Documentaries

Documentaries

106 Episodes

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

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Documentaries
  • No Ordinary Man

    Episode 1

    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...

  • Meet Marlon Brando

    Episode 2

    Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin • 1966 • United States
    Starring Marlon Brando, Rex Morgan, Mary Frann

    MEET MARLON BRANDO is a delightful, unusually candid portrait of the legendary actor during a tongue-in-cheek confrontation with the press. While television journ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • I Called Him Morgan

    Episode 5

    Directed by Kasper Collin • 2016 • Sweden, United States
    Starring Lee Morgan, Helen Morgan, Wayne Shorter

    On 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...

  • Dressed in Blue

    Episode 6

    Directed by Antonio Giménez Rico • 1983 • Spain
    Starring Lorenzo Arana, René Amor, Francisco Pérez Cobos

    This 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 ...

  • 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...

  • Greetings from Washington, D.C.

    Episode 8

    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 ...

  • The Aggressives

    Episode 9

    Directed by Daniel Peddle • 2005 • United States
    Starring Kisha Batista, Marquise Vilson, Octavio Sanders

    Filmed 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...

  • Shinjuku Boys

    Episode 10

    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 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...

  • alexia
    09:37
    Episode 12

    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...

  • No Home Movie

    Episode 13

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 2015 • France, Belgium
    Starring Natalia Akerman, Chantal Akerman, Sylvaine Akerman

    The 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...

  • 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...

  • kore
    16:08
    Episode 15

    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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • So We Live

    Episode 21

    Directed by Rand Abou Fakher • 2021 • Belgium
    Starring Rahaf Alobeid, Amina Al Haj, Luna Al Obeid

    In 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...

  • LYNCH2
    30:19
    Episode 22

    LYNCH2

    Episode 22

    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.

  • 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 ...

  • 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” ...