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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...

  • 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.

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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."
    ...

  • Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (Maya Deren)

    Directed by Maya Deren • Documentary • 1977 • 52 minutes

    A journey into the fascinating world of the Voudoun religion edited from footage shot by Deren in Haiti.

    "Maya Deren was a brilliant filmmaker and theorist whose substantial body of films and writings has paled beside the even larger lege...

  • La Commune (Paris, 1871)

    4 items

    Inside a giant warehouse in a working-class Parisian suburb, Peter Watkins (The War Game, Edvard Munch) assembles a cast of over 200 non-professional actors (though their amateur status is undetectable). Basing their work upon thorough historical research, they will attempt to re-create the event...

  • 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 ...

  • Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker, Pierre Lhomme)

    Movie

    Filmed just after the March 1962 ceasefire between France and Algeria, LE JOLI MAI documents Paris during a turning point in French history: the first time since 1939 that France was not involved in any war.

    Part I, "A Prayer from the Eiffel Tower," documents personal attitudes and feelings arou...

  • 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 ...

  • Our Daily Bread

    Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 2005 • 92 minutes

    OUR DAILY BREAD reveals the little-known world of high-tech agriculture. In a series of visually stunning, continuously tracking, wide-screen images that seem right out of a science-fiction movie, we see the places where food is c...

  • Trópico de Cancer / Tropic of Cancer

    Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2004 • 52 minutes

    Polgovsky’s stunning debut immerses the viewer in the impoverished lives of families in the arid desert region of San Luis Potosi in Mexico (situated on the global parallel known as Tropic of Cancer), who survive by selling plants a...

  • Strange Victory

    Directed by Leo Hurwitz • Documentary • With Alfred Drake, Muriel Smith, Gary Merrill • 1948 • 71 minutes

    The year was 1945. The free world rejoices over the defeat of fascism. But the peace soon chilled, and in the Cold War that followed the United States entered a period of national paranoia a...

  • Waiting for Fidel

    Directed by Michael Rubbo • Documentary • 1974 • 57 minutes

    Inside Fidel Castro's Cuba with a movie-making threesome whose hope is that Fidel himself will star in their film. The filmmakers are Joseph Smallwood, former Newfoundland premier, Geoff Stirling, radio and televison owner, and Michael ...