Documentaries
94 Episodes
Meet some of life’s most colorful characters in these true stories.
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Martha Clarke Light & Dark: A Dancer’s Journal
Episode 1
Directed by Joyce Chopra • 1980 • United States
Starring Félix Blaska, Martha Clarke, Philip GrausmanJoyce Chopra traces one year in the artistic evolution of celebrated choreographer Martha Clarke, offering an intimate window into Clarke’s creative process as she sets out to redefine the bound...
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1:41:10Episode 2
A Night of Knowing Nothing
Episode 2
Directed by Payal Kapadia • 2021 • France, India
Starring Bhumisuta DasThrough fictional love letters found in a cupboard at the Film and Television Institute of India, we meet L, a film student writing to her estranged lover while he is away. Gradually we’re immersed in the drastic changes tak...
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56:33Episode 3
Songs for Drella
Episode 3
Directed by Ed Lachman • 1990 • United Kingdom, United States
Starring Lou Reed, John CaleNewly restored, this elegiac concert documentary captures the extraordinary 1990 reunion of estranged Velvet Underground bandmates Lou Reed and John Cale. The occasion for this landmark event was a live pe...
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28:42Episode 4
Black Panthers
Episode 4
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1970 • United States
Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton. In addition to evincing Varda’s fascination with her adopted surroundings and her empathy, this perceptive sho...
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1:33:38Episode 5
Searching for Mr. Rugoff
Episode 5
Directed by Ira Deutchman • 2019 • United States
Starring Donald S. Rugoff, Elyce Bonnell, Peter BroderickThis illuminating, unexpected slice of forgotten film history tells the story of Donald Rugoff, who was the crazy genius behind Cinema 5, the groundbreaking midcentury theater chain and fil...
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53:04Episode 6
Original Cast Album: “Company”
Episode 6
Directed by D. A. Pennebaker • 1970 • United States
Starring Stephen Sondheim, Elaine Stritch, Donna McKechnieThis legendary, long-unavailable documentary from Direct Cinema pioneer D. A. Pennebaker captures the behind-the-scenes drama that went into the making of a classic Broadway recording. ...
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1:17:28Episode 7
Paris Is Burning
Episode 7
Directed by Jennie Livingston • 1990 • United States
Starring Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Angie XtravaganzaWhere does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African America...
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1:35:20Episode 8
Grey Gardens
Episode 8
Directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer • 1976 • United States
Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive cousins of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampton...
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1:31:26Episode 9
Streetwise
Episode 9
Directed by Martin Bell • 1984 • United States
Seattle, 1983. Taking their camera to the streets of what was supposedly America’s most livable city, filmmaker Martin Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall set out to tell the stories of those society had left behind: hom...
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1:17:26Episode 10
Ornette: Made in America
Episode 10
Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1985 • United States
Starring Ornette ColemanThis freewheeling documentary captures Ornette Coleman’s evolution over three decades. Documentary footage, dramatic scenes, and some of the first music-video-style segments ever made chronicle his boyhood in segregated T...
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1:30:07Episode 11
Burroughs: The Movie
Episode 11
Directed by Howard Brookner • 1983 • United States
Made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet filmed over the course of five years, Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs was for decades mainly the stuff of legend; that changed when Aaron Brook...
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1:44:42Episode 12
Harlan County USA
Episode 12
Directed by Barbara Kopple • 1976 • United States
Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning HARLAN COUNTY USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikeb...
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Salesman
Episode 13
Directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin • 1969 • United States
This radically influential portrait of American dreams and disillusionment from Direct Cinema pioneers David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin captures, with indelible humanity, the worlds of four ...
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31:11Episode 14
Gap-Toothed Women
Episode 14
Directed by Les Blank • 1987 • United States
Filmmaker Les Blank breezily questions our commonly accepted standards of beauty with this paean to women with extra-wide dental spaces.
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Festival
Episode 15
Directed by Murray Lerner • 1967 • United States
Before WOODSTOCK and MONTEREY POP, there was FESTIVAL. From 1963 through 1966, Murray Lerner visited the annual Newport Folk Festival to document a thriving, idealistic musical movement as it reached its peak as a popular phenomenon. Joan Baez, Bo...
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1:12:13Episode 16
Antonio Gaudí
Episode 16
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara • 1984 • Japan
Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) designed some of the world’s most astonishing buildings, interiors, and parks; Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara constructed some of the most aesthetically audacious films ever made. In ANTONIO GAUDÍ, t...
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1:38:04Episode 17
The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
Episode 17
Directed by Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri • 2021 • Sweden
Starring Björn Andrésen, Riyoko Ikeda, Margareta KrantzTHE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOY IN THE WORLD follows Björn Andrésen, who was propelled to international stardom at the age of fifteen based on his looks. In 1969, filmmaker Luchino Vi...
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1:25:46Episode 18
Town Bloody Hall
Episode 18
Directed by Chris Hegedus • 1979 • United States
Starring Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Jacqueline CeballosOn April 30, 1971, a standing-room-only crowd of New York’s intellectual elite packed the city’s Town Hall theater to see Norman Mailer—fresh from the controversy over his essay “The Pris...
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Shakedown
Episode 19
Directed by Leilah Weinraub • 2018 • United States
Charting the eight-year run of Shakedown, a peripatetic black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles, director Leilah Weinraub attempts “to portray the before and after of a utopic moment.” Weinraub presents a world unto itself, shaped by the desires...
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1:38:08Episode 20
Beyond the Visible – Hilma af Klint
Episode 20
Directed by Halina Dyrschka • 2019 • Germany
Hilma af Klint was an abstract artist before the term existed, a visionary, trailblazing figure who, inspired by spiritualism, modern science, and the riches of the natural world, began in 1906 to reel out a series of huge, colorful, sensual, strange...
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1:55:09Episode 21
The Eyes of Orson Welles
Episode 21
Directed by Mark Cousins • 2018 • United Kingdom
Starring Mark Cousins, Jack Klaff, Beatrice WellesVisionary cinema historian Mark Cousins (THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY) charts the unknown territory of the imagination of one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary artists. Granted unprec...
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1:28:33Episode 22
TINY: The Life of Erin Blackwell
Episode 22
Directed by Martin Bell • 2016 • United States
Starring Erin BlackwellThirty years in the making, TINY: THE LIFE OF ERIN BLACKWELL continues to follow one of the most indelible subjects of STREETWISE, a groundbreaking documentary on homeless and runaway teenagers. Erin Blackwell, a.k.a. Tiny, w...
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1:26:18Episode 23
Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
Episode 23
Directed by Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz • 2020 • United States
Starring Nick Cave, Lacy J. Dalton, Rick MoodyWith her plaintive, bluer-than-blue voice, singer Karen Dalton rose to prominence within the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s—though her rough-edged authenticity stood ou...
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1:05:00Episode 24
On the Bowery
Episode 24
Directed by Lionel Rogosin • 1956 • United States
Starring Ray Salyer, Gorman Hendricks, Frank MatthewsLionel Rogosin’s landmark of American neorealism chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York’s skid row, the Bowery. When the film ...