill, Robert Mugabe, Tonderai Makoni

    Narrated by Lauryn Hill, this profound essay from the director of "The Black Power Mixtape" is a b...

  • Lust for Gold: A Race Against Time

    Movie

    Directed by Robert May • Documentary • 2021 • US • English
    Featuring William Blackwell, Sal Delgadillo, Robert Kesselring

    "Lust for Gold: A Race Against Time" is a true story about obsession, greed, and the hunt for gold. When a retired missile scientist makes a monumental discovery, he hatches ...

  • The Man Who Drove with Mandela

    Movie

    Directed by Greta Schiller • Documentary • 1998 • UK, US, South Africa • English
    Featuring Corin Redgrave, Joseph Bale, Adriaan Bassier

    In 1962, at the height of oppression in apartheid South Africa, a gay white theater director was arrested with Nelson Mandela. His name was Cecil Williams. This...

  • The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith

    Movie

    Directed by Sara Fishko • Documentary • 2016 • US • English
    Featuring Sam Stephenson, Carla Bley, Steve Reich

    In 1950s Manhattan, a dingy loft building becomes the home and obsession of the brilliant photographer W. Eugene Smith – who leaves his family and moves there to live the artist’s life. ...

  • Loving Highsmith

    Movie

    Directed by Eva Vitija • Documentary • 2022 • Switzerland, Germany • English, German, French with English subtitles
    Featuring Gwendoline Christie, Annina Butterworth

    This unique look at celebrated author Patricia Highsmith is based on her diaries, notebooks, and reflections of her lovers, friend...

  • 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...

  • 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...