Observational Documentary Movies

What is the "feeling" of a city? Is it the roads, the light that illuminates them, the people that live there and their stories? It's all these...

The definitive documentary on the history of nudity in feature films from the early silent days to the present, studying the changes in morality that...

A close examination of the Whakaari / White Island volcanic eruption of 2019 in which 22 lives were lost, the film viscerally recounts a day when...

Pierre Carles questions the privatization of the leading French televisions channel : is it not scandalous that the TFI-Bouygues concession has been...

Without memory we are nothing. Memory makes us human. It’s who we are. Memory Games offers a thrilling insight into the lives of four athletes...

The White Planet or in French, La Planète Blanche, is a 2006 documentary about the wildlife of the Arctic. It shows interactions between...

Tobacco, climate change, pesticides,... Never has scientific knowledge seemed so vast, detailed and shared. And yet it appears to be increasingly...

In 1978, the Amoco Cadiz, a supertanker loaded with 220,000 tons of petrol, ran aground in Brittany, France. The accident caused the biggest oil...

A cinéma vérité exploration of the grueling schedules, auditions, lighting design, and backstage operations at the famous...

Weeping Rocks follows Art, an entomologist nearing the end of his life, who has spent over five decades walking the same ten trails counting...

Employing methods of direct cinema–observation, limited stylization, and non-intervention–this stark look into the State Prison for the...

After a 20-year long fruitless search in the Cameroonian forest, Frenchman Michel Ballot is on the verge of giving up his lifelong quest to find the...

The past collides with the present in this excavation of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam: a journey from World War II to recent years of pandemic...

The story of a Warlpiri woman, Audrey, and her Sicilian partner Santo as they navigate through colonial systems to keep the children they care for...

In the year following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, young journalist Claude Baechtold finds himself in the war zone of Afghanistan. Not entirely...

Once free to farm in the most remote part of the Himalayas, today the people labor on the ambitious road to Zanskar, which will soon connect both...

Irish director Donagh Coleman explores the extraordinary phenomenon of Tukdam, whereby some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners are able to forestall...

Candid interviews of ordinary people on the meaning of happiness, an often amorphous and inarticulable notion that evokes more basic and...

This documentary was distilled from a 3 1/2-hour television film Nessuno o Tutti, to make the point that many inmates now in mental hospitals could...