Documentaries

Documentaries

66 Episodes

Meet some of life’s most colorful characters in these true stories.

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Documentaries
  • Norman Mailer vs. Fun City

    Episode 1

    Directed by Dick Fontaine • 1970 • United States

    Writer and firebrand provocateur Norman Mailer, accompanied by rabble-rousing journalist Jimmy Breslin, takes to the streets of New York City in his colorful and ultimately failed 1969 run for New York City mayor.

  • Hearts and Minds

    Episode 2

    Directed by Peter Davis • 1974 • United States

    A startling and courageous film, Peter Davis’s landmark 1974 documentary HEARTS AND MINDS unflinchingly confronted the United States’ involvement in Vietnam at the height of the controversy that surrounded it. Using a wealth of sources—from intervie...

  • Regret to Inform

    Episode 3

    Directed by Barbara Sonneborn • 1998 • United States

    In this powerful and poetic documentary, the legacy of the Vietnam War is explored from a perspective rarely acknowledged: that of the survivors whose lives continue to be impacted by the loss of their loved ones. Twenty years after her husban...

  • Halving the Bones

    Episode 4

    Directed by Ruth Ozeki • 1995 • Japan, United States
    Starring Ruth Ozeki

    Skeletons in the closet? HALVING THE BONES delivers a surprising twist on the old saying. This cleverly constructed film tells the story of Ruth, a half-Japanese filmmaker living in New York, who has inherited a can of bone...

  • Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts Anyway?

    Episode 5

    Directed by Janice Tanaka • 1992 • United States

    Through a brilliant collage of interviews, family photographs, archival footage and personal narration, Japanese American video artist Janice Tanaka documents her search for her father after a forty-year separation. The two reunited when Tanaka fo...

  • No Ordinary Man

    Episode 6

    Directed by Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt • 2020 • Canada
    Starring Billy Tipton, Susan Stryker, Kate Bornstein

    American jazz musician Billy Tipton developed a reputable touring and recording career in the mid-twentieth century, along with his band the Billy Tipton Trio. After his death in the...

  • Greetings from Washington, D.C.

    Episode 7

    Directed by Lucy Winer • 1981 • United States
    Starring Rob Epstein, Jan Oxenberg, Terry Lawler

    On October 14, 1979, LGBTQ+ history was made when tens of thousands of people converged on America’s capital for the first ever National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. This empowering ...

  • Shinjuku Boys

    Episode 8

    Directed by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams • 1995 • United Kingdom
    Starring Gaish, Tatsu, Kazuki

    This remarkable documentary offers rich insight into gender and sexuality in Japan via a candid portrait of Kazuki, Tatsu, and Gaish, three trans masc hosts working at the New Marilyn Club in Tokyo...

  • ocularis

    Episode 9

    Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 1997 • United States

    This video highlights several narratives concerning video surveillance—not to reiterate the conventional privacy argument but rather to engage the desire to watch surveillance materials and society’s insatiable voyeurism. A variety of subjects...

  • alexia
    09:37
    Episode 10

    alexia

    Episode 10

    Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 2000 • United States

    ALEXIA is an experimental video about word-blindness and metaphor. Word-blindness is a condition that usually afflicts people who have suffered a stroke, causing them to lose the visual recognition of individual letters but perceive the entire...

  • ekleipsis

    Episode 11

    Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 1998 • United States

    In 1992, Tran T. Kim-Trang came across a New York Times article about a group of hysterically blind Cambodian women in Long Beach, California, known as the largest group of such people in the world. Hysterical blindness is sight loss brought a...

  • kore
    16:08
    Episode 12

    kore

    Episode 12

    Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 1994 • United States

    By focusing on the blindfold, KORE explores the eye as purveyor of desire, sexual fear, and the fantasy of blindness. An alternative sexuality is founded in touch-based (feminine?) pleasure as opposed to a vision-based (masculine?) pleasure. A...

  • The Rabbit Hunt

    Episode 13

    Directed by Patrick Bresnan • 2017 • United States

    In the Florida Everglades, rabbit hunting is considered a rite of passage for young men. THE RABBIT HUNT follows seventeen-year-old Chris and his family as they hunt in the fields of the largest industrial sugar farms in the U.S. The film record...

  • aletheia

    Episode 14

    Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 1992 • United States

    The introductory title to The Blindness Series, ALETHEIA presents an indexing of categories investigating different aspects of blindness as metaphor. Stylistic preference for the techniques and conventions of MTV, and American television in ge...

  • Epilogue: The Palpable Invisibility of Life

    Episode 15

    Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 2006 • United States

    EPILOGUE: THE PALPABLE INVISIBILITY OF LIFE is the final chapter in the Blindness Series, a body of eight videos on blindness and its metaphors that was begun in 1992. The inspiration for the series came from a 1990 exhibition Jacques Derrida ...

  • operculum

    Episode 16

    Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 1993 • United States

    The artist visits with seven cosmetic surgeons specializing in blepharoplasty (cosmetic eyelid creasing surgery) in the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills area for initial consultation sessions. The doctors demonstrate different reshaping options an...

  • amaurosis

    Episode 17

    Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 2002 • United States

    AMAUROSIS is an experimental documentary about Dat Nguyen, a blind guitarist living in Little Saigon in Orange County, California. Dat Nguyen was a “triple outcast”: blind, Amerasian, and an impoverished orphan. The video unfolds through layer...

  • LYNCH2
    30:19
    Episode 18

    LYNCH2

    Episode 18

    Directed by blackANDwhite • 2007 • United States
    Starring David Lynch

    This 2007 short film by blackANDwhite, the makers of DAVID LYNCH: THE ART LIFE, features behind-the-scenes footage from the making of INLAND EMPIRE.

  • Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch

    Episode 19

    Directed by Toby Keeler • 1997 • United States
    Starring David Lynch, Angelo Badalamenti, Jack Nance

    This eighty-minute documentary was made by Toby Keeler in 1997. In addition to footage from the set of LOST HIGHWAY, it includes interviews with David Lynch, Patricia Arquette, Angelo Badalamenti,...

  • LYNCH (one)

    Episode 20

    Directed by blackANDwhite • 2007 • United States
    Starring David Lynch

    This 2007 feature-length film by blackANDwhite, the makers of DAVID LYNCH: THE ART LIFE, was made over the course of two years during the filming of INLAND EMPIRE.

  • Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You.

    Episode 21

    Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese • 2019 • Germany, Lesotho

    Part poetic essay, part documentary, this rapturous film by director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT’S A RESURRECTION) analyzes the complexities of his relationship to his native country of Lesotho from his new hom...

  • ABC Africa

    Episode 22

    Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2001 • Iran
    Starring Abbas Kiarostami, Seifollah Samadian

    In 2000, Abbas Kiarostami traveled to Africa at the request of the United Nations to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Uganda, where 1.5 million children had been orphaned by civil war and AIDS. Wo...

  • Celluloid Man

    Episode 23

    Directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur • 2012 • India
    Starring P. K. Nair, Krzysztof Zanussi, Lester James Peries

    An engaging, heartfelt look at one man’s battle to preserve his nation’s cinematic heritage, CELLULOID MAN is an intimate portrait of legendary Indian archivist P. K. Nair, who founde...

  • CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel

    Episode 24

    Directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur • 2018 • India
    Starring Jiří Menzel, Antonín Máša, Dušan Hanák

    This epic, indispensable work of cinema scholarship from archivist and filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur is a remarkable, in-depth portrait of director Jiří Menzel (CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS) and ...