Directed by Wolf Koening, Roman Kroiter • Documentary • 1962 • 26 minutes

The story of popular singer Paul Anka. He rose from obscurity to become the idol of millions of adolescent fans around the world. This film takes a candid look at both sides of the footlights as well as the promotion indus...

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,...

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.

Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2023 • 96 minutes

THE FIRST YEAR is a jubilant record of the 12 months following the election of Chile’s first socialist president, Salvador Allende. Director Patricio Guzmán travels the country, meeting workers who no longer have to answer to the capr...

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...

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.

Directed by Daniel Schmid • Documentary • 1984 • 87 minutes

Meet the inhabitants of the "Casa di Riposa" in Milan, the world's first nursing home for retired opera singers, founded by composer Giuseppe Verdi in 1896.

In his documentary film Tosca's Kiss, which has developed an underground cult...

Directed by Thomas Heise • Documentary • 2019 • 218 minutes

In HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME, German filmmaker Thomas Heise shares the stories of three generations of his family, in their own words.

Heise sets the tone early, reading an anti-war essay written in 1912 by his grandfather Wilhelm, whe...

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, ...

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...

Directed by Tatiana Huezo • Documentary • 2011 • 104 minutes

On the surface THE TINIEST PLACE is the story of Cinquera, a village literally wiped off the official map during El Salvador's 12-year civil war. But on a deeper level it is a story about the ability to rise, to rebuild and reinvent on...

Directed by Basil Charles Wright • Documentary • With Lionel Wendt, Alberto Cavalcanti, John Grierson, Stuart Legg, Basil Charles Wright • 1934 • 38 minutes

The Song of Ceylon was originally commissioned as a series of short travelogues, but spawned an ambitious film transforming travelogue (exo...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • Documentary • 1975 • 75 minutes

From the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, Japanese girls and women were trafficked out of Japan and sent to foreign countries like China, Singapore, and beyond to serve as indentured prostitutes. These women were called Karayuki-san.

Shoh...

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...

Directed by Lionel Rogosin • Documentary • With Ray Salyer, Gorman Hendricks, Frank Matthews • 1956 • 65 minutes

On the Bowery chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York’s skid row. When the film first opened in 1956, it exploded on t...

Directed by Judy Irving, Christopher Beaver & Ruth Landy • Documentary • 1982 • 82 minutes

It’s been 75 years since the start of the Atomic Age, with the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, but its trail of destruction has never ended.

Dark...

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...

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...

Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1989 • 55 minutes

The seminal documentary on Black gay life, Emmy Award-winning director Marlon T. Riggs’ 1989 Tongues Untied uses poetry, personal testimony, rap and performance (featuring poet Essex Hemphill and others), to describe the homophobia and r...

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...

Directed by Marta Rodriguez & Jorge Silva • Documentary • 1972 • 42 minutes

Remastered! Considered a classic Latin American and Colombian documentary film, Brickmakers chronicles the search for a film production methodology that could be adapted to the sociopolitical conditions of Latin America....