Documentary

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Werner Herzog returns to the South American jungle with Juliane Koepcke, the German woman who was the sole survivor of a plane crash there in 1971. They find the remains of the plane and recreate her journey out of the jungle.Read More »

Face To Face With The Past (Part 2):
Alan Berliner’s “Nobody’s Business”
by Andrew J. Horton (from Kinoeye)

Intrigued by his family’s Central European past, Alan Berliner turned the camera on his father to find out more. Nobody’s Business (USA, 1996) is Berliner’s witty account of the uphill struggle which followed. You might have thought that interviewing your father would be a relatively easy thing for a documentarist to do. You obviously don’t have a father like Alan Berliner’s. Tetchy and cantankerous, Oscar Berliner has little understanding for his son’s project – and this is the joy of the film.Read More »

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The First Eden: The Mediterranean World and Man is a BBC documentary series written and presented by David Attenborough, first transmitted in the United Kingdom from 8 March 1987.

It comprises four programmes, each of 55 minutes’ duration, which describe man’s relationship with the natural habitats of the Mediterranean, and is a glorious portrait of the landscape, wildlife and plants of the Mediterranean. From the earliest human settlements to the cities of today, from the forests of the North African shore and the Middle East to Southern Europe, this series tells the dramatic story of man and nature at work.Read More »

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Using music of the genre, a short look at Tex-Mex music, how it expresses love found and love lost, and how it comes straight from the heart.Read More »

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The film is an interview done at the time of Stroszek, it has Herzog talking about each film, talking about their creation and what he hoped to achieve. Its the director explaining his films in a way that enlightens on more than just a cinematic level. Herzog not only talks about his films but also his larger ideas about what film is, both fiction and documentary.Read More »

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The story of the 1914-1916 Antarctic exploration mission of Sir Ernest Shackleton. The ship sails south, breaking the ice, and ultimately getting trapped by the fast-changing weather. The ship breaks up in the ice, and while 22 men and 70 dogs wait on Elephant Island, Shackleton and a crew of five take a 20-foot lifeboat 800 miles to South Georgia Island to mount a rescue mission. We also get a good look at the exotic animals of the region, particularly the penguins.Read More »

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Being Gypsy is one of Peter and Zsóka Nestler’s most important works. The film uncovers the history and fate of the Roma and Sinti in Germany under Nazism and their continued persecution after the war.

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In the Romani language, Roma means “people.” This film lends a voice to these people, who tell of how they were arrested and locked up in camps and prisons, and how 90 percent of their families never returned from the death camps. They speak in dialects from Burgenland, Bavaria and Saxony. They live in desolate barracks on the fringes of cities, where ten people share a room with damp walls. The children are sick all winter long.Read More »

This is a documentary about the Finnish-Soviet Winter War (Talvisota) of 1939-1940. It contains rare and never before seen footage from the official film archives (Sota-arkisto) of the Finnish army.Read More »

Bob Stewart, Allmovie, wrote:
This 1973 Frederick Wiseman documentary, filmed at the Juvenile Court in Memphis, Tennessee, won the Columbia University School of Journalism’s 1974 Dupont Award for “Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.” In 144 minutes, Wiseman shows a wide variety of cases before the Memphis Juvenile Court, from child abuse and sexual offenses to armed robbery and foster home placement, and it examines such issues as the range and limits of choices available to the court, psychology of offenders, constitutional points, procedural questions, and community protection vs. the desire for rehabilitation.Read More »