Disaster
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 / Disaster
SUB-GENRES · Natural Disaster · Man-made
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The Town That Was
In 1962, a trash fire ignited a seam of anthracite coal beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving mining town of over 3,000 people. By the mid-1980s, giant plumes of smoke and deadly carbon monoxide gases billowed from fissures in the ground, the local highway cracked...Watch Movie
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Lessons of Darkness
Werner Herzog travelled to Kuwait with producer/cameraman Paul Berriff to shoot the oil fires left blazing by the retreating Iraqi soldiers after the Gulf War. Faced with flames spewing from the earth, a landscape blackened by fire and oil and plumes of dark smoke choking the...Watch Movie
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The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
THE PRUITT-IGOE tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home. It began as a housing marvel. Built in 1956,...Watch Movie
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Lumsden
Lumsden, Saskatchewan is a town of 850 citizens on a river called the Qu'Appelle. In the spring of 1974, the river doubled its volume and threatened to flood the town. The townspeople organized themselves and the whole province stood behind them. LUMSDEN is the story of an incredible battle...Watch Movie
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Behemoth
Beginning with a mining explosion in Mongolia and ending in a ghost city west of Beijing, political documentarian Zhao Liang's visionary new film BEHEMOTH details, in one breathtaking sequence after another, the social and ecological devastation behind an economic miracle that may yet prove...Watch Movie
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Trouble the Water
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, this astonishingly powerful documentary is at once horrifying and exhilarating. Directed and produced by FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE producers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, TROUBLE THE WATER takes you...Watch Movie
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Crude
Three years in the making, CRUDE tells the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet: the infamous $27 billion “Amazon Chernobyl” lawsuit pitting 30,000 rainforest dwellers in Ecuador against the U.S. oil giant Chevron. Winner of 19 international awards,...Watch Movie
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Songhua
In northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. SONGHUA is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways...Watch Movie
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Give Us Our Daily Water
2015 has seen the driest winter in eighty-four years in southeastern Brazil. Water shortages became extremely critical in São Paulo, home to twenty million people. At the end of winter, officials were estimating São Paolo's reserves would last a mere ninety days without...Watch Movie
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Parallel Lines
The filmmaker's journey is chronicled in the fall of 2001 from California back home to New York, where her apartment once overlooked the World Trade Center in PARALLEL LINES. Driving along back roads as she winds her way to Ground Zero, she stops to talk with strangers about September 11th, which...Watch Movie
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There Once Was an Island
What if your community had to decide whether to leave their homeland forever and there was no help available? This is the reality for the culturally unique Polynesian community of Takuu, a tiny low-lying atoll in the South Western Pacific. As a terrifying tidal flood rips...Watch Movie
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Kamp Katrina
KAMP KATRINA, an award winning cinéma vérité documentary, follows a small group of people who have taken refuge in a garden transformed into a tent city by an extraordinary New Orleans couple, Ms. Pearl and her husband, David. KAMP KATRINA focuses on the dialectic between madness and hope in...Watch Movie
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Act of God
Is being hit by lightning a random natural occurrence or a predestined event? Accidents, chance, fate and the elusive quest to make sense out of tragedy underpin director Jennifer Baichwal’s captivating new work, an elegant cinematic meditation on the metaphysical effects of being struck by...Watch Movie
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Storm Children
With striking black & white photography, this critically-acclaimed observational documentary from Philippine master Lav Diaz takes stock of the devastation wrought by typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) on the Philippine coastal town of Tacloban. The film, which follows three children as they cope with the...Watch Movie
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The Third Wave
Immediately following the 2004 tsunami distaster, Alison and Oscar raced to Sri Lanka with little money or experience and planned to volunteer for two weeks. Along the way, they met up with two other volunteers, Donny and Bruce. Together they found themselves running a refugee camp for over a...Watch Movie
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Films of the San Francisco Earthquake
Edison cameraman Bonine traveled to San Francisco to take more than thirteen short films of San Francisco in the aftermath of its devastating earthquake on 18 April 1906, among them DYNAMITING RUINS and RESCUING SOLDIERS CAUGHT IN THE FALLEN WALLS and PANORAMA RUSSIAN AND NOB...Watch Movie
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Libby, Montana
A small company town in northwestern Montana is beset by the worst case of a widespread toxic contaminant in U.S. history. Now, the U.S. government has determined that nearly one quarter of the residents have some form of asbestos-related lung abnormality. LIBBY, MONTANA is the story of the...Watch Movie
