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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
  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen)

    Directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen • Drama • With Dinah Stabb, Merdelle Jordine, Rhiannon Tise • 1977 • 92 minutes

    Laura Mulvey, author of the seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, helped to establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study. With Peter Wollen, sh...

  • 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.

  • 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, ...

  • A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings)

    Directed by Humphrey Jennings • Documentary • 1946 • 38 minutes

    A diary for the first six months in the life of a baby born 3rd September 1944, illustrating events and daily life during this period of the war. Directed by Humphrey Jennings.

  • The Wobblies

    Directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer • Documentary • 1979 • 89 minutes

    Founded in Chicago in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) took to organizing unskilled workers into one big union and changed the course of American history. This compelling documentary of the IWW (or “The...

  • Before Stonewall: Restored Edition

    Directed by Directed by Greta Schiller; Co-Directed by Robert Rosenberg • Documentary • With Rita Mae Brown, Ann Bannon, Martin Duberman, Allen Ginsberg, Dr. Evelyn Hooker, Audre Lorde, Harry Hay • 1984 • 87 minutes

    In 1969 the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenw...

  • How to Build an Igloo

    Directed by Douglas Wilkinson • Documentary • 1949 • 10 minutes

    A demonstration of igloo-building in Canada's Far North, showing how the site is selected and how blocks of snow are used to make a snug shelter in only an hour and a half. As the camera follows each stage, the commentary explains t...

  • Berkeley in the Sixties

    Directed by Mark Kitchell • Documentary • With Ronald Reagan, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mario Savio, Huey Newton, Allen Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix • 1990 • 117 minutes

    Berkeley in the Sixties recaptures the exhilaration and turmoil of the unprecedented student protests that sha...

  • 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...

  • Stories of A

    Directed by Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel • Documentary • 1973 • 89 minutes

    Shot in Paris in 1973, this feminist film on the fight for abortion rights was banned as soon it was released. A large-scale game of hide-and-seek ensued, as activists created an underground distribution network,...

  • Finally Got the News

    Directed by Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter Gessner • Documentary • 1970 • 55 minutes

    FINALLY GOT THE NEWS is a forceful, unique documentary that reveals the activities of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers inside and outside the auto factories of Detroit. Through interviews with th...

  • Night Mail

    Directed by Harry Watt & Basil Charles Wright • Documentary • 1936 • 23 minutes

    A cornerstone of British documentary, Harry Watt and Basil Wright's NIGHT MAIL, with music by Benjamin Britten and verse by W.H. Auden, stands as a beacon for John Grierson's original purpose for documentary - to mak...

  • Chris and Bernie

    Directed by Bonnie Friedman, Deborah Shaffer • Documentary • With Chris Fallow, Bernie Billingsley • 1974 • 24 minutes

    Chris and Bernie explores what happens when the "all American girl" grows up and takes responsiblity for herself and her child.The two single mothers share family life rotating ...

  • 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 ...

  • Time Indefinite (Ross McElwee)

    Directed by Ross McElwee • Documentary • 1993 • 117 minutes

    McElwee, Charleen Swansea, and several other memorable characters you met in Sherman's March invite you to pick up their story in Time Indefinite, McElwee's hilariously profound sequel to his much-beloved, critically acclaimed hit.

    "Gl...

  • Remembrance of Things to Come

    Directed by Chris Marker, Yannick Bellon • Documentary • 2001 • 42 minutes

    Chris Marker's "cine-essay" is dense and demanding, a splendid reminder of the agility, poetry, and power of his nimble, capacious mind.

    Ostensibly a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon, focusing on the two decades be...

  • Class of Struggle

    Directed by The Medvedkin Group • Documentary • 1969 • 37 minutes

    In 1967, Chris Marker and Mario Marret (under the aegis of SLON) produced A BIENTOT J'ESPERE , which documented a strike and factory occupation-the first in France since 1936-by textile workers at the Rhodiaceta textile plant in B...

  • Le Joli Mai

    Directed by Chris Marker, Pierre Lhomme • Documentary • 1963 • 145 minutes

    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 P...

  • 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...