New: Documentaries

New: Documentaries

The sixty-or-so most recent documentaries released on OVID.

Share
New: Documentaries
  • Looking for Robert

    Directed by Richard Copans • Documentary • With Robert Kramer • 2025 • 74 minutes

    Robert Kramer’s politics were as a radical as his approach to making films. A founder of the leftist Newsreel collective, he went on to direct documentaries and dramas, and films that blended both. Disgusted with t...

  • The Dialogue Police

    Movie

    Directed by Susanna Edwards • Documentary • 2025 • 90 minutes

    Anti-vaccine demonstrators. Extinction rebellion activists blocking a downtown intersection. Opposing factions yelling at each other outside a Stockholm courthouse. An anti-Muslim neo-fascist agitator.

    In Sweden, all these people hav...

  • El-Sisi: Egypt's New Pharaoh

    Directed by Claire Billet, Nadia Blétry • Documentary • With François Hollande, Maye Kabil, Ariane Lavrilleux, Ahmed Abdel Quddus • 2026 • 53 minutes

    To an outsider, Egypt looks like a dynamic country reinventing itself. Under president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, construction is booming, with dams, b...

  • The Flats

    Movie

    In his tower-block apartment in New Lodge, Joe reenacts memories from his childhood amidst the “Troubles“. In this Catholic area of Belfast, the number of deaths was tragically significant. Joe is joined by neighbors Jolene, Sean, Angie, and others, all willingly participating in this process of ...

  • Emergent City

    Movie

    Residents of Sunset Park, Brooklyn face rising rents, a legacy of environmental racism and the loss of the industrial jobs that once sustained their community. When a global developer purchases a massive industrial complex on the waterfront and lays plans for an “innovation district,” a battle er...

  • The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes to Haiti

    Movie

    What happens when the oppressor becomes your salvation? Through a letter to his grandfather, a Haitian filmmaker revisits the U.S. occupation of Haiti, unraveling the paradox of a man who longed for American rule and a nation scarred by it. Blending intimate memory with sweeping history, the film...

  • Inquiring Nuns

    2 items

    Directed by Gordon Quinn, Gerald Temaner • Documentary • 1968

    In the politically fraught climate of Chicago in 1968, two young nuns crisscross the city in order to ask strangers the question, “Are you happy?” The answers vary: “Happiness is the absence of fear,” “Avoiding people,” “Raspberries,”...

  • The Luck of Water

    Directed by Ignacio Decerega, Cristóbal Jasso • Documentary • 2023 • 64 minutes

    The Luck of Water profiles two rivers and a sacred saltwater lagoon system in the indigenous Mixtec, mestizo, and Afro-descendant communities in the Oaxaca’s coastal region in Mexico. For indigenous Mixtec communitie...

  • The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers

    Directed by Ben Rivers • Drama • 2015 • 95 minutes

    Please note not all of the dialogue is translated in this film, nor does it have English closed captions.

    The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers is a labyrinthine and epic film that moves between documentary,...

  • What Means Something

    Directed by Ben Rivers • Documentary • With Rose Wylie • 2015 • 66 minutes

    A portrait of the painter Rose Wylie. I met Rose quite a few years ago and we became good friends. I asked her if I could make a film about her and she agreed. The film, finally, is a meeting between two friends, made spo...

  • Hummingbirds

    Movie

    In Hummingbirds, Silvia and Beba tell their own coming-of-age story, transforming their hometown on the Texas-Mexico border into a wonderland of creative expression and activist hijinks. Filmed collaboratively over the final summer of their fleeting youth, their cinematic self-portrait celebrates...

  • It Happens to Us

    Directed by Amalie R. Rothschild • Documentary • 1971 • 32 minutes

    Made in 1971 when a medically safe legal abortion was available in only one state, "It Happens to Us" was produced to bring to public attention the sometimes shattering, and always difficult, personal situations underlying a woma...

  • My Letter to the World

    Directed by Solon Papadopoulos • Documentary • With Cynthia Nixon • 2018 • 80 minutes

    Emily Dickinson has spent the 130 years since her death unfairly pigeonholed as the strange recluse in white. My Letter To The World is an in-depth exploration of her life and work, filmed in her hometown of Am...

  • The Land of the Whale

    Movie

    For filmmaker Armando Capó, the southeastern Cuban town of Gibara is a place of ghosts, haunted by his lost youth, a bustling past that cannot be recovered — and the skeleton of a whale.

    Capó left Gibara for Havana as a young man, realizing he had no future there as a filmmaker. THE LAND OF THE ...

  • Final Vows

    Movie

    Final Vows chronicles the life of a cloistered order of nuns at Santa Rita Abbey, a Cistercian monastery in the high desert of Arizona. The nuns, who take a vow that binds them to remain in the community they entered for life, candidly share their joys and struggles. While each woman's journey is...

  • The Reverend

    Directed by Nick Canfield • Documentary • With Vince Anderson, Questlove, Jaleel Bunton, Kyp Malone • 2022 • 86 minutes

    The Reverend is a raucous concert film as well as an intimate portrait of Reverend Vince Anderson's spiritual and musical journey. After coming to New York in the 90's to enter...

  • The Weavers' Songs

    Directed by Ismael Vásquez Bernabé • Documentary • 2024 • 77 minutes

    In San Pedro Amuzgos, Oaxaca, Mexico—known as "the town of the spinners"—director Ismael Vásquez Bernabé returns to the community that shaped him. As a child, Vásquez Bernabé would lie under his mother’s loom and ponder life be...

  • Timestamp

    Movie

    Keeping schools open in Ukraine is an attempt to recreate at least some of the normal life they had before the war — until February 24, 2022 (and in some regions even earlier, in 2014). Without interviews, narration and reenactments, TIMESTAMP provides an insight into how the war is affecting the...

  • Pastor: Four Movements

    Directed by Joanna Rechnio • Documentary • 2024 • 70 minutes

    Pastor: Four Movements is an intimate documentary that profiles Krzysztof Pastor, the renowned Polish dancer and choreographer affiliated with the Dutch ballet school. The film delves into Pastor’s creative process, showcasing his work...

  • The Pavilion on the Water

    Directed by Stefano Croci, Silvia Siberini • Documentary • 2023 • 77 minutes

    The documentary feature film The Pavilion On The Water is a cinematic journey into the world of Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa and his passion for Japanese culture. Japan, to him, was an inspirational universe but also...

  • Creating Paradise

    Documentary • 2023 • 67 minutes

    'The ultimate goal of an architect is to create a paradise', Alvar Aalto said.

    After a trip to Finland in 1960, Spanish architect Vicente Saavedra (1937-2021) plans the construction of TenBel, a touristic area in the Canary Islands where he applied some of Aalto'...

  • Leila and the Wolves

    Directed by Heiny Srour • Documentary • With Nabila Zeitouni, Rafik Ali Ahmad • 94 minutes

    Drawing on the Arab heritage of the ‘Arabian Nights’, Leila and the Wolves combines fictional drama, archival footage, fantasy sequences, mosaic pattern, to refute the colonial and male dominated version o...

  • The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived

    Directed by Heiny Srour • Documentary • 68 minutes

    In the late 60s, Dhofar rose up against the British-backed Sultanate of Oman, in a democratic, Leninist guerrilla movement. Srour and her team crossed 500 miles of desert and mountains by foot, under bombardment by the British Royal Air Force, t...

  • Downeast

    Directed by Ashley Sabin and David Redmon • Documentary • 2012 • 81 minutes

    Downeast is an experiential story that unfolds over the course of a year-and-a-half in the small lobster village of Prospect Harbor, Maine. It observes the closing of the last remaining Sardine Cannery in the United Stat...