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Classic Documentaries

Classic Documentaries

A selection of the most heavy-hitting, and/or iconic docs in OVID's collection.

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Classic Documentaries
  • Milestones (Robert Kramer)

    Directed by Robert Kramer and John Douglas • Documentary • 1975 • 195 minutes

    MILESTONES is a lilting, free-associative masterpiece that follows dozens of characters — including hippies, farmers, immigrants, Native Americans, and political activists — as they try to reconcile their ideals with t...

  • Hotel Terminus: The Life And Times Of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophüls)

    5 items

    Directed by Marcel Ophüls • Documentary • With Klaus Barbie, Claude Lanzmann, Marcel Ophüls • 1988 • 267 minutes

    A brilliant and epic Academy Award-winning examination of the Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon", HOTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE weaves t...

  • Seventeen

    Directed by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines • Documentary • 1982 • 120 minutes

    Part of the acclaimed Middletown series.

    In their final year at Muncie's Southside High School, a group of seniors hurtles toward maturity with a combination of joy, despair, and an aggravated sense of urgency. They are...

  • 56 UP (Michael Apted)

    Directed by Michael Apted • Documentary • With Bruce Balden, Jacqueline Basset, Symon Basterfield, Andrew Brackfield, John Brisby, Suzanne Dewey, Nicholas Hitchon, Neil Hughes, Lynn Johnson, Paul Kligerman, Susan Sullivan, Tony Walker, Charles Furneaux • 2012 • 138 minutes

    ”Give me the child ...

  • The Last Pullman Car

    Directed by Gordon Quinn, Jerry Blumenthal • Documentary • 1983 • 56 minutes

    In 1864, George Pullman began selling his famous railroad sleeping cars which helped him build a vast industrial empire that was supposed to last forever. In 1981, however, Pullman workers found themselves in the midst ...

  • Dressed in Blue (Vestida de Azul)

    Directed by Antonio Giménez Rico • Documentary • 1983 • 98 minutes

    One of the best trans films you’ve likely never heard of, Antonio Giménez-Rico’s landmark 1983 documentary Dressed in Blue (Vestida de Azul) explores the lives and loves of a group of six transgender women living in Madrid in the...

  • Travels in the Congo (Voyage au Congo)

    Directed by Marc Allégret • Documentary • 1927 • 117 minutes

    In 1925, Marc Allégret accompanied André Gide on a journey to French Equatorial Africa, the Congo, as his secretary, and novice filmmaker. Filming throughout their 11-month travels, and only three years after Nanook of the North, Allég...

  • Drug Stories!

    Directed by Max Miller • Documentary • 2022 • 80 minutes

    A compilation of educational anti-drug and anti-alcohol short films from the 1960s and the 1970s.

  • The Mad Masters (Jean Rouch)

    Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1955 • 28 minutes

    The film opens on the bustling streets of Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana), a major colonial port city that serves as a stage for the collision of the traditional and the modern. Among the diverse groups who populate...

  • Drifters (John Grierson)

    Directed by John Grierson • Documentary • 1929 • 50 minutes

    Story of the North Sea herring fleets. Filmed around the coast of Yarmouth and Lowestoft and Lerwick in the Shetlands in all weathers, but using some studio sets for interiors.

  • Rocky Road to Dublin

    Movie + 1 extra

    ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN is a provocative and revealing portrait of Ireland in the Sixties, a society characterized by a stultifying educational system, a morally repressive and politically reactionary clergy, a myopic cultural nationalism, and a government which seemingly knew no boundary between ch...

  • Last Grave at Dimbaza

    Directed by Chris Curling and Pascoe Macfarlane • Documentary • 1974 • 55 minutes

    In 1969, a small group of South African exiles and British film students formed Morena Films in London to produce films about apartheid. By 1974, they produced one of the first, and certainly the most influential, ...

  • Terrorists in Retirement

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Mosco Boucault • Documentary • 1983 • 71 minutes

    Too controversial to be shown on French TV when first released – after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1983 – TERRORISTS IN RETIREMENT is the story of men and women from Armenia, Poland, and Romania, mostly Jews, who fough...

  • A Grin Without a Cat (Chris Marker)

    Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1977 • 178 minutes

    Newly restored! A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT is Chris Marker's epic film-essay on the worldwide political wars of the 60's and 70's: Vietnam, Bolivia, May '68, Prague, Chile, and the fate of the New Left.

    Released in France in 1978, restored a...

  • Sherman's March (Ross McElwee)

    Directed by Ross McElwee • Documentary • 1986 • 155 minutes

    When First Run released Ross McElwee's Sundance Award winning Sherman's March in 1986, it went on to become one of the largest grossing documentaries ever. Audiences and critics alike fell in love with McElwee's "quirky, funny and fasci...

  • The Cruise (Bennett Miller)

    Directed by Bennett Miller • Documentary • With Timothy "Speed" Levitch • 1998 • 76 minutes

    Sailing the streets of Manhattan atop a double-decker bus, Timothy "Speed" Levitch waxes philosophical as the city's most eccentric tour guide. Speed's bombastic and psychedelic poetry is captured in the ...

  • Free Cinema (eleven films)

    11 items

    Free Cinema not only reinvented British documentary making, but this highly influential period in the country’s cinema history was the precursor for the better known British New Wave of social realist films in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

    The term Free Cinema was coined by critic and filmmake...

  • The Battle of Chile
    Movie + 3 extras

    The Battle of Chile

    Movie + 3 extras

    On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende's democratically-elected Chilean government was overthrown in a bloody coup by General Augusto Pinochet's army.

    Patricio Guzman and five colleagues had been filming the political developments in Chile throughout the nine months leading up to that...

  • Forever (Heddy Honigmann)

    Directed by Heddy Honigmann • Documentary • 2006 • 95 minutes

    Through a leisurely tour of the world-famous Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the final resting place for legendary writers, composers, painters and other artists from around the world, FOREVER provides an unusually poignant, emotiona...

  • No Home Movie

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • Documentary • 2015 • 115 minutes

     The final film from groundbreaking auteur Chantal Akerman, NO HOME MOVIE is a portrait of her relationship with her mother, Natalia, a Holocaust survivor and familiar presence in many of her daughter's films.

    "At the center of Chan...

  • From The East (Chantal Akerman)

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • Documentary • 2003 • 110 minutes

    FROM THE EAST retraces a journey from the end of summer to deepest winter, from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow. It is a voyage Chantal Akerman wanted to make shortly after the collapse of the Soviet bloc "befo...

  • Far from Vietnam

    Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais • Documentary • 1967 • 115 minutes

    Initiated and edited by Chris Marker, FAR FROM VIETNAM is an epic 1967 collaboration between cinema greats Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Clau...

  • Third Avenue: Only the Strong Survive

    Directed by Jon Alpert • Documentary • 1980 • 60 minutes

    This Emmy Award-winning documentary tells the stories of six "ordinary" people who live or work along New York City's Third Avenue, which runs for sixteen miles through Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, cutting through the complex social...

  • Moi, Un Noir (Jean Rouch)

    Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1958 • 70 minutes

    Winner of the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1958, MOI, UN NOIR marked Jean Rouch's break with traditional ethnography, and his embrace of the collaborative and improvisatory strategies he called "shared ethnography" and "ethnofiction."
    ...