Documentaries
The best documentaries in streaming. Arthouse documentary, new languages and avant-garde documentary experiments, new outlooks on reality. The documentary captures the reality we live in, it is a direct testimony of the world around us. The documentary tells about real places and characters, their lives, their environment. The cinema was born with the documentary film, in the projections of the first films of the Lumiere brothers shot in France. Subsequently, the inventors of the cinema will send dozens of operators around the world to film distant countries: exotic places never seen by the less affluent that could now be known on the big screen. Documentary cinema has the ability to open wide windows of otherwise inaccessible worlds in our space and in our time. The ability to multiply knowledge and perception of reality in an incredible way. In the 1920s the documentary mixes with fiction thanks to Robert Flaherty's extraordinary films: Nanook, Moana and The Man of Aran. Flaherty invented poetic documentary cinema, a genre that artists such as Jean Epstein and Luchino Visconti confronted themselves with. In 1929 the director Dziga Vertov, convinced of the superiority of the documentary over fictional cinema, condenses his experience as a propaganda documentary maker, as an editing theorist and his cinematographic talent to shoot an avant-garde documentary that will mark the history of cinema: Man with a movie camera. After the arrival of television, it devoted itself to spreading the popular documentary, while the cinema continued to propose the documentary as an arthouse film with high-level artistic, dramaturgical and aesthetic contents. In recent years, the documentary has been re-evaluated compared to fictional films. Documentary films have won the most prestigious awards at festivals around the world. The distinction between documentary and fictional film is now obsolete. If there is a genre preferred by independent and avant-garde cinema it is certainly the documentary, because it allows, without the artifices of fictional cinema, to experiment with new languages and create important works without having large budgets. The difference between documentary and fictional cinema has no reason to exist because even the author of the documentary, if he films reality, filters it through his own vision of the world. Nothing is as real as the subjective gaze of the beholder. The documentary maker also creates his film starting from his imagination, making choices of storytelling, framing, editing and sound. The documentary interprets and reinvents reality as fictional cinema, using "pieces" of real life.
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MovieLooking for David
Movie
Documentary, by Betsy L. Ross, USA, 2017.
Part mystery, part romance, and part social commentary. Ten years ago, actor/writer/musician/producer/director David Fetzer was found dead while visiting his family home in Salt Lake City for the Christmas holidays. Here is that story. Looking for David i... -
MovieMoving Sounds
Movie
Documentary, by Tom Sands and Ramsay S. James, UK, 2018.
Teacher and musician Ed Wade-Martins embarks on an England-sponsored bike ride in West African Mali. In addition to raising money for the Fresh Start Foundation, which supports orphans and other vulnerable children in The Gambia, he is on a... -
Adriatico - United sea of Europe
Movie
Documentary, by Cristiana Lucia Grilli, Italy, 2019.
Adriatic - United sea of Europe is a fascinating journey between Italy and the Balkans to discover the Slavic and Albanian communities that settled in central Italy, in the Molise region, as early as the 15th century, following the Ottoman inva... -
MovieThe House is Black
Movie
Documentary, by Forough Farrokhzad, Iran, 1963.
The House is Black is a lyrical, transcendent film that places a gaze full of compassion and religiosity towards a suffering humanity. The only source of harmony is found outside the leper colony, in nature: suffering reigns inside. Not even religio... -
MovieCracolice
Movie
Documentary, by Fabio Serpa, Italy, 2020.
Calabria, late 1980s and first half of the 1990s. Cracolice, a seaside village in the Tyrrhenian Sea, is sadly known in the news for an event that broke out in the early 90s, never denied or confirmed: following the landing of the famous "ships of poisons... -
MovieThe eyes of the land
Movie
Documentary, by Marcos Altuve, Spain, 2020.
The biodiversity crisis is one of the most serious problems on the planet. To stop the processes of extinction of the species, urgent diagnoses are needed. One such endangered species is the Moorish tortoise in Morocco. But quickly determining the prese... -
Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis
Movie
Documentary, by Walter Ruttmann, Germany, 1928.
One of the most important avant-garde films of the "city symphony" genre, inspired by Dziga Vertov's "The Man with the Camera" and Soviet editing theories. The film marks the passage of the artist Walter Ruttmann from abstract cinema to reality cine... -
MovieAbout Nice
Movie
Documentary, by Jean Vigo, France, 1930.
With an old used movie camera bought with the money loaned by his wife's father, Jean Vigo shoots a documentary about Nice. Meeting Boris Kaufman changes the French director's initial project, which will be influenced by Dziga Vertov's operator. The nature... -
MovieSwimming
Movie
Documentary, by Jean Vigo, 1931, France.
Documentary on the French swimmer Jean Taris, specialized in freestyle, swimming champion in France in 1929. Commissioned to Jean Vigo by the sports editorial team of a French news bulletin of Gaumont, the director uses commissioned work to experiment with... -
In the footsteps of Buddha
Movie
Documentary, by Jon Braeley, USA, 2014.
In the Footsteps of Buddha is a journey across India tracing the same route that Buddha walked on his path enlightenment. Siddhartha Guatama lived 2500 years ago in an ancient land called Maghada, known today as Bihar, the poorest state in India. He was bor... -
MovieThe yoga gurus
Movie
Documentary, by Jon Braeley, United States, 2009.
In this documentary, you will encounter the spirituality of some of the most enlightened yoga masters in the world and get answers to important questions about higher consciousness. Shot in India between the Northern Himalayas and Mysore, you will... -
MovieThe Zen mind
Movie
Documentary, by Jon Braeley, United States, 2006.
The Zen Mind is a fascinating journey through Japan to explore Zen in its natural habitat. A travelogue to explore the practice of modern Zen. We will take you from the hustle and bustle of rush hour Tokyo to the peaceful mountains of Kyoto. From ... -
MovieThe doors of perception
Movie
Experimental, by Morgan Menegazzo, Mariachiara Pernisa, Italy, 2019.
The doors of perception is the personal attempt to evoke a metaphysics of images and light, arbitrarily recalling the dividing structure interposed between the presbyterial area and that reserved for the faithful in the Orthodox... -
MovieTalking with Buddha
Movie
Documentary, by Jon Braeley, United States, 2012.
What is Tibetan Buddhism? This film is a journey through Tibetan Buddhist monasteries to meet some of the great Lamas of Buddhism, against the backdrop of the Himalayan mountains and the rhythmic chanting of prayers. A documentary to improve menta... -
MovieApennines
Movie
Documentary, by Emiliano Dante, Italy, 2017.
Appennino is a cinematographic diary that begins with the slow reconstruction of L 'Aquila, the director's city, in Italy, and continues with the earthquakes in the central Apennines of 2016-17, up to the very long and exhausting asylum of the new eart... -
MovieThe soul of the belly
Movie
Documentary, by Fabio Giovinazzo, Italy, 2018.
"L'anima nel ventre" is an art film about Claudio Pozzani, a rustling entity of poetic vivacity that sings while narrating. The cinematic work shakes imaginative formulas in which happiness and melancholy coexist, the scenic actions meet with daily p... -
France, almost a self-portrait
Movie
Documentary, by Ilaria Pezone, 2017, Italy.
Avid cinephile, filmmaker, film essayist, teacher. Who is really Francesco Ballo? Maybe it's all these things together, and more: an Inter fan, a wine expert, a careful jazz lover ... A truly independent filmmaker out of any commercial logic, Francesco ... -
MovieVegetable skin
Movie
Documentary, by Giovanni Soletta, Italy, 2018.
An exciting documentary on the mysterious relationship between art and nature. The peasant artist Bruno Petretto has created Molineddu, the place where he lives and which for years has hosted visual artists from all over Sardinia, in annual events, w... -
MovieThree songs about Lenin
Movie
Documentary, by Dziga Vertov, Russia, 1934.
The most famous film while the director Dziga Vertov was alive, a great success of socialist documentary cinema. An experimental documentary celebrating Lenin with the use of sound and folk songs. The liberation of Muslim women in Uzbekistan, footage of... -
MovieMan with a movie camera
Movie
Documentary, by Dziga Vertov, Russia, 1929.
After a few years spent making propaganda documentaries, Dziga Vertov realizes his masterpiece, inspired by the theories on reality cinema and Kinoglaz. An experimental visual symphony with futurist roots. An ordinary day of a cinematographer wandering ... -
MovieVideo on paper
Movie
Documentary, by Antonello Matarazzo, Italy, 2011.
Video on paper is a voyage into the imagination of Perino & Vele in search of the creative impulses which spark the production of these two artists – more of a prelude to their work than a presentation. Three authors, artist-director Antonello Mat... -
MovieThe enemy
Movie
Documentary, by Federico Spinetti, Italy, 2016.
How stereotyped is, how alive is the word "partisan"? Massimo Zamboni, guitarist and co-founder of CSI, fifteen years after the dissolution of the historic Italian post-punk band would like to reunite the members around a new project on the partisan... -
MovieThe dream of Homer
Movie
Documentary, by Emiliano Aiello, Italy, 2018.
What makes those who live without seeing dream? What kind of images and figures populate your imagination and dreams? The Dream of Homer is a documentary on the dreams of Rosa, Domenico, Gabriel, Daniela and Fabio: blind from birth, united by their co... -
MovieHeruka
Movie
Documentary, by Isabel Russinova, Italy, 2015.
The history of the Romanes people through the images of a meager and gloomy reportage, which shows the living conditions of the people today: the hardships, the expectations, the dramas of discrimination and persecution. However, the personality and ...
