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Thought-Provoking Documentaries

Thought-Provoking Documentaries

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Thought-Provoking Documentaries
  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Call Her Applebroog

    Movie

    Directed by Beth B • Documentary • 2016 • US • English
    Featuring Ida Applebroog

    This deeply personal portrait of acclaimed New York–based artist Ida Applebroog was shot with mischievous reverence by her filmmaker daughter, Beth B (“Exposed”). Born in the Bronx to Orthodox Jewish émigrés from Po...

  • 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 ...

  • Something Ventured

    Movie

    Directed by Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine • Documentary • 2011 • US • English
    Featuring Bill Bowes, Herbert Boyer, Nolan Bushnell

    “Something Ventured” tells the story of the creation of America's start-up economy, an industry that went on to become the single greatest engine of innovation and econo...

  • Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil

    Movie

    Directed by Pieter van Huystee • Documentary • 2016 • Netherlands • English, Dutch, Spanish, Italian with English subtitles
    Featuring Matthijs Ilsink, Peter Klein, Jos Koldeweij

    Follow a team of Dutch art historians as they crisscross the globe to unravel the secrets of Hieronymus Bosch. In 2016...

  • The Atomic Cafe

    Movie

    Directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, Pierce Rafferty • Documentary • 1982 • US • English
    Featuring Paul Tibbets, W.H.P. Blandy,

    Armageddon has never been so darkly funny as in “The Atomic Cafe”. This 1982 cult classic juxtaposes Cold War history, propaganda, music and culture, seamlessly cr...

  • On the Adamant

    Movie

    Directed by Nicolas Philibert • Documentary • 2023 • France, Japan • French with English subtitles
    Featuring Nicolas Philibert

    Golden Bear winner at the Berlin Film Festival, this affecting documentary from Nicolas Philibert invites viewers aboard the Adamant, a floating refuge on Paris’ Seine R...

  • Godard Cinema

    Movie

    Directed by Cyril Leuthy • Documentary • 2022 • France • French with English subtitles
    Featuring Guillaume Gouix, Cyril Leuthy, Jean-Luc Godard

    Jean-Luc Godard is synonymous with cinema. He arose in the 1960s as a cinematic rebel and symbol for the era's progressive youth. Six decades and 140 fi...

  • Eldorado

    Movie

    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...

  • Las Sandinistas!

    Movie

    Directed by Jenny Murray • Documentary • 2018 • US • English, Spanish with English subtitles
    Featuring Dora Maria Tellez, Daisy Zemora, Claudia Lopez Alonso

    "Las Sandinistas!" tells the untold stories of Nicaraguan women warriors and social revolutionaries who shattered barriers to lead combat a...

  • Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect

    Movie

    Directed by Mark Noonan • Documentary • 2017 • Ireland • English
    Featuring Kevin Roche

    "Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect" is a feature documentary that considers many of the key questions throughout the career of Pritzker Prize winner Kevin Roche, including the relationship between architects an...

  • The Pearl Button

    Movie

    Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2014 • Chile, Spain, France • Spanish with English subtitles
    Featuring Patricio Guzmán

    Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the Berlin Film Festival, "The Pearl Button" explores the supernatural landscape of Chile. With its 2,670 miles of c...

  • Ever Deadly

    Movie

    Directed by Tanya Tagaq, Chelsea McMullan • Documentary • 2022 • Canada • English, Inuktitut with English subtitles
    Featuring Tanya Tagaq, Laakkuluk Williamson, Bathory Mary Gillis

    "Ever Deadly" weaves together intimate concert footage of Tanya Tagaq alongside moving personal reflections, stunni...

  • Acasa, My Home

    Movie

    Directed by Radu Ciorniciuc • Documentary • 2020 • Romania, Germany • Romanian with English subtitles
    Featuring Gica Enache, Vali Enache, Rica Enache

    Winner of the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival, this documentary follows a family with...

  • Out of My Head

    Movie

    Directed by Susanna Styron • Documentary • 2018 • US • English
    Featuring Paul Auster, Joan Didion, John Lewis

    A filmmaker seeking treatment for her daughter's migraine attacks discovers a confounding neurological disease and learns why a devastating condition, afflicting nearly a billion people ...

  • Manufactured Landscapes

    Movie

    Directed by Jennifer Baichwal • Documentary • 2007 • Canada • English
    Featuring Edward Burtynsky

    Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Edward Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civi...

  • The Super 8 Years

    Movie

    Directed by Annie Ernaux, David Ernaux-Briot • Documentary • 2022 • France • French with English subtitles
    Featuring Annie Ernaux, David Ernaux-Briot

    The French writer and 2022 Nobel Prize awardee Annie Ernaux, whose novels and memoirs have gained her a devoted following, opens a treasure trove ...

  • Sisters with Transistors

    Movie

    Directed by Lisa Rovner • Documentary • 2021 • UK • English
    Featuring Laurie Anderson, Jean-Michel Jarre, Kim Gordon

    "Sisters with Transistors" is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly trans...

  • When the Beat Drops

    Movie

    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...

  • The French

    Movie

    Directed by William Klein • Documentary • 1982 • France • English, French with English subtitles
    Featuring Arthur Ashe, Björn Borg, John McEnroe

    Go behind the scenes of the 1981 French Open with photographer and filmmaker William Klein, who was the first to be granted full, exclusive access to ...