Film Documentaries

The international success of Iranian cinema over the past decades may have veiled the fact that Iranian filmmakers work under extremely harsh circumstances rarely seen in other national cinemas. Filmmaking in Iran is subject to tight government...

U.S.-based film professor Jamsheed Akrami talks to Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami in an inpromptu video interview, which offers a frank and funny view of Kiarostami rarely seen before. The interview was conducted over a span of two days during the...

AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE explores the history of exploitation films. From the early “Nudie Cuties” to the Blaxploitation boom in the 70s,AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE boasts interviews with film critics Herschell Gordon Lewis, Joe Dante, Larry Cohen,...

Alice Guy-Blaché was a true pioneer who got into the movie business at the very beginning—in 1894, at the age of 21. Two years later, she was made head of production at Gaumont and started directing films. She and her husband moved to...

Noted film historian Charles Musser co-wrote and directed this definitive tribute to Edwin S. Porter, the mechanic and cameraman for Thomas Edison, now recognized as a major contributor to the evolution of film structure. From the time of The Great...

A chronicle of the iconoclastic life of gay poet, filmmaker, and spiritual visionary James Broughton, one of the defining voices of the sexual revolution, whose groundbreaking artistic celebrations of sexuality and the body influenced generations...

Billy Wilder Speaks is a lively lesson in filmmaking, from one of its undisputed masters.

BLANK CITY is an "absorbing snapshot of a daring time" (LA Times) when a disparate crew of renegade filmmakers emerged from an economically bankrupt and dangerous moment in New York history.

Weaving interviews and clips with never-before-heard audio tapes of Hedy Lamarr speaking on the record about her incredible life—from her beginnings as an Austrian Jewish emigre to her scandalous nude scene in the 1933 film Ecstasy t...

Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) was possibly the most important filmmaker of the avant-garde, and one of the greatest artists of our time. From 1952, at the age of nineteen, until his death, Brakhage created more than 400 films, ranging in length from...

THE LOOK features Charlotte Rampling in a series of reflective conversations with artists, friends, and one-time collaborators such as novelist Paul Auster and photographers Peter Lindbergh and Juergen Teller, revealing the personality and...

Acclaimed three-part documentary tells the proud, sad story of D.W. Griffith: the man who first brought artistry and ambition to the movies, and then, having dragged a reluctant American film industry to international prominence, found it had no...

This meditation on cinema’s past from Decasia director Bill Morrison pieces together the bizarre true history of a long-lost collection of 533 nitrate film prints from the early 1900s. Discovered buried under the permafrost in a former Canadia...

Written and narrated by Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton, this documentary blends vintage clips from Jarman's groundbreaking experimental works, never-before-seen footage from his films, and candid interviews shot shortly before his death in 1994.

In this mesmerizing collage of silent Italian melodrama, found-footage filmmaker Peter Delpeut (Lyrical Nitrate) affectionately captures the spirit of the World War One-era cinema diva. In all-but-lost gems such as La donna nuda(1914), and Tigre...

Johan Grimonprez's ingenious documentary/ fiction hybrid - a meditation on identity, filmmaking, power and paranoia - looks at Alfred Hitchcock's 50s-60s films against the climate of Cold War anxiety. Using a meticulous array of archive footage and ...

DREW: THE MAN BEHIND THE POSTER is a feature-length documentary film highlighting the career of poster artist Drew Struzan, whose most popular works include the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and Star Wars movie posters.

An unprecedented collaboration of Kino International and the Museum of Modern Art, together with the Library of Congress. EDISON: THE INVENTION OF THE MOVIES is a four-disc box set featuring 140 complete Edison Co. films from 1891 to 1918, all...

After starring as Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, Leon Vitali gave up his acting career to toil in obscurity as Stanley Kubrick’s devoted aide-de-camp. This candid, often funny, and sometimes shocking documentary offers a singular perspective...

This documentary provides a vivid introduction to one of the most important, yet perpetually marginalized, realms of filmmaking: Avant-garde cinema. In its exploration of this expansive domain, FREE RADICALS privileges rare interviews with filmmaker...

“Friendly Persuasion” examines the critical issues of Iranian cinema by framing several key questions and providing informed responses through commentary, scene analysis, and interviews with top Iranian filmmakers. The questions...

A visually rich documentary that analyzes German Weimar cinema and its relation to the Fascist regime that followed.

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction is a personal documentary about the iconic actor in his intimate moments, with clips from some of his 250 films and his own heart-breaking renditions of American folk songs.

This unique documentary recounts the history of the shock-value driver's education films that haunted American teens. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, these grisly movies used unflinching color footage of fatal accidents to scare young drivers.

Celebrates the man who cultivated cinema's future by protecting its past. "A MOVIEGOER'S TREAT AND A CINEPHILE'S DELIGHT!"- CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Raphaël Nadjari’s extraordinary two-part documentary weaves together clips from more than 70 years of Israeli film with commentary from filmmakers, scholars and critics

This follow-up to From Caligari to Hitler traces the rise and fall of Nazi Germany through the cinema of the Third Reich: an explosion of lavish, escapist films celebrating a German utopia and subtly legitimizing a brutality that continues to haunt...

Tribute is paid to the screen's first special effects wizard in this special collection of marvelously restored prints. In addition to more than a dozen of his early trompes l'oeil - such as Untamable Wiskers, Tchin-Chao, the Chinese Conjurer, and...

An Oscar nominee for Best Documentary and winner of the 1986 New York Film Critic's Circle non-fiction film prize, Marlene is a "portrait of a remarkably strong-willed woman, stage-managing her career right up to the bitter end" (New York Times) tha...

MUTANTES is a documentary about pro-sex feminism, a movement that seeks to redefine how we understand pornography and its role in media. Through interviews with sex workers, porn actresses, and other members of the sex industry, the film demystifies...