Documentaries 2019

A man travels around a city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention.

The impact of the decline of heavy industry on workers and their families in the Tiexi district of Shenyang, China, at the turn of the 21st century, documented unflinchingly by a fly-on-the-wall camera.

In his final - and most daring - cinematic statement, Jarman the romantic meets Jarman the iconoclast in a lush soundscape pulsing against a purely blue screen, laying bare his physical and spiritual state.

A man paves his own way to his own soul through an intellectual quest, tragedies of nations and personal drama. The road moving through the cosmic distances is a flight into one's internal world. This flight and this drama are revealed in this philosophical film-poem.

Through examining Fini Straubinger, an old woman who has been deaf and blind since adolescence, and her work on behalf of other deaf and blind people, this film shows how the deaf and blind struggle to understand and accept a world from which they are almost wholly isolated.

Chronicles 7-weeks in the lives of 12 emotionally disturbed children and their therapist's experimental method of treatment at the Toronto-area Warrendale facility.

A look at life in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

During some months, the Dutch movie director Ivens and some North Vietnamese colleagues filmed the life of North Vietnamese peasants under the menace of heavy American bombardments. The result is an indictment of all forms of war.

Homo Sapiens shows stunning images of forgotten places, buildings we constructed and then left.

A filmmaker's inquiry into transcendence becomes a three-hour trip across countries and cultures, interconnecting people, places and times. From Toronto, the scene of his childhood, Peter Mettler sets out on a journey that includes evangelism at the airport strip, demolition in Las Vegas, tracings in the Nevada desert, chemistry and street life in Switzerland, and the coexistence of technology and divinity in contemporary India. Everywhere along the way, the same themes are to be found: thrill-seeking, luck, destiny, belief, expanding perception, the craving for security in an uncertain world. Fact joins with fantasy; the search for meaning and the search for ecstasy begin to merge.

A documentary about the film-maker's wife and co-worker, Peggy Lawson, who died in 1971.

Documentary about The Netherlands shown as a reflection in a puddle.

Documentary examining the work of sculptor Richard Lippold, particular his sculpture of the sun at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A tour of Iran filmed from a helicopter.

The story of an ordinary accountant, Ryszard Siwiec, who set himself on fire during the large harvest festival at the Warsaw stadium in 1968. He did it to protest against the military invasion in Czechoslovakia.

An examination of life inside the Grande Chartreuse, the head monastery of the reclusive Carthusian Order in France.

Taiga is an eight-hour documentary directed and photographed by Ulrike Ottinger. It focuses on the life and rituals of nomadic peoples in Northern Mongolia, specifically the Darkhad nomads and the Sojon Urinjanghai.

The passage of time in different dimensions illustrated by biological evolution, the changing seasons and the everyday moments of human life.

A ten-minute study of wild animal life in a Swedish forest; stoat, fox, hare, and owl, who stalk and savage one another, are photographed with extraordinary vividness and intimacy. It is perhaps the most striking of Sucksdorff's animal studies, in spite of an abrupt introduction and ending.

Several stories depicting the landscapes and fauna of India are mixed with documentary footage.

Astronomer Carl Sagan leads us on an engaging guided tour of the various elements and cosmological theories of the universe.

Fictionalized documentary showing the evolution of witchcraft, from its pagan roots to its confusion with hysteria in Eastern Europe.