documentaries i wish to see someday

Today, co-ops are multi-million dollar businesses, so successful they’ve prompted mainstream grocery stores to stock organic food. But in the 1970s, it almost ended before it began, as internecine battles and even hostile takeovers threatened this burgeoning movement.

Jamie Johnson takes the exploration of wealth that he began in Born Rich one step further. The One Percent, refers to the tiny percentage of Americans who control nearly half the wealth of the U.S. Johnson's thesis is that this wealth in the hands of so few people is a danger to our very way of life.

Oobah Butler, a writer and filmmaker with a history of pulling elaborate pranks and gaming the system to advance his career, has his sights set on challenging Amazon.

A faceless traveller takes a journey through the barren reaches of a Siberia caught between tradition and modernity, imparting his philosophical musings on its people and places, wildlife and culture.

A found-footage documentary assembled exclusively out of post-socialist Romanian advertisements, this brings together these documents of Romania’s long transition period, they are made to speak about life, love and death, about the body and human frailty, about nature and the supernatural, about recent history, and, of course, about socialism and capitalism.

Down the road from Woodstock in the early 1970s, a revolution blossomed in a ramshackle summer camp for disabled teenagers, transforming their young lives and igniting a landmark movement.

A true pioneer in audio exploration and psycho-acoustics, Delia Derbyshire conceived one of the most familiar compositions in science fiction, the Doctor Who theme, while working in a BBC basement. Her soundscapes felt like they connected to another realm. Kicking off with the discovery of 267 tapes in an attic, along with a treasure trove of journals hidden in her childhood bedroom, this film tunes in to Derbyshire’s frequency; that of a life-long non-conformist, whose peals of laughter in an archive interview tickle with delight and eccentricity. Featuring a rich archive, interviews, fictional embodiment and Cosey Fanni Tutti’s psycho-sonic channelling, director Caroline Catz traces acoustic pathways on her archeological dig into Derbyshire’s resonant life.

Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the United States.

Guy Debord's analysis of a consumer society.

At the end of the 1980s, the first generation of Brazilian punk rock lived a cycle of violence and self-destruction. In the opposite direction, the beginning of the next decade sees the emergence of a powerful and tuned in generation that amplifies the echoes of punk, coming up with new subgenres. More politicized, united and socially conscious, the 1990s crop came along to put an end to the conflicts of the "old-timers" and bring new life to an engaged and active scene, ushering in new talent to the Brazilian music landscape, with important names such as No Violence, Agrotóxico, Ação Direta, Garage Fuzz, Dominatrix, among others.

Bruce Conner’s most celebrated film for a reason: it takes historical moments that were replayed over and over on television—chilling repetition of Kennedy assassination coverage—and repurposes them into a meditation on how the media tries to exert authority and apply a sense of order to the anarchic. And though it may sound perverse to say so, the film is also—not incidentally—a thrill to watch.

Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles moves between documentary and fiction as he examines the fundamental elements of fraud and the people who commit fraud at the expense of others.

How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) mocks an instructional film on the idea of becoming invisible in the digital world.

More than 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war, the greatest displacement since World War II. Filmmaker Ai Weiwei examines the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact. Over the course of one year in 23 countries, Weiwei follows a chain of urgent human stories that stretch across the globe, including Afghanistan, France, Greece, Germany and Iraq.

Created by a collective of neurodivergent filmmakers in an attempt to provide an alternative and artistic take on what it's like to live with neurodivergence in a chaotic world not made for those who are different.

A disturbing collection of 1940s and 1950s United States government-issued propaganda films designed to reassure Americans that the atomic bomb was not a threat to their safety.

This Peabody Award-winning documentary from New Mexico PBS looks at the European arrival in the Americas from the perspective of the Pueblo Peoples.

Commissioned by the journal Présence Africaine, this short documentary examines how African art is devalued and alienated through colonial and museum contexts. Beginning with the question of why African works are confined to ethnographic displays while Greek or Egyptian art is celebrated, the film became a landmark of anti-colonial cinema and was banned in France for eight years.

Alphaville is a slice of the lifestyle inside the wall. The portrait of a Brazil surrounded, where danger, unwanted interactions, all kinds of movement, heterogeneity and unpredictability of the streets are supposedly kept away.

Two-part documentary about the Czechoslovak "New Wave" in the '60s, including interviews with directors, actors, and others involved in the industry at the time.