Documentaries
105 Episodes
Meet some of life’s most colorful characters in these true stories.
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27:14Episode 1
Tobacco Embers
Episode 1
Directed by Yugantar • 1982 • India
In the spirit of mobilizing for the leftist labor and women’s movements, the Yugantar collective spent four months with female tobacco factory workers in Nipani, Karnataka, listening to their accounts of exploitative working conditions, discussing strategies f...
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1:27:51Episode 2
Loving Highsmith
Episode 2
Directed by Eva Vitija • 2022 • Germany, Switzerland
Starring Gwendoline Christie, Annina Butterworth, Marijane MeakerThe life and work of celebrated American writer Patricia Highsmith are revealed through her diaries and notebooks and the intimate reflections of her lovers, friends, and family...
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51:57Episode 3
Something Like a War
Episode 3
Directed by Deepa Dhanraj • 1991 • India
SOMETHING LIKE A WAR is a chilling examination of India’s family-planning program from the point of view of the women who are its primary targets. It traces the history of the family-planning program and exposes the cynicism, corruption, and brutality of ...
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1:26:30Episode 4
Invoking Justice
Episode 4
Directed by Deepa Dhanraj • 2011 • India
In Southern India, many family disputes are settled by Jamaats—all-male bodies that apply Islamic Sharia law to cases without allowing women to be present, even to defend themselves. Recognizing this fundamental inequity, a group of women in 2004 establis...
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46:50Episode 5
Love in the Time of AIDS
Episode 5
Directed by Deepa Dhanraj • 2006 • India
LOVE IN THE TIME OF AIDS follows a group of kothis (gay men who identify as femme) in Belgaum, a small city in Karnataka, and traces their stories of love, desire, and ostracization, as well as their work with an NGO that promotes safe-sex practices.
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27:04Episode 6
Maid Servant
Episode 6
Directed by Yugantar • 1981 • India
This portrait of female solidarity in action exposes the oppressive working conditions of hundreds of maidservants in Pune, India, and reveals how the women came together to form an organization to fight for their rights.
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1:11:49Episode 7
So Late So Soon
Episode 7
Directed by Daniel Hymanson • 2020 • United States
Starring Jackie Seiden, Don SeidenHalf a century into their marriage, Chicago artists Jackie and Don Seiden approach the fragility of old age in their own distinct ways. Jackie, notorious for her unbounded energy, is constantly on the move, ins...
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Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You.
Episode 8
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...
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27:40Episode 9
Is This Just a Story?
Episode 9
Directed by Yugantar • 1983 • India
The Yugantar Film Collective’s most successful and widely seen film sheds light on the issue of domestic violence in Indian society. Created in collaboration with the feminist activist collective Stree Shakhti Sanghatana, this short, improvised narrative film ...
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Sudesha
Episode 10
Directed by Yugantar • 1983 • India
SUDESHA tells the story of a woman who is a village activist in the Chipko Forest Conservation Movement in the foothills of the Himalayas. In this area, people depend entirely on the forest for their daily needs of firewood, food, and water. But the forests ha...
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Attica
Episode 11
Directed by Cinda Firestone • 1974 • United States
In 1971, after their peaceful protest failed, over a thousand inmates at New York’s Attica Correctional Facility took guards and staff hostage and seized control of the prison yard—a four-day uprising against inhumane living conditions that woul...
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1:28:49Episode 12
The Day After Trinity
Episode 12
Directed by Jon Else • 1981 • United States
Starring Paul Frees, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hans BetheThis essential, Academy Award–nominated documentary offers an urgent warning from history about the dangers of nuclear warfare via the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic physicist and al...
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1:14:40Episode 13
The Reagan Show
Episode 13
Directed by Pacho Velez and Sierra Pettengill • 2017 • United States
Starring Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Barbara WaltersComposed entirely of archival footage, The Reagan Show is an ingenious work of media analysis about the original performer-president’s role of a lifetime. Teasing apart the ...
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1:20:55Episode 14
The Village Detective: A Song Cycle
Episode 14
Directed by Bill Morrison • 2021 • United States
Starring Gísli Fannar Gylfason, Erlendur Sveinsson, Peter BagrovDuring the summer of 2016, a fishing boat off the shores of Iceland made a most curious catch: four reels of 35 mm film, seemingly of Soviet provenance. Unlike the film find explored...
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1:08:49Episode 15
The American Sector
Episode 15
Directed by Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez • 2020 • United States
For eighteen months, Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez traveled the U.S. to document sections of the Berlin Wall that are on display in over seventy-five locations, ranging from the serious (Fort Benning) to the bizarre (Main S...
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1:38:24Episode 16
American Dream
Episode 16
Directed by Barbara Kopple, Cathy Caplan, Thomas Haneke, Lawrence Silk • 1990 • United States
Fourteen years after her watershed documentary HARLAN COUNTY, USA, cinema-verité pioneer Barbara Kopple returned to the subject of union organizing in this eye-opening look at class struggle and solidar...
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1:27:32Episode 17
ABC Africa
Episode 17
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2001 • Iran
Starring Abbas Kiarostami, Seifollah SamadianIn 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...
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1:08:31Episode 18
INAATE/SE/
Episode 18
Directed by Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil • 2016 • Canada, United States
INAAT/SE/ reimagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience blending documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, INAAT...
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The Task
Episode 19
Directed by Leigh Ledare • 2017 • United States
Twenty-eight strangers shuffle into a nondescript room, where they sit down for day three of a radical social experiment orchestrated by taboo-breaking artist Leigh Ledare. Veering between brutal honesty, righteous indignation, manipulative cagines...
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2:36:39Episode 20
Celluloid Man
Episode 20
Directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur • 2012 • India
Starring P. K. Nair, Krzysztof Zanussi, Lester James PeriesAn 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...
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1:34:43Episode 21
Marx Can Wait
Episode 21
Directed by Marco Bellocchio • 2021 • Italy
Starring Marco Bellocchio, Alberto Bellocchio, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio1968 was the year Camillo died. Nearly fifty years after the death of his twin brother at the age of twenty-nine, acclaimed director Marco Bellocchio (FISTS IN THE POCKET) gathers h...
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Cane Fire
Episode 22
Directed by Anthony Banua-Simon • 2020 • United States
The Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi is seen by many as a paradise of leisure and pristine natural beauty, but these escapist fantasies obscure the colonial displacement, hyperexploitation of workers, and destructive environmental extraction that h...
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51:16Episode 23
Gramercy Stories
Episode 23
Directed by Joyce Chopra • 2008 • United States
GRAMERCY STORIES is an inspiring look inside a unique residence in Manhattan that provides a safe home for twenty-five gay and transgender teenagers who have experienced violence at home and on the streets. Told from their candid, often witty persp...
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7:27:36Episode 24
CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel
Episode 24
Directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur • 2018 • India
Starring Jiří Menzel, Antonín Máša, Dušan HanákThis 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 ...