Documentary
see all genres ›Truth is rarely stranger than fiction. Cinematic storytelling centered on actuality, facts and unrehearsed life events has offered a century’s worth of strange and illuminating fascination. Spanning newsreel, performance, travelogue, diary, propaganda, investigation and ethnography, documentaries are centered on that slippery state of "reality."
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Genres / Documentary
SUB-GENRES · Art · Biography · Conspiracy · Political · Religion · Science · Propaganda · Social Issues · Sport · Travelogue · War · Literature · History · Mythology · Philosophy · Commerce · Design · Transportation · Espionage · Pseudoscience · Crime · Cuisine · Health · Disaster · Media · Environment · Process · Education
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Debra Paget, For Example
Debra Paget was a contract player for 20th-Century Fox, whom they groomed and coached for stardom. But she never quite caught on. Maybe the movies weren't interesting enough. Or maybe she didn’t stand out from the rest of the pack. Or the studio didn’t take enough care in...Watch Movie
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Heavy Metal Parking Lot
Hailed by Cameron Crowe as "one of the greatest rock movies ever made," HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT documents the parking lot tailgating at Capital Centre in Largo, Maryland, in the hours before (and the moments after) a Judas Priest concert in May 31, 1986 (the "JUN 23 1995"...Watch Movie
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The Cult of JT LeRoy
Ethically charged, controversial and confusing, JT's life and death sprang open a Pandora's box of powerful questions about literature and culture, identity and celebrity and the reality of the society we live in. Fraud? Art? Sociopathy? Complicity? THE CULT OF JT LEROY is a...Watch Movie
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The Cruise
From the director of FOXCATCHER, MONEYBALL, and CAPOTE comes this wildly entertaining portrait of Timothy "Speed" Levitch, an eccentric New York City tour bus guide. THE CRUISE follows the funny, fast-talking Levitch as he cruises the Big Apple in a double decker bus, sharing a treasure trove of...Watch Movie
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The Double Life of Paul Henreid
Paul Henreid, perhaps most famous for his roles in CASABLANCA and NOW, VOYAGER became a star at Warner Brothers during World War II, as the exotic lead with the European accent. After the war, his contract was cancelled and he was left to his own devices. He continued acting...Watch Movie
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A Film Unfinished
At the end of WWII, 60 minutes of raw film, having sat undisturbed in an East German archive, was discovered. Shot by the Nazis in Warsaw in May 1942, and labeled simply "Ghetto," this footage quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record of the Warsaw...Watch Movie
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Becoming Anita Ekberg
BECOMING ANITA EKBERG is an exploration of how the construct of "Anita Ekberg" became an internationally famous sex goddess as a result of the careful cultivation of her image in various movies, both in Hollywood, by Frank Tashlin, and in Europe, by Federico Fellini. It's an...Watch Movie
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Scientology: The Ex-Files
Behind Scientology's high celebrity profile lies an organisation on its knees. In this powerful documentary produced for the Australian television program Four Corners, a band of former elite members emerge from the secretive religion to allege extreme cruelty, slave labour...Watch Movie
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Zizek!
The author of works on subjects as wide-ranging as Alfred Hitchcock, 9/11, opera, Christianity, Lenin and David Lynch, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek is one of the most important and outrageous cultural theorists working today. This captivating, erudite documentary explores the eccentric...Watch Movie
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The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk
A video essay exploring the frequency and meaning of that particular prop in a wide variety of Sirk movies. Is it a device that traps and keeps women in an artificial world with a limited point of view? Or is it a gateway to the past and the future, and a distorted but...Watch Movie
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Sex and Broadcasting
SEX AND BROADCASTING is a human and humorous look at New Jersey's WFMU, a radio station that refuses any programming boundaries. Most of its disc jockeys are unpaid volunteers, working for their love of surprising, spontaneous radio. They play everything from flat-out...Watch Movie
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The Woodmans
The tragic story of Francesca Woodman, a young photographer renowned for her extraordinary self-portraits, is also the story of her brilliantly artistic family. With THE WOODMANS, director C. Scott Willis shows how the struggle for fame in the high-stakes world of art resulted in tragedy and then...Watch Movie
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Nostalgia For the Light
For his new film master director Patricio Guzmán, famed for his political documentaries travels ten thousand feet above sea level to the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert, where atop the mountains astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars. The sky...Watch Movie
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Brian Eno: The Man Who Fell to Earth
Brian Eno: musician, composer, producer, music theorist, singer and visual artist. Probably best known for his early work with Roxy Music, his production duties for U2 and Coldplay and as one of the principal innovators of ambient music. This first-ever documentary film about...Watch Movie
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The Yellow Curtain
In the 1970s, Iran seemingly had everything. U.S. President, Jimmy Carter called it "an island of stability" in a visit. Yet, only two years later, in the winter of 1979, a revolution occurred. The Shah of Iran was overthrown and the Islamic Republic was established. It was a...Watch Movie
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Daguerréotypes
A classic documentary from Agnes Varda, DAGUERREOTYPES is a wonderfully intimate portrait of the small shops and shopkeepers on a short stretch of the Rue Daguerre, a picturesque street that has been the filmmaker's home for more than 50 years. As in her films THE BEACHES OF AGNES and THE...Watch Movie
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Blank City
BLANK CITY is an "absorbing snapshot of a daring time" (Los Angeles Times) when a disparate crew of renegade filmmakers emerged from an economically bankrupt and dangerous moment in New York history. From the late 1970s through the mid-'80s, when the East Village was still a wasteland of cheap...Watch Movie
