Cinéma-vérité
see all genres ›In creating filmic "truth,” that is, reality captured in its essence, the documentary form is at its most direct and observant. Sans narration and largely observational.
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Genres / Documentary / Process / Cinéma-vérité
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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 -
Réponse de femmes
1975: the "Year of the Woman." A television station gives seven female filmmakers seven minutes to answer the question "What does it mean to be a woman?" Agnès Varda answers with the cine-tract, ("Our Body: Our Sex"). Women talking about sex, desire, commercials and children...Watch Movie -
Billy the Kid
Jennifer Venditti's award-winning documentary is a provocative coming-of-age story (an odyssey into the soul of an American teenager). Following fifteen-year-old Billy as he bicycles through the quiet streets of small town Maine, we watch him traverse the frustrating gap between imagination and...Watch Movie
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Leviathan
One of the most critically-acclaimed documentaries in recent years, LEVIATHAN is a groundbreaking, immersive portrait of the contemporary commercial fishing industry. Filmed off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts (at one time the whaling capital of the world as well as Herman Melville's...Watch Movie -
Sweetgrass
The last major sheep drive across the Montana Beartooth Mountains is the nominal "focus" of this critically acclaimed documentary. But SWEETGRASS encompasses far more in its complex combination of Howard Hawks Western, nature film and sensory recording: work and labor, the decline of the American...Watch Movie
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Up the Yangtze
In China, it is simply known as "the River." But the Yangtze (and all of the life that surrounds it) is undergoing a truly astonishing transformation wrought by the largest hydroelectric project in history, the Three Gorges Dam. Canadian documentary filmmaker Yung Chang returns to the gorgeous,...Watch Movie -
Last Train Home
Every spring, China's cities are plunged into chaos as 130 million migrant workers journey to their home villages for the New Year's holiday. This mass exodus is the world's largest human migration, an epic spectacle that reveals a country tragically caught between its rural past and industrial...Watch Movie -
Bestiaire
Fascinating and beguiling, BESTIAIRE is filmmaker Denis Côté's mesmerizing meditation on the relationships between animals and people through the seasons at a Quebec safari park. This strikingly gorgeous work about the act of looking slyly blurs the line between observer and observed (the film...Watch Movie
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Maidentrip
14-year-old Laura Dekker sets out, camera in hand, on a two-year voyage in pursuit of her dream to be the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone. In the wake of a year-long battle with Dutch authorities that sparked a global storm of media scrutiny, Laura now finds herself far from...Watch Movie -
Rock Soup
It's the summer of 1989 in New York's Lower East Side. Homeless people have turned Tompkins Square Park into a tent city. On a nearby corner lot deeper in Alphabet City, where punk became famous and Allen Ginsburg wrote much of his poetry, a bunch of people try to make a soup kitchen work. They...Watch Movie -
The Gods of Times Square
THE GODS OF TIMES SQUARE was shot over a six year period that witnessed a radical transformation of Times Square. Gone now are the mom and pop stores, squeezed out by a real estate gold rush. Gone too are the colorful characters who made Times Square a "speaker's corner." Only...Watch Movie
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Trypps #6 (Malobi)
From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It's Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set. TRYPPS #6 (MALOBI) is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series...Watch Movie -
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 -
Love Meetings
LOVE MEETINGS is a cinпїЅma vпїЅritпїЅ investigation of sex in Italy, including impressive appearances by famed author Alberto Moravia and noted psychologist Cesare Musatti. Pier Paolo Pasolini, the poet turned filmmaker, appears as the interviewer and asks a wide-range of individuals to share...Watch Movie
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Los niños abandonados
Danny Lyon is one of America's great photographers, best known for his series on Chicago bike gangs and his on-going series of death row inmates in the Texas prison system. Lyon was partners with Robert Frank in a company they formed to make documentaries and support their...Watch Movie -
It's Been a Lovely Day
"A riveting study in the purest documentary tradition" is how Variety described Jos de Putter's look at the final year of his own parents' farm. But the film's connection between landscape and art is best described by its opening dedication: "For my father, who made me love...Watch Movie