Personal
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 / Process / Personal
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My Best Fiend
Director Werner Herzog and late actor Klaus Kinski made five films together over a fifteen-year period, including such mutual career highlights as FITZCARRALDO, NOSFERATU and AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD. As much as this collaboration benefitted them both, the partnership was fraught with off-screen...Watch Movie
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The Beaches of Agnès
Agnès Varda takes a cinematic stroll through her career—and the history of French film—in this jovial first-person documentary that "walks backwards" across the beaches, landscapes, and movie sets of her life and times. For some, turning eighty may mean settling down, but for...Watch Movie
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Kate Plays Christine
A gripping nonfiction thriller, Robert Greene's KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE follows actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she prepares for her next role: playing Christine Chubbuck, a Florida newscaster who committed a shocking act on live television in 1974. As Kate investigates Chubbuck's...Watch Movie
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Sink or Swim
A contemporary classic and a landmark in autobiographical filmmaking, SINK OR SWIM is an unflinching account of the highly charged relationship between a daughter and her father. Through a series of twenty-six short stories, a young girl chronicles the childhood events that shaped her ideas about...Watch Movie
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Sherman's March
When First Run Features released Ross McElwee’s Sundance Award-winning SHERMAN'S MARCH in 1986, it went on to become one of the largest grossing documentaries ever. After his girlfriend leaves him, McElwee takes a voyage along the original route followed by General William Sherman, but rather...Watch Movie
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The Sheik and I
Commissioned by a Middle Eastern Biennial to make a film on the theme of "art as a subversive act," independent filmmaker Caveh Zahedi goes overboard. Told that he can do whatever he wants except make fun of the Sheik of Sharjah (who rules the country and finances the Biennial), Zahedi decides to...Watch Movie
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High There
Hunter S. Thompson meets Barry McKenzie in this dark nonfiction comedy about a real-life, legendary but down-and-out tabloid television journalist who heads to Hawaii to film a marijuana travel series, only to become lost as he uncovers a secret government war to control the marijuana trade. The...Watch Movie
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Photographic Memory
Filmmaker Ross McElwee finds himself in frequent conflict with his son, a young adult who seems addicted to and distracted by the virtual worlds of the internet. To understand his fractured love for his son, McElwee travels back to St. Quay-Portrieux in Brittany for the first...Watch Movie
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Bright Leaves
McElwee family legend has it that the Hollywood melodrama BRIGHT LEAF starring Gary Cooper as a 19th century tobacco grower, is based on filmmaker Ross McElwee's great-grandfather, who created the Bull Durham brand. Using this legacy as a jumping off point, McElwee reaches back to his roots in...Watch Movie
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Ballet Boys
BILLY ELLIOT meets FIRST POSITION in BALLET BOYS, a documentary that follows, over four years, the struggles, set-backs and accomplishments of three friends and hopeful future dance stars: Lukas, Syvert, and Torgeir. The boys sacrifice a normal high school experience (including parties and...Watch Movie
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Phantom Limb
PHANTOM LIMB revisits the childhood death of the filmmaker's younger brother, a major tragedy that spun Jay Rosenblatt's family on a sad axis. Rosenblatt's treatment of the death and decades of grieving, through personal narrative, amazing scenes of amputation and experimentation from medical...Watch Movie
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I Was Possessed by God
On February 14th (Valentine's Day), 1993, Caveh Zahedi, being without a date, decided to ingest five grams of hallucinogenic mushrooms. For the first time in his mushroom-taking experience, he had an experience of "divine possession," in which he felt that a divine being took...Watch Movie
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Dear Pyongyang
A young girl's father sends her three brothers from Japan to live permanently in a homeland foreign to them: North Korea. In this autobiographical documentary spanning ten years, the daughter left behind, filmmaker Yonghi Yang, struggles to understand why her loving father would split his family...Watch Movie
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Without a Home
Filmmaker Rachel Fleischer spent four years creating this extraordinary documentary that enters the lives of six homeless individuals in her hometown of Los Angeles. The film's subjects include families in temporary housing, a street performer who depends on banjo-playing for income and a...Watch Movie
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Dream City
In Iraqi Kurdistan, two friends, Emma, a filmmaker from the US, and Diana, a local aspiring actress, make a movie. When they begin Diana is living on her own in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan's buzzing capital city. She is studying to be a flight attendant and enjoying the freedom of being independent...Watch Movie
