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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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 ... -
MovieThe honeymoon
Movie
Documentary, by Danilo Monte, Italy, 2017.
The honeymoon is a film-diary that tells about material and interior places that are difficult to show: an Ayurvedic clinic, an ashram, headaches and the desire to have a child. The director Danilo together with his wife Laura, during an atypical honeymo... -
My name is..I ask for the moon
Movie
Documentary, by Manuela Morgaine, France, 2017.
They come from Afghanistan, Mali, Nigeria, Sudan, Chad. They fled from a dictatorship, a war or something unimaginable for us. For a period of four months, they learn French at Thot school, a French graduation school for refugees and asylum seekers.... -
MovieCorona days
Movie
Drama, by Fabio Del Greco, Italy, 2020.
A man remains alone at home due to the Corona virus emergency measures. Solitude, time, and space become his adversaries, while imagination, memories, and the yearning for freedom become his allies. Director Fabio Del Greco intimately and personally documen... -
MovieHome
Movie
Documentary, by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, France, 2009.
Spectacular documentary on environment and climate change with the narration voice of Glenn Close, produced by Luc Besson, Home shows us the exploitation of natural resources, lifestyles and destructive habits of man and the repercussions on the... -
Memories, on the road to Auschwitz
Movie
Documentary, by Danilo Monte, Italy, 2015.
Intimate and powerful documentary on the journey made by the director together with his brother in search of a memory. Roberto spent the last years of his life in prison, drugs, community and history books and dialogue in the family was often lacking. Da... -
MovieFeast
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... -
Hampi - Valley of the Kings
Movie
Documentary, by Ramsay S. James, Tom Sands, UK/India, 2012.
The small village of Hampi was once the capital of an empire stretching across the whole of Southern India. But with the ancient city's fortifications in ruins, Hampi has little defence against the invading forces of development. In the ... -
MovieThe last resort
Movie
Documentary, by Ramsay S. James, Tom Sands, United Kingdom, 2014.
When Andrew Miners first arrived on the Indonesian island village Babitim, he was struck by two things: the tropical paradise surrounding him and the corpses of the mutilated sharks strewn around the beach. Andrew decided to build ... -
MovieUbuntu
Movie
Documentary, by Tom Sands, United Kingdom, 2011.
Four years ago, Marieke de Lange co-founded a travelling theatre to empower underprivileged children by staging theatrical performances in their communities that address issues pertinent to the problems they face. Now Marieke travels to Ghana to se...
