Documentaries
106 Episodes
Meet some of life’s most colorful characters in these true stories.
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1:24:25Episode 1
No Ordinary Man
Episode 1
Directed by Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt • 2020 • Canada
Starring Billy Tipton, Susan Stryker, Kate BornsteinAmerican 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...
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27:02Episode 2
Meet Marlon Brando
Episode 2
Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin • 1966 • United States
Starring Marlon Brando, Rex Morgan, Mary FrannMEET MARLON BRANDO is a delightful, unusually candid portrait of the legendary actor during a tongue-in-cheek confrontation with the press. While television journ...
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54:59Episode 3
Tongues Untied
Episode 3
Directed by Marlon Riggs • 1989 • United States
Marlon Riggs’s landmark documentary uses poetry, personal testimony, rap, and performance (featuring poet Essex Hemphill and others) to describe the homophobia and racism faced by Black gay men. The stories are often devastating: the man refused en...
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1:30:01Episode 4
Orion: The Man Who Would Be King
Episode 4
Directed by Jeanie Finlay • 2015 • United Kingdom, United States
ORION: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING tells the story of Jimmy Ellis—an unknown singer plucked from obscurity and thrust into the spotlight as part of a crazy scheme that had him masquerade as Elvis, back from the grave. With a fictiona...
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1:35:27Episode 5
I Called Him Morgan
Episode 5
Directed by Kasper Collin • 2016 • Sweden, United States
Starring Lee Morgan, Helen Morgan, Wayne ShorterOn a snowy night in 1972, celebrated jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot to death by his common-law wife, Helen, at a club in New York City. The memory of the event still haunts those who rem...
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1:38:28Episode 6
Dressed in Blue
Episode 6
Directed by Antonio Giménez Rico • 1983 • Spain
Starring Lorenzo Arana, René Amor, Francisco Pérez CobosThis landmark documentary explores the lives and loves of a group of six transgender women living in Madrid in the years following Spain’s transition to democracy. But more than that, it’s a ...
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1:32:24Episode 7
The Great Hip Hop Hoax
Episode 7
Directed by Jeanie Finlay • 2013 • United Kingdom
Foul-mouthed Californian hip hop duo Silibil N’ Brains were going to be massive. But no one knew the pair were really amiable Scotsmen, with fake American accents and made-up identities. This documentary tells the audacious tale of how two lads f...
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28:51Episode 8
Greetings from Washington, D.C.
Episode 8
Directed by Lucy Winer • 1981 • United States
Starring Rob Epstein, Jan Oxenberg, Terry LawlerOn 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 ...
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1:12:29Episode 9
The Aggressives
Episode 9
Directed by Daniel Peddle • 2005 • United States
Starring Kisha Batista, Marquise Vilson, Octavio SandersFilmed over the course of five years, this bold, candid documentary follows the journeys of six masculine-presenting, genderqueer New Yorkers who defy labels in their quest to live authentic...
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53:15Episode 10
Shinjuku Boys
Episode 10
Directed by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams • 1995 • United Kingdom
Starring Gaish, Tatsu, KazukiThis 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...
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ocularis
Episode 11
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...
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alexia
Episode 12
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...
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1:52:54Episode 13
No Home Movie
Episode 13
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 2015 • France, Belgium
Starring Natalia Akerman, Chantal Akerman, Sylvaine AkermanThe final film from groundbreaking auteur Chantal Akerman is a deeply personal, heart-woundingly intimate portrait of her relationship with her mother, Natalia, a Holocaust survivor a...
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ekleipsis
Episode 14
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...
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kore
Episode 15
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...
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12:15Episode 16
The Rabbit Hunt
Episode 16
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...
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aletheia
Episode 17
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...
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13:52Episode 18
Epilogue: The Palpable Invisibility of Life
Episode 18
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 ...
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operculum
Episode 19
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...
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amaurosis
Episode 20
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...
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16:58Episode 21
So We Live
Episode 21
Directed by Rand Abou Fakher • 2021 • Belgium
Starring Rahaf Alobeid, Amina Al Haj, Luna Al ObeidIn this claustrophobic study of life during wartime, a family in a conflict-ravaged country spends what seems to be a normal evening together. Their conversations shift between casual matters of dai...
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04:14Episode 23
Heron 1954–2002
Episode 23
Directed by Alexis McCrimmon • 2022 • United States
HERON 1954–2002 is a visual eulogy that taps into the phenomena of makeshift memorials and small gestures of mourning. Honoring the life of a loved one who died due to an accidental opioid overdose, the film materializes the process of overdue ...
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02:51Episode 24
Maman Brigitte
Episode 24
Directed by Ayanna Dozier • 2022 • United States
MAMAN BRIGITTE stitches together the intimacy of a private ritual involving the Voudou loa Maman Brigitte (who governst the barrier between the living and the dead) with the sounds of the body (spitting, running, vomiting, etc.). These “interior” ...