Science
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 / Science
SUB-GENRES · Agronomy · Anthropology · Biology · Ecology · Geology · Linguistics · Pharmacology · Psychology
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Dirty Pictures
Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin is the scientist behind more than two-hundred psychedelic compounds, including MDMA, more commonly known as Ecstasy. Considered to be one of the greatest chemists of the twentieth century, Sasha's vast array of discoveries have had a profound impact in the field of...Watch Movie
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Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
Fabulously offbeat and refreshingly upbeat, this lovable film gets friendly with the natives of the Salton Sea, an inland ocean of massive fish kills, rotting resorts, and 120 degree nights located just minutes from urban Southern California. This award-winning film from...Watch Movie
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Look at the Sun
For thousands of years, humanity has watched the sun with a mixture of fear and awe, believing without knowing why, that our lives depend on its mysterious undulations. Today, technology has sharpened the view and revealed fantastic, explosive visions roiling a chaotic surface, but what has...Watch Movie
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General Orders No.9
Awarded for its visionary cinematography, GENERAL ORDERS NO.9 breaks from the constraints of the documentary form as it contemplates the signs of loss and change in the American South. The stunning culmination of over eleven years' work from first time writer-director Robert...Watch Movie
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Orgasm Inc.
ORGASM INC. explores the strange science of female pleasure and in the process reveals the warped mentality of our pharmaceutical and medical industries. Director Liz Canner embarks on a nine year odyssey as she follows the companies who are racing to be the first to win FDA approval for a...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
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Blast!
BLAST! is a spectacular and suspenseful story of space exploration. Five-time Emmy-winner Paul Devlin follows his brother Mark Devlin, Ph.D., to five continents, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, to launch a revolutionary new telescope on a NASA high-altitude balloon. They hope to look back in...Watch Movie
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Psychiatry in Russia
In 1955, Albert Maysles traveled to Russia, 16mm camera in hand. During this trip, he shot what was to become his first film, PSYCHIATRY IN RUSSIA, an unprecedented view into Soviet mental healthcare. Originally televised by the David Garroway Show on NBC-TV in 1956.Watch Movie
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Three Cheers for the Whale
THREE CHEERS FOR THE WHALE chronicles the history of mankind's relationship with the largest and most majestic of marine mammals, and graphically exposes their slaughter by the fishing industry. Chris Marker's co-director, Mario Ruspoli, descendant of an aristocratic Italian...Watch Movie
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The Voyagers
In the summer of 1977, NASA sent Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 on an epic journey into interstellar space. Together and alone, they will travel until the end of the universe. Each spacecraft carries a golden record album, a massive compilation of images and sounds embodying the best of Planet Earth....Watch Movie
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The House of Suh
One of Chicago's most famous murder cases surrounded sister and brother Catherine and Andrew Suh, first-generation Korean Americans, who conspired against, shot and killed Catherine's former boyfriend. Over a decade later, director Iris Shim revisits the case and opens a...Watch Movie
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G-Spotting
In 1982, "The G-Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality” is published. It makes the New York Times bestsellers list, sells over 1 million copies and is translated into 19 languages. In the 30 years since , this small erogenous zone has become the subject of much debate,...Watch Movie
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Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL is the bonafide sleeper theatrical hit of the year. The film's endearing guide is Mark Bittner, an aging bohemian, but the supporting cast members, a rambunctious flock of urban parrots, are the true stars, and their surprisingly humanlike...Watch Movie
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Dead Birds
DEAD BIRDS is a film about the Dani, a people dwelling in the Grand Valley of the Baliem high in the mountains of West Irian. When I shot the film in 1961, the Dani had an almost classic Neolithic culture. They were exceptional in the way they focussed their energies and based their values on an...Watch Movie
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Araneae
Filmmaker Paul Clipson's underlying attraction to things that elude the touch finds its apotheosis in the translucent thread of the spider's web, contrasted here against the grey solidity of a factory building. Pitched on the lip of nightmare, ARANEAE accesses the sublime in the very small. - Max...Watch Movie
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The Gleaners and I
Gleaning has meanings both literal (to gather grain left behind by reapers, the subject of nineteenth century French paintings like Jean-Francois Millet's famed "Les glaneuses") and metaphorical (to collect, bit-by-bit). Agnes Varda's rumination on this art of "living off the...Watch Movie
