Documentaries

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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Documentaries
  • Feast

    Movie

    Documentary, by Franco Piavoli, 2018, Italy.
    Franco Piavoli, author of the masterpiece "The Blue Planet", returns to the director to capture the "evening of the day of celebration", between Leopardi and Pascoli. A journey between the poetic and the anthropological. What is a "party"? What does it...

  • The Zone

    Movie

    Documentary, by Paolo Maggi, Italy, 2022.
    Corticella, Bologna suburbs. The Serendippo association and the artist Atena, call fifteen artists to repaint the William Michelini Civic Center, partisan of the neighborhood. Generational exchanges and clashes between very different people, linked by the...

  • Sudditalia

    Movie

    Documentary, by Adamo Mastrangelo, Italy, 2023.
    "Sudditalia" is a documentary directed by Adamo Mastrangelo that takes an in-depth look at the socio-economic conditions of Southern Italy. Through an immersive narrative, the film follows the daily lives of people living in the southern regions of ...

  • Every Work of Confession

    Movie

    Documentary, by Alberto Gemmi, Mirco Marmiroli, Italy, 2016.
    A man has decided to buy a penthouse in a controversial area of ​​the city. From the windows of this building you can see a huge area in disuse. It is an industrial complex with a glorious past, which lies waiting for a complex redevelo...

  • Days Blows by in a Moment

    Movie

    Documentary, by Cristiana Donghi, Italy, 2022.
    Ancilla is 86 years old. Two years ago, she moved in with her daughter Emanuela at the pandemic's beginning. Ancilla is slowly losing her memory. He does not remember what she had for lunch, she only remembers events from the past, perhaps only becau...

  • Cathnafola - A Paranormal Investigation

    Movie

    Documentary, horror, by Jason Figgis, USA, 2014.
    In *Cathnafola*, everything begins when renowned paranormal investigator Chris Halton of Haunted Earth UK receives footage filmed by three teenagers at the ruins of Cathnafola House in Ireland. Determined to unearth the truth behind the location’s ...

  • Studio 2091

    Movie

    Documentary, by Naù Germoglio, Italy, 2020
    In a former warehouse on the ground floor of the civic number "2091", in the district of “Santa Croce” in Venice, two sculptors, a craftswoman and an alchemist-photographer work together. It is a 65 square meters space with two windows overlooking a smal...

  • Turcomannia

    Movie

    Documentary, by Leopoldo Bonessio, Italy, 2024.
    Leopoldo, the director, finds himself filming with little more than a tent and a GoPro in the most isolated, mysterious and authoritarian of the ex-Soviet countries, Turkmenistan. He has 5 days to find out what kind of strange people live in this de...

  • The Long Goodbye

    Movie

    A devoted daughter tends to her aging father, offering affectionate support as he grapples with the challenges of living with dementia. The Alzheimer's Association has reported that the high incidence of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia is worrying, as it may result in one out of three sen...

  • Investigation of Six Pieces of Noisy Life Dispersed in a Sultry Summer

    Movie

    Documentary, by Ilaria Pezone, Italy, 2016.
    A documentary shot as "proximity film", intimate filming with a "sensible structural" scheme. The confidential atmosphere originates from the closeness between the author and the characters: a closeness that is necessary to create a communicative intima...

  • A Laugh Will Save Us

    Movie

    Documentary, by Michelangelo Gregori, Italy, 2024.
    Between humour, satire and religion, through interviews with comedians, artists and scholars, we will discover the irreverent jokes, the clever parodies and the daring caricatures that question religious dogmas. The film is a reflection on the cr...

  • Assassination Orders from Belgrad

    Movie

    Documentary, by Dragan Cotic, Germany, 2021.
    This documentary film deals with what is probably the longest series of unsolved murders on German soil and a bloody chapter in German-Yugoslav history little known to the German public. Yugoslavia's communist secret service killed at least 78 Croatian...

  • The Choice to Stay

    Movie

    Documentary, by Mattia Mura, Italy, 2020.
    Damanhur is a community of spiritual seekers located in Valchiusella, Piedmont. The people of Damanhur, who live in the largest ecovillage in Italy, consider themselves to belong to a micronation, although it is not recognized by the Italian state. The co...

  • Ancestral

    Movie

    Documentary, by Lumar Brothers, Italy, 2023.
    “Ancestral: Life and Art of Massinissa Askeur” is a documentary that explores the life and art of Algerian painter Massinissa Askeur. The film follows Askeur on his creative journey, showing his artistic process and his commitment to the preservation o...

  • The Witches of Mount Sciliar

    Movie

    Docufiction, by Andrea Dalfino, 2022, Italy.
    The Witches of Scillar is a documentary that delves deeply into the trials that took place in Alto Adige, in Castel Presule and surrounding areas at the beginning of the 16th century, following which more than 10 were condemned to the stake on charges ...

  • The Passenger

    Movie

    Documentary, by Tommaso Valente, Christian Poli, Italy, 2022.
    The territory of Ravenna, suspended between its centuries-old history and recent industrial development, is a land of conflicts and rarefied landscapes. It is here that the action of "Housing First" develops, an association that focuse...

  • Lightning part 1

    Movie

    Documentary, by Manuela Morgaine, France, 2013.
    A film divided into two parts, a legend intertwining with a documentary across four seasons. This portrait unfolds like a cinematic kaleidoscope, zigzagging like the branching of lightning bolts. The narrative is set in different countries around th...

  • Lightning part 2

    Movie

    Documentary, directed by Manuela Morgaine, France, 2013.
    This fresco is a cinema of zig-zags, akin to the branching of lightning bolts. It unfolds its subject across different countries of the world and over the span of several centuries, concurrently presented in both documentary and legendary f...

  • Habitat

    Movie

    Documentary, by Emiliano Dante, Italy, 2014.
    Habitat follows the story of three men who lived in the same tent and stayed in L'Aquila. One, Alessio, first becomes a squatter, then a real estate agent; Paolo, who made a living renting his properties in the very center of the town, becomes a pain...

  • The Donbass Children

    Movie

    Documentary, by Lubomir Dankov, Ukraine, 2020.
    This is a film about the Donbas war, first person stories. You will hear the stories of the so-called "ordinary people". These people have been subjected to military-senseless attacks against civilian targets. They are victims of someone's desire to ...

  • Faces of Memory

    Movie

    By Isabel Russinova, Rodolfo Martinelli, documentary, Italy, 2020.
    Istria of exodus and sinkholes through the testimonies of those who suffered the atrocities of the Second World War, losing everything: their identity, their home and very often their life. A journey towards memory through the tes...

  • Stove

    Movie

    Documentary, by Jad Andari, Lebanon, 2020.
    The director returns to his homeland and reconnects with the heart of Bzebdine, a rural part of Mount Lebanon. The documentary is an up-close and intimate look at the lives of his friends and family who still live there. A fascinating documentary that ex...

  • Looking for David

    Movie

    Documentary, by Betsy L. Ross, United States, 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 f...

  • Moving 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...