8.6
Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek in NIGHT AND FOG (NUIT ET BROUILLARD), one of the first cinematic reflections on the Holocaust. Juxtaposing the stillness of the abandoned camps’ empty buildings with haunting wartime footage, Resnais investigates humanity’s capacity for violence, and presents the devastating suggestion that such horrors could occur again.
8.2
Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene. Made over seven years, PARIS IS BURNING offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion “houses,” from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens, and trans women—including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza—PARIS IS BURNING brings it, celebrating the joy of movement, the force of eloquence, and the draw of community.
8.3
Two ordinary inner-city Chicago kids dare to reach for the impossible, professional basketball glory, in this epic chronicle of hope and faith. Filmed over a five-year period, HOOP DREAMS, by Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert, follows young Arthur Agee and William Gates and their families as the boys navigate the complex, competitive world of scholastic athletics while dealing with the intense pressures of their home lives and neighborhoods. This revelatory film continues to educate and inspire viewers, and it is widely considered one of the great works of American nonfiction cinema.
8.2
An extraordinary, transformative experience, Allan King's DYING AT GRACE is quite simply unprecedented: five terminally ill cancer patients allowed the director access to their final months and days inside the Toronto Grace Health Centre. The result is an unflinching, enormously empathetic contemplation of death, featuring some of the most memorable people ever captured on film.
8.2
A true twentieth-century trailblazer, Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world. The Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, directed by Robert Epstein and produced by Richard Schmiechen, was as groundbreaking as its subject. One of the first feature documentaries to address gay life in America, it's a work of advocacy itself, bringing Milk's message of hope and equality to a wider audience. This exhilarating trove of original documentary material and archival footage is as much a vivid portrait of a time and place (San Francisco's historic Castro District in the seventies) as a testament to the legacy of a political visionary.
8.2
Seattle, 1983. Taking their camera to the streets of what was supposedly America’s most livable city, filmmaker Martin Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall set out to tell the stories of those society had left behind: homeless and runaway teenagers living on the city’s margins. Born from a “Life” magazine exposé by Mark and McCall, “Streetwise” follows an unforgettable group of at-risk children—including iron-willed fourteen-year-old Tiny, who would become the project’s most haunting and enduring face, along with the pugnacious yet resourceful Rat and the affable drifter DeWayne—who, driven from their broken homes, survive by hustling, panhandling, and dumpster diving. Granted remarkable access to their world, the filmmakers craft a devastatingly frank, nonjudgmental portrait of lost youth growing up far too soon in a world that has failed them.
8.2
A startling and courageous film, Peter Davis’s landmark 1974 documentary HEARTS AND MINDS unflinchingly confronted the United States’ involvement in Vietnam at the height of the controversy that surrounded it. Using a wealth of sources—from interviews to newsreels to footage of the conflict and the upheaval it occasioned on the home front—Davis constructs a powerfully affecting picture of the disastrous effects of war. Explosive, persuasive, and wrenching, HEARTS AND MINDS is an overwhelming emotional experience and the most important nonfiction film ever made about this devastating period in history.
8
This Oscar-winning documentary is a twentieth-century fable, the story of an American dreamer who rose from humble origins to the heights of political power. Robert S. McNamara was both witness to and participant in many of the crucial events of his lifetime: the crippling Depression of the 1930s; the industrialization of the war years; the development of a different kind of warfare based on air power; and the creation of a new American meritocracy. He was also an idealist who saw his dreams and ideals challenged by the ambiguous role he played in history. Filmmaker Errol Morris lets McNamara tell his story in his own words, letting his subject draw lessons from the successes and failures of his career.
8
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” Originally intended to be Agnès Varda’s farewell to filmmaking, this enchanting auto-portrait, made in her eightieth year, is a freewheeling journey through her life, career, and artistic philosophy. Revisiting the places that shaped her—from the North Sea beaches of Belgium where she spent her childhood to the Mediterranean village where she shot her first film to the boardwalks of Los Angeles where she lived with her husband, Jacques Demy—Varda reflects on a lifetime of creation and inspiration, successes and setbacks, heartbreak and joy. Replete with images of wonder and whimsy—the ocean reflected in a kaleidoscope of mirrors, the streets of Paris transformed into a sandy beach, the filmmaker herself ensconced in the belly of a whale—The Beaches of Agnès is a playful and poignant record of a life lived fully and passionately in the name of cinema.
8.1
In July 1969, the space race ended when Apollo 11 fulfilled President Kennedy’s challenge of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” No one who witnessed the lunar landing will ever forget it. Al Reinert’s documentary FOR ALL MANKIND is the story of the twenty-four men who traveled to the moon, told in their words, in their voices, using the images of their experiences. Forty years after the first moon landing, it remains the most radical, visually dazzling work of cinema yet made about this earthshaking event.
8.1
A tremendous, handmade monument to lives lost to AIDS, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt demonstrated that grief and activism together could forge a powerful symbol of resilience. Winner of the Academy Award for best documentary feature, this moving film—buoyed by an original all-vocal score by Bobby McFerrin—explores the human stories obscured by statistics, examining the cross section of identities affected by HIV/AIDS, as well as efforts to combat the stigma, misinformation, and political obstruction that deepened the crisis.
8.1
Made with a righteous political anger that anticipates the incendiary polemics of documentarians such as Michael Moore and Joshua Oppenheimer, Kazuo Hara’s most renowned film is a harrowing confrontation with one of Japanese history’s darkest chapters: the atrocities committed by the country’s military during World War II. Hara’s unforgettable subject and collaborator in THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON is Kenzo Okuzaki—a former soldier, convicted murderer, and defiantly anti-establishment agitator—who has made it his life’s mission to expose the crimes committed by Japanese officers against their own men while stationed in New Guinea. As the often-violent Okuzaki resorts to extreme measures in his crusade to find out the truth about what happened to two soldiers murdered by their commanders, what emerges is at once a shocking piece of investigative journalism, a courageous condemnation of militarism and blind obedience, and a riveting portrait of a single-minded man driven by a raw fury bordering on madness.
8.1
Jimi Hendrix arrived in California virtually unknown. Returning stateside from London, where he had moved to launch his musical career, Hendrix exploded at Monterey, flooring an unsuspecting audience with his maniacal six-string pyrotechnics. JIMI PLAYS MONTEREY features the entire set of this legendary musician, a performance that has entered rock-and-roll mythology.
8
“To call RYUICHI SAKAMOTO | OPUS a concert film would be correct and also drastically inadequate . . . A testament to the artistic spirit and, above all, an act of love.” —Sheri Linden, “The Hollywood Reporter” “A spare, lovely work . . . The culmination of a lifelong journey.” —Bilge Ebiri, “New York Magazine”
8
In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, the killings fueled by anti-Black hatred fomented by the Dominican government. Fast-forward to 2013, when the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity, or a homeland. In this dangerous climate, a young attorney named Rosa Iris mounts a grassroots campaign, challenging electoral corruption and advocating for social justice. In STATELESS, director Michèle Stephenson traces the complex tributaries of history and present-day politics, issuing an urgent warning about what can happen when racism runs rampant in the government.
8
Krzysztof Kieślowski made more than twenty documentaries, including the following short. In TALKING HEADS, Kieślowski poses the questions “What year were you born?” “Who are you?” and “What do you most wish for?” to forty different people, ranging from an infant to a one-hundred-year-old woman.
8
More than forty years ago, in 1978, WORD IS OUT: STORIES OF SOME OF OUR LIVES startled audiences across the country when it appeared in movie theaters and on television. The first feature-length documentary about queer identity made by gay filmmakers, the film was created by the Mariposa Film Group, a collective comprised of three lesbians (Veronica Selver, Lucy Massie Phenix, Nancy Adair) and three gay men (Rob Epstein, Peter Adair, Andrew Brown). Featuring candid interviews with twenty-six gay men and women across a wide range of demographics, it became an immediate flash point in the emerging gay-rights movement of the 1970s and forever altered the cultural conversation around LGBT issues.
7.9
Sam Harkness was fourteen years old when his mother, Jois, abruptly disappeared. Tracking cryptic clues of her whereabouts years later, Sam and his half brother—director Reed Harkness, who has been making short films with Sam since childhood—head out on a West Coast road trip to try to find her. But solving the mystery of Jois’s disappearance is only the beginning. What unfolds is a remarkable emotional journey that gradually reveals the ripple effects of trauma across generations of the Harkness family. Stitching together twenty-five years of home movies and filling the gaps in the archive with play, SAM NOW is a vibrant mosaic of love, longing, and loss, as well as a deeply empathetic attempt at healing.
7.9
Made over the course of ten years, this epic work of activist cinema joins the citizens of Sennan, Osaka, as they embark on an unprecedented uphill legal battle to receive reparations from the government for exposing their community to the deadly toxins of the city’s asbestos factories. Through wrenching interviews with the victims whose lives have been shattered by the agonizing effects of asbestosis, SENNAN ASBESTOS DISASTER paints a damning portrait of how decades of negligence exacted a devastating human toll while revealing the ways in which the tragedy is deeply entwined with issues of class and anti-Korean discrimination. It’s also a galvanizing look at the power of collective action and what happens when ordinary people take on their own government—going up against an unfeeling, often maddeningly slow-moving bureaucracy in their unceasing fight for justice.
7.9
In 1974, Leon Gast traveled to Africa to film Zaïre 74, a music festival planned to accompany an unprecedented sports spectacle: the Rumble in the Jungle, in which late-career underdog Muhammad Ali would contend with the younger powerhouse George Foreman for the boxing heavyweight championship title—“a fight between two Blacks in a Black nation, organized by Blacks,” as a Kinshasa billboard put it. When the main event was delayed, extending Ali’s stay in Africa, Gast wound up amassing a treasure trove of footage, observing the wildly charismatic athlete training for one of the toughest bouts of his career while basking in his role as Black America’s proud ambassador to postcolonial Africa. Two decades in the making, WHEN WE WERE KINGS features interviews with Norman Mailer and George Plimpton that illustrate the sensational impact of the fight, rounding out an Academy Award–winning portrait of Ali that captures his charm, grace, and defiance.
7.9
Michael Glawogger’s startling, unflinching look at some of the world’s most dangerous jobs is an eye-opening confrontation with the kind of backbreaking, life-threatening labor that is often rendered invisible. Shooting amid the harsh conditions of volcanic sulfur mines in Indonesia, a ship-breaking yard in Pakistan, a Nigerian butcher’s market, a Chinese steel mill, and beyond, Glawogger captures images of overwhelming, sometimes almost apocalyptic power set to an entrancing score by John Zorn.
7.9
Among the most important documentaries ever made, The Thin Blue Line, by Errol Morris, erases the border between art and activism. A work of meticulous journalism and gripping drama, it recounts the disturbing tale of Randall Dale Adams, a drifter who was charged with the murder of a Dallas police officer and sent to death row, despite evidence that he did not commit the crime. Incorporating stylized reenactments, penetrating interviews, and haunting original music by Philip Glass, Morris uses cinema to build a case forensically while effortlessly entertaining his viewers. The Thin Blue Line effected real-world change, proving film's power beyond the shadow of a doubt.
7.9
Filmed over the course of more than ten years, from 1987 to 1998, INSTRUMENT is director Jem Cohen’s visceral, fittingly unconventional portrait of legendary DC punk band Fugazi from their origins through their electrifying prime. Capturing the blistering intensity of their live shows, intimate moments backstage and in the studio, and interviews with members including frontmen Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto, the film sheds light on an often enigmatic band whose unwavering commitment to their independent, anticorporate ideals—forgoing money and mainstream fame in favor of accessibility and activism—continues to inspire the DIY underground.
