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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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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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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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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Ryan
This Oscar-winning animated short from Chris Landreth is based on the life of Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who produced some of the most influential animated films of his time. Ryan is living every artist's worst nightmare - succumbing to addiction, panhandling on the streets to make ends...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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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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5 Broken Cameras
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2013 Academy Awards®, 5 BROKEN CAMERAS is an extraordinary work of both cinematic and political activism and a deeply personal, first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil'in, a West Bank village threatened by encroaching...Watch Movie
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Dear Zachary
On November 5, 2001, Dr. Andrew Bagby was murdered in a parking lot in western Pennsylvania; the prime suspect, his ex-girlfriend Dr. Shirley Turner, promptly fled the United States for St. John's, Canada, where she announced that she was pregnant with Andrew's child. She named the little boy...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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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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Above and Below
This not-quite-documentary takes place far away and out of sight, on the margins and off the grid of American society. It tells the stories of April, Dave, Cindy, Rick and a man who calls himself 'The Godfather.' From a couple scraping by in the depths of the flood channels located beneath Sin...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
