Poetic Documentary Movies

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...

This short documentary, shot in the glass factories of Leerdam and Schiedam, demonstrates how glass blowers do their work. But thanks to the superbly...

Seamus Heaney travels across Lough Erne in Fermanagh, visiting early Christian sites and the settlements of the English and Scots who made their...

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...

Syria. Among the ravages of war, there is also this more discreet yet vital phenomenon: exile. Leave, stay? A question Liwaa Jazji tackles. The place...

Featuring a commentary by Noël Burch (in nonsense French), Recreation's rapid-fire montage of single-frame images of incredible density and...

This short film made by László Moholy-Nagy is based on the shadow patterns created by his Light-Space Modulator, an early kinetic...

An encounter with the last shamans of Bolivia's Beni River Valley brings the audience on an intimate spiritual journey through the Amazon Rainforest....

The personal collaboration between Kiran Acharya and Clint Mansell is an early combination of documentary film and augmented reality.

A short film following Anthony, a young child from the small, rural town of San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba. We see him in different moments of...

For years I've been looking for the means to capture everyday life just as it is perceived through a glance from the street. Twenty years ago, you...

The story of Nisar Ahmed Khan, told through his children and the people he served, a spiritual guide whose followers still visit his tomb on his...

A lyrical portrait of Amsterdam and its changing appearance during a rain-shower.

A story of The Map and The Territory. Shot in BC, California, and Nevada. Original music by Tashi Townley, Jack Brintnell, Luc Wiebe, and George Lee.

The camera floats quietly to capture the beauty that emerges from the mundane. Accompanied by Ryuichi Sakamoto's composition, Arseny Tarkovsky's poem...