Documentaries

Hilarious documentary on the wildlife of the Namib Desert.

A woman narrates the contemplative writings of a seasoned world traveler, focusing on contemporary Japan.

A documentary about fraud and fakery.

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

In this silent predecessor to the modern documentary, film-maker Robert J. Flaherty spends one year following the lives of Nanook and his family, Inuits living in the Arctic Circle.

A tomato is planted, harvested, transported and sold in a supermarket, but it rots and ends up in the trash. The film follows it to its true end, all to make clear the difference between tomatoes, pigs, and human beings.

The history of Nazi Germany's death camps of the Final Solution and the hellish world of dehumanization and death contained inside.

Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary recounts the story of the Holocaust through interviews with witnesses - perpetrators as well as survivors.

An in-depth exploration of the various reactions by the French people to the Vichy government's acceptance of the German invasion.

A film following the lives of two inner-city Chicago boys who struggle to become college basketball players on the road to going professional.

A surrealist film, a pseudo-documentary portrait of Las Hurdes, a remote region of Spain where civilisation has barely developed, showing how the local peasants try to survive without even the most basic utilities and skills.

What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Cote d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.

A documentary which challenges former Indonesian death-squad leaders to reenact their mass-killings in whichever cinematic genres they wish, including classic Hollywood crime scenarios and lavish musical numbers.

A family that survived the genocide in Indonesia confronts the men who killed one of their brothers.

Kon Ichikawa examines the beauty and rich drama on display at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, creating a record of observations that range from the expansive to the intimate.

The document of the 1936 Olympics at Berlin.

The document of the 1936 Olympics at Berlin, orchestrated as Nazi propaganda.

A devastating and heart-rending take on grizzly bear activists Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, who were killed in October of 2003 while living among grizzly bears in Alaska.

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

Director Pasolini traverses Italy in 1963 with camera and microphone interviewing people in public places about sex, marriage and gender roles.

A witty examination of life and culture in Siberia.

Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme's LE JOLI MAI (The Lovely Month of May) is a portrait of Paris and Parisians during May 1962, the first springtime of peace after the ceasefire with Algeria and the first time in 23 years that France was not involved in any war.

THREE CHEERS FOR THE WHALE chronicles the history of mankind's relationship with the largest and most majestic of marine mammals, and graphically exposes their slaughter by the fishing industry. Chris Marker's co-director, Mario Ruspoli, descendant of an aristocratic Italian family, had been a journalist, painter and ethnologist before discovering his vocation as a documentary filmmaker. In the Sixties he became one of the founders -along with Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin and Chris Marker- of the "direct cinema" movement, pioneering in the use of new lightweight cameras and synchronous sound recording equipment.

With this documentary on the plots and sub-plots of the universe of food, Moullet moves away from comedy to become a pioneer of today's trend to analyze the forms of globalization by looking at a small cultural field. In his survey going from our everyday menu to the exploitation of Third World workers, the genesis in the title provides the basis for this political essay: by following the history of a meal's ingredients, an intelligent map of the workings of the global world is charted.

Moved by the work of director Yasujirô Ozu, Wim Wenders travels to Japan in search of the Tokyo seen in Ozu's films.