Founded in 2005 by pioneering nonfiction filmmaker Albert Maysles, the Harlem, New York City–based Maysles Documentary Center has fostered an incredible sense of community through its diverse, thought-provoking, and often challenging programming; classes that teach the fundamentals of documentary...

Directed by Leo Hurwitz • 1948 • United States
Starring Alfred Drake, Muriel Smith, Gary Merrill

In 1945, the free world rejoiced over the defeat of fascism. But the sense of peace was short-lived, and as the Cold War began, the United States entered a period of national paranoia and political r...

Directed by Forugh Farrokhzad • 1963 • Iran

The only film directed by trailblazing feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad finds unexpected grace where few would think to look: a leper colony whose inhabitants live, worship, learn, play, and celebrate in a self-contained community cut off from ...

Directed by William Greaves • 1968 • United States
Starring William Greaves, Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don Fellows

In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM TAKE ONE, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York’s Central Park, leaving them t...

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 ...

Directed by Mira Nair • 1985 • India

This documentary examines the line separating “good” and “bad” women in Indian society, specifically by focusing on the dancers at a Bombay strip club, a frequent patron, and his stay-at-home wife.

Directed by Agnès Varda • 2000 • France
Starring Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda’s extraordinary late-career renaissance began with this wonderfully idiosyncratic, self-reflexive documentary in which the French cinema icon explores the world of modern-day gleaners: those living on the margins who surviv...

Directed by Kirsten Johnson • 2016 • United States

A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home with the director: Kirsten Johnson weaves these scenes and others into her film CAMERAPERSON, a tape...

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...

Directed by Payal Kapadia • 2021 • France, India
Starring Bhumisuta Das

Through 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...