Movies: Poetic documentary

A documentary of insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography. It includes bees collecting nectar, ladybugs eating mites, snails mating, spiders wrapping their catch, a scarab beetle relentless...

Filmed over nearly five years in twenty-five countries on five continents, and shot on seventy-millimetre film, Samsara transports us to the varied worlds of sacred grounds, disaster zones, industrial complexes, and natural wonders....

May Pang lovingly recounts her life in rock & roll and the whirlwind 18 months spent as friend, lover, and confidante to one of the towering figures of popular culture, John Lennon, in this funny, touching, and vibrant portrait of first love....

Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. This first half of her two-part film opens with a renowned introduction that compares modern Olympians ...

A visual montage portrait of our contemporary world dominated by globalized technology and violence....

Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. Where the two-part epic's first half, Festival of the Nations, focused on the international aspects of ...

A documentary shot by filmmakers all over the world that serves as a time capsule to show future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24th of July, 2010....

A paralysingly beautiful documentary with a global vision—an odyssey through landscape and time—that attempts to capture the essence of life....

Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and...

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the ...

Terpsichore is a captivating exploration of dance as an art form, illuminating the passion, discipline, and vulnerability that transform movement into poetry. The documentary follows three distinct yet interconnected artists: Cece Trapani, an Irish d...

This short experimental film tells the story of a man who comes to Hollywood to become a star, only to fail and be dehumanized. He is identified by the number 9413 written on his forehead....

In the town of Xoco, the spirit of an old villager awakens in search of its lost home. Along its journey, the ghost discovers that the town still celebrates its most important festivities, but also learns that the construction of a new commercial com...

"The Boy Of The Fish" follows Noon, a young boy living in a Syrian refugee camp, who finds solace and a sense of freedom in a whale-shaped doll he names "Bahr." Set against the challenging realities of camp life, Noon’s journey is both a story of res...

...

Robert Drew shows the sights and sounds from the funeral of President John F. Kennedy in November, 1963. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2002....

An ode to man's capacity to care for all creatures throughout their sometimes greatly protracted existence, displayed through the homegrown remedies Tom and Debbie Nicholson create for disabled animals....

On July 25th, 2020, Ridley Scott and Academy Award winner Kevin Macdonald invite you to be part of Life in a Day—a historic, global documentary capturing a single day on Earth. Videos from around the world are woven into a feature film....

Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of love, what it means, and why it matters....

A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco....