Poetic Documentary Movies

On July 25th, 2020, Ridley Scott and Academy Award winner Kevin Macdonald invite you to be part of Life in a Day—a historic, global documentary...

This short documentary, shot in the glass factories of Leerdam and Schiedam, demonstrates how glass blowers do their work. But thanks to the superbly...

Women find empowerment behind the red nose and makeup, revealing the playful and subversive spirit of female clowning. Through poetic and intimate...

Documentary portrait of the poet Karla Erbová is a confession of a creative personality who, despite many twists and turns in life, remains...

Bondi Icebergs is the most photographed pool in the world. This is where generations of children have learnt to swim, where the diehard have braved...

A hypnotic and slow-burning journey through the austere landscapes of the island of South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula. Shot on black and...

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line...

A perfect, fast and hilarious montage. Using images from Artis (Amsterdam Zoo), Bert Haanstra shows that a couple of similarities can be discovered...

In this short film the director reflects on the feeling of being on the wrong path in your life, that you have no control over your own life. But...

A city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished...

Robert Drew shows the sights and sounds from the funeral of President John F. Kennedy in November, 1963. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in...

A montage of the skyscrapers of Manhattan opens with a succession of stationary views of the upper portions of numerous buildings. This is followed...

A young filmmaker maintains an epistolary conversation with his deceased grandmother while he rediscovers the space they both inhabited for more than...

Ibuka follows Valentine and Jean-Claude, a new couple, at the very beginning of the civil war and the massacres that swept through Rwanda in 1994....

Featuring a commentary by Noël Burch (in nonsense French), Recreation's rapid-fire montage of single-frame images of incredible density and...

The faces of a 5:00 PM crowd descending via the Pan Am building escalators in one continuous shot. In old-fashioned black and white, these faces...