A few years ago, Gruff Rhys, lead singer of fabulous Welsh pop oddballs Super Furry Animals (Cymraeg/English) set out to make a film about the search for his uncle, a 1970s Argentinian pop star called René Griffiths. The result is Separado!: part travelogue, part music film, and part history of how a small band of idealists set out to establish a Welsh colony in the Argentinian part of Patagonia. [more inside]
posted by Len on Nov 12, 2009 - 14 comments

Ya'll remember Johnathan "The Impaler" Sharkey, Minnesota gubernatorial candidate for the Vampires, Witches, and Pagans Party? Of course you do. But have you seen Impaler, the documentary about him? hulu
posted by Pope Guilty on Nov 3, 2009 - 10 comments

CGI-brows (link goes to video on Vimeo which contains a naughty word but is otherwise SFW.) A short mockumentary about extreme emoting through SFX by RocketSausage (Dir. Andrew Gaynord) which has won the Virgin Media Shorts People's Choice Award for 2009.
posted by planetkyoto on Oct 1, 2009 - 12 comments

On Any Sunday is a 1971 film about motorcycling. Narrated by Bruce Brown (director of The Endless Summer, it features Mert Lawwill (who later developed a prosthetic for amputee riders), Malcolm Smith, and Steve McQueen, among others. It can be viewed in its entirety on Hulu. It was nominated for Best Documentary Feature in 1971, and reviewed by Roger Ebert in the same year.
posted by entropic on Sep 9, 2009 - 12 comments

HOOPESTON is documentary in four acts by synedyne, the people who did the This Is My Milwaukee ARG (MeFi post). It's about the decline of tiny town in Illinois and the strange religion that moved in and called it home.
posted by arcolz on Jul 3, 2009 - 15 comments

The David Lynch Interview Project. A 121-part documentary series featuring 3-5 minute portraits of ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) Americans from all over the country starts on June 1. Here's a Preview.
posted by fearfulsymmetry on May 16, 2009 - 15 comments

Southern Comfort is a 2001 documentary film about the final year in the life of Robert Eads, a female-to-male transsexual. Eads, diagnosed with ovarian cancer, was turned down for treatment by two dozen doctors out of fear that treating such a patient would hurt their reputation. You can watch the film here, part 1 through 10.
posted by nola on Mar 3, 2009 - 45 comments

Mentioned here earlier in its beta form, Canada's National Film Board has released the bulk of its films online, for free, in the NFB Screening Room. With hundreds of films from the 1920s onwards, including groundbreaking work by animator Norman McLaren, documentaries, dramas, bizarre anti-smoking (or pro-smoking?) screeds and much, much more, it's a breathtaking trove of amazing film to be discovered from north of the 49th. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd on Jan 22, 2009 - 53 comments

"Did you hear a stalk of celery being cut? If you did, you understand the magic of the Foley Artist." A short film that is just too long about silent films from the previously mentioned podcast You Look Nice Today
posted by Del Far on Jan 8, 2009 - 19 comments

Architectural critic and writer Reyner Banham loved Los Angeles. (Last link is a BBC documentary, circa 1972, 52 minutes -- NSFW at 47 minute mark) [more inside]
posted by miss lynnster on Dec 1, 2008 - 2 comments

Director Peter Watkins' web site describes the filming, distribution and critical reaction to each of his controversial films, including Punishment Park, the rock star satire Privilege, The War Game, La Commune and more. He also offers a 10-part critique of "the media crisis" that marginalizes non-mainstream ideas via the Hollywood monoform and the Universal Clock, a style he claims structures almost all of the messages delivered to the public, but which sharply limits the range of relationships possible between media producers and audiences. [more inside]
posted by mediareport on Nov 3, 2008 - 7 comments

"It's a human drama thing." This is a documentary film about a group of people in Texas who enter a competition to win a new "hardbody" pickup truck, merely by keeping one hand on the truck the longest. (via Kottke via waxy) [more inside]
posted by acro on Aug 25, 2008 - 44 comments

Bollywood, the 1960s and 70s: "For years, the favorite setting for the big dance number has been a cabaret, with its atmosphere of forbidden liquor and sexual permissiveness, with its mixed audience of privileged Indians, industrialists, playboys, princes, and its foreign decadence..." And no one was more at home this exotic milieu than an Anglo-Burmese refugee who began dancing in films at 13 to support her family. Her pale skin and vaguely foreign looks, along with a collection of colored contacts and wigs, allowed her to play white women, Asian women, whatever titillating role was called for. She was Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls (part 2, part 3, part 4). [more inside]
posted by bookish on Aug 10, 2008 - 24 comments

Home Movies. A 1975 documentary by a young academic folklorist, exploring what it was that people were doing when they made home movies: remembering selectively, creating a "golden age." [more inside]
posted by Miko on Jul 21, 2008 - 20 comments

"America's most valuable resource is poor people." The award-winning Internets Celebrities (Dallas Penn, Rafi Kam and director Casimir Nozkowski) take on check cashing joints with a short documentary called Checkmate. Don't know the IC? Educate yourself with Bodega, Cereal Is Dope and the incredibly informative Urine Nation. (via Hip-Hop is Read)
posted by grabbingsand on May 22, 2008 - 23 comments

Koyaanisqatsi [more inside]
posted by phrontist on May 10, 2008 - 72 comments

In a pilot project with Canada's National Film Board, Katerina Cizek is Filmmaker-in-Residence at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital (Flash site with videos). She directed The Interventionists: Chronicles of a Mental Health Crisis Team, a film about a unique crisis team in downtown Toronto. A mental health nurse and a police officer ride the streets of the inner city together in an unmarked police car, responding to 911 calls involving "emotionally disturbed persons." The team is a partnership between St. Michael's Hospital and two downtown police divisions. Their mandate is to de-escalate crises and avoid unnecessary arrests and emergency room visits by providing referrals, services and resources within a patient's own community. [more inside]
posted by heatherann on May 9, 2008 - 12 comments

The Grace Lee Project Inspired by the Jennifer 8. Lee post, here goes Grace Lee. She's a filmmaker who made a documentary about women named Grace Lee.
posted by fixedgear on Apr 17, 2008 - 16 comments

Young@Heart. What started as a 2006 British television documentary and became an audience favorite at the Los Angeles and Sundance film festivals in 2007 and 2008 opens across the United States this weekand will soon open in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Japan and Australia. The opening sequence showing Eileen Hall , then 92 , singing the 1982 hit from punk-rock group The Clash provided the inspiration for director Stephen Walker when he first saw the group on stage in London in 2005. Besides giving new meaning to lyrics from popular hits, the film is comedic and poignant as it explores friendship, old age and death.
posted by mrducts on Apr 13, 2008 - 24 comments

Do you love documentaries? The Documentary Blog offers reviews and news about documentary films. Check out their list of the Top 25 Documentaries.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner on Mar 27, 2008 - 52 comments

POSSESSED is a short documentary film that 'enters the complicated worlds of four hoarders; people whose lives are dominated by their relationship to possessions'.
posted by jack_mo on Mar 7, 2008 - 44 comments

Word Into Image: Writers on Screenwriting {youtube}
William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) (1 2 3)
Robert Towne (Chinatown) (1 2 3)
Carl Foreman (High Noon) (1 2 3)
Neil Simon (The Odd Couple) (1 2 3)
Paul Mazursky (An Unmarried Woman) (1 2 3)
Eleanor Perry (The Swimmer) (1 2 3)
posted by dobbs on Feb 22, 2008 - 9 comments

Tony Silver, the director of the groundbreaking hip-hop documentary Style Wars passed last night. He was a family friend of mine, and had been sick for several years with a irreversible brain condition. Style Wars is considered by some to be the best hip-hop film ever made, and by everyone to be the first. It was shot at the very start of the 1980s, when graffiti was still hip-hop's dominant form, and the idea of graffiti as art was brand new. I recommend checking out the deluxe DVD edition of the film Tony put together a few years ago after many years where it was only available as an expensive educational-only VHS, but you can also check out the 1hr 10m version on Google Video.
posted by YoungAmerican on Feb 2, 2008 - 15 comments

Second Skin [is a documentary that] takes an intimate look at computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by the emerging genre of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). [more inside]
posted by Dave Faris on Jan 31, 2008 - 29 comments

Its animated-type opening credits set the tone - and when, soon after, Jonas Mekas stumbles in, explaining his version of the butterfly-wing theory, you know this is a different kind of rock-movie. Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel's 1990 music film "Step Across the Border" matches 35mm black&white cinema direct to several seasons of poly-instrumentalist Fred Frith's round-the-globe improvisational jams (with the likes of Joey Baron, Iva Bitová, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn and others). A big-wig at Cahiers du Cinema has it in his top-ten - now you can watch this masterpiece of visual jazz online (or do yourself a favour and get the DVD). (Thanks to Vincent Moon for the heads-up.)
posted by progosk on Jan 31, 2008 - 10 comments

The Return of a Clockwork Orange - Writers, artists, directors, UK film censors and starring actor Malcolm McDowell discuss Stanley Kubrick's classic film A Clockwork Orange
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Jan 28, 2008 - 121 comments

Meet Billy the kid, an outsider growing up in small-town Maine.
posted by JPowers on Jan 5, 2008 - 18 comments

Why Democracy? "In October 2007, ten one-hour films focused on contemporary democracy will be broadcast in the world's largest ever factual media event. More than 40 broadcasters on all continents are participating, with an estimated audience of 300 million viewers. Each of the broadcasters - an A-Z which includes everyone from Al Arabiya to ZDF - will be producing a locally-based seasons of film, radio, debate and discussion to tie in with the global broadcast of the Why Democracy? films."
posted by St Urbain's Horseman on Oct 5, 2007 - 21 comments

Interviews and segments from the film American Philosopher by Phillip McReynolds.
posted by anotherpanacea on Aug 30, 2007 - 16 comments

80 years of Found Footage Filmmaking...
1927-1967:
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, 1927.
Rose Hobart, 1936.
Night and Fog 2 3 4 5 6 7, 1956.
1968-2007 inside...
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur on Aug 28, 2007 - 12 comments

Burroughs
A 1983 documentary by Howard Brookner on William S. Burroughs. 89 mins, G-vid, a bit more inside...
posted by carsonb on Jul 10, 2007 - 13 comments

Biographies, history, science and more. Over 500 of the best online documentaries.
posted by Mblue on May 5, 2007 - 26 comments

David Bowie: Cracked Actor – a BBC documentary circa 1974. One|Two|Three|Four|Five (53 minutes)
posted by miss lynnster on May 4, 2007 - 16 comments

Disco cellist Arthur Russell is the subject of a new documentary. MP3s for those who don't know him: Sidebar here, here, here (photo may be NSFW), more here.
posted by klangklangston on May 3, 2007 - 10 comments

The Search For Count Dante is a documentary-in-progress by filmmaker Floyd Webb (- Youtube trailer -). Webb takes on the daunting task of exploring the (larger than) life and times of martial artist Count Dante (born John Keehan), the then self-described "Deadliest Man Alive". Some of you may remember his ad from '60's and '70's comic books. [more inside]
posted by schleppo on Mar 7, 2007 - 29 comments

Lenny Bruce -Swear to Tell the Truth 1995 documentary of the rise and fall of the patron saint of samizdat 1:40 nsfw language nudity via
posted by hortense on Feb 24, 2007 - 15 comments

'Films from the Homefront' is a (new) collection of amateur documentaries, newsreels, government films, and home movies documenting life for the ordinary people in Britain during World War II, with background text descriptions/explication. Browse the themes. The films are QT and wmv format. I found it both poignant and funny, for instance, seeing kids don gasmasks during air raid drills then attempt to continue writing in their lessons. [via Glasgow School of Art Library]
posted by peacay on Feb 16, 2007 - 4 comments

The Beaver Trilogy... Starring the Beaver Kid himself (circa 1979), Sean Penn (circa 1981), Crispin Glover (circa 1985) and a bathroom cameo by... wait, is that Carrot Top? Oh my, Olivia Newton John has never looked so good.
Parts 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11
posted by miss lynnster on Jan 2, 2007 - 29 comments

"When you walk into a house that was sealed in the last couple of years of the plague, you can crack the door or window and it pops like a vacuum seal, and you walk in and there's surprisingly little dust..."

Among the quotes from "Ever Since the World Ended," a fake documentary about the 186 survivors left in SF following a slate-wiping pandemic. No idea if it's any good, but the documentary approach makes it creepy, because it doesn't feel far from home.
posted by cloudscratcher on Nov 13, 2006 - 61 comments

Awake, My Soul is a new documentary on Sacred Harp singing, an American musical tradition that's strange, beautiful, and very much alive. Previously discussed and beautifully explicated in this post.
posted by Miko on Nov 6, 2006 - 13 comments

On the Edge of Blade Runner [documentary, google video, 52mins]
posted by MetaMonkey on Oct 29, 2006 - 114 comments

"THIN is a photographic essay and a documentary film about the treatment of eating disorders. In 1997, Lauren Greenfield began documenting the lives of patients at the Renfrew Center in Coconut Grove, Florida, a forty-bed residential facility for the treatment of women with eating disorders. She subsequently returned to Renfrew to take more photographs, and was eventually given unprecedented access to film the daily lives of patients". (scroll down or search for "Greenfield"). 2002 MeFi post on Greenfield's previous project, "Girl Culture", here.
posted by matteo on Oct 16, 2006 - 23 comments

Folkstreams.net has two goals. One is to build a national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures. The other is to give them renewed life by streaming them on the internet. The films were produced by independent filmmakers in a golden age that began in the 1960s and was made possible by the development first of portable cameras and then capacity for synch sound. Their films focus on the culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed Americans from many different regions and communities. The filmmakers were driven more by sheer engagement with the people and their traditions than by commercial hopes. Their films have unusual subjects, odd lengths, and talkers who do not speak "broadcast English." Although they won prizes at film festivals, were used in college classes, and occasionally were shown on PBS, they found few outlets in venues like theaters, video shops or commercial television. But they have permanent value...

folkstreams.net Currently streaming are the films The Land Where the Blues Began , Cajun Country , Jazz Parades: Feet Don't Fail Me Now , Talking Feet: Solo Southern Dance: Buck, Flatfoot and Tap , Ray Lum: Mule Trader and Pizza Pizza Daddy-O , among many others.
posted by y2karl on Oct 6, 2006 - 14 comments

Last night I saw this short film at the Breckenridge Film Festival which was an inspired and low-key effort at encouraging the two-state solution to The Problem. You can watch the video if you can watch a thirty-minute movie on your computer (I can't), or you can order a free copy to watch and hopefully share.
posted by kozad on Sep 10, 2006 - 10 comments

Japanese professor Kenji Sugimoto has a long-standing fascination with the brain of Albert Einstein. In the early nineties he travelled to the United States in search of it. This bizarre 1994 documentary (YouTube, multiple parts) by Kevin Hull (UK) chronicles his quest. Fake or real? [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Sep 1, 2006 - 12 comments

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. A key documentary artifact of the uprising is Magyarország lángokban (Hungary in Flames) [embedded .wmv], partly composed of footage shot by two young film school students using whatever equipment they could find. Narrowly avoiding capture by the Communists, the duo smuggled 10,000 feet of film out of the country in spare tires and potato sacks; there's much more to the story, but better to hear Vilmos tell it in his own words. [.rm] Eventually, they made their way to America, where László Kovács, ASC (Five Easy Pieces, Ghost Busters, more) and Vilmos Zsigmund, ASC (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Deliverance, more) became two of the most prolific cinematographers in Hollywood history. [more inside]
posted by milquetoast on Aug 8, 2006 - 7 comments

When I Came Home: Iraq War veteran Herold Noel suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and lives out of his car in Brooklyn. Using Noel's story as a fulcrum, this doc examines the wider issue of homeless U.S. military veterans-from Vietnam to Iraq-who have to fight tooth-and-nail to receive the benefits promised to them by their government.
posted by riley370 on May 21, 2006 - 45 comments

Zanta: The Movie. If you live or work in downtown Toronto, you've seen him. Shirtless, wearing a Santa hat, and most likely doing pushups, he's David "Zanta" Zancai, and one of the city's most enigmatic characters.
posted by Robot Johnny on May 19, 2006 - 38 comments

Bike Kill 2004 - a 5 min QT clip documenting the Black Label Bike Club’s annual Bike Kill in Brooklyn, recently shown at Bicycle Film Festival 2005. These guys party hard. via in case of mishaps
posted by madamjujujive on Nov 28, 2005 - 15 comments

Loose change A one hour analysis of 9/11 and how it is more likely than not that the government was actually behind the attacks. A documentary analyzing the footage and presenting an alternative view to the official version.
posted by zeerobots on Nov 11, 2005 - 115 comments