Process
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
SUB-GENRES · Cinéma-vérité · Direct Cinema · 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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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
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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
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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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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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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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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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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
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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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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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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
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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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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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Hotel Dallas
Playfully mixing fiction and documentary, HOTEL DALLAS is a surreal parable of communism, capitalism, and the power of art. It premiered at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival, in the Panorama program. In the 80s, "Dallas" is the most popular TV show in communist Romania. Presented as a...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
