Looking to watch some good documentaries. If political/history then documentaries that have at least a little leftist analysis of the subject would be great.
theres a pretty funny doco called 'fyre' on netflix/piratebay about the fyre festival if you want to laugh about the dumbest music festival in history and the losers behind it
i havent watched a ton but i really liked the miles davis one from a couple years ago, Birth of the Cool
Harlan County U.S.A.
Man With a Movie Camera (sort-of)
The Sorrow and the Pity
Hotel Terminus
San Soleil
Antonio Gaudi
F For Fake
Gates of Heaven (still my favorite Errol Morris)
Slavoj Zizek made a film called "The Perverts Guide to Ideology" which i really recommend.
"Breaking Bounderies" is also good, it's a documentary by David Attenborough about how our society is about to leave, what scientists call, our "safe operating space" (climate change is the most well known problem, but there are 8 others, which all will have detrimental effects on human society on a similar order of magnitude). It's essentially a popular adaptation to this scientific paper .
Fuck, I always forget that ads exist and are only ever placed horribly.
Two that I didn't see already listed:
Fighting in the age of loneliness (I actually genuinely loved this film. Felix did a great job)
And of course
Hypernormalization
Fantastic Fungi
that doc is so fucking dope. i really liked it a lot, but i gotta say there was a guy on there who made some big claims about how the human consciousness evolved by consuming psychedelic mushrooms and while it's definitely very possible it contributed to our evolution, i felt like it was a little too narrow of a claim. i mean just the process of cooking food was major and gave them different proteins the body and mind could handle, that mattered a lot too. He seemed like a very eccentric guy and i'll absolutely give him the benefit of the doubt cause of how like all media is edited that they may have cut out some things. idk it kinda bothered me how they drew such a massive conclusion to one thing like that. everything else in the film was very fuckin cool though, i try to get people to watch it all the time
Concerning Violence: 9 Scenes From the Anti-imperialistic Self-Defence is a great meditation on the Frantz Fanon essay On Violence. It's a series of vignettes of really interesting footage of different anti-colonial movements in the 60s and 70s, while Lauryn Hill reads you Fanon. You can tell your friends you read theory after watching this one.
I saw someone already mentioned this one, but The Act of Killing is a must watch companion film to reading The Jakarta Method. It's a tough watch about the Indonesian genocide of half a million leftists, but the angle the director takes is really interesting and valuable. I haven't seen the sequel yet but want to
Let the Fire Burn is a great doc about the Philadelphia police bombing of the MOVE commune in 1985.
Walking with Dinosaurs (the entire walking with series too), though a lot of it is really outdated with 20 years of additional science, it was my fucking jam, pretty sure we were the most frequent renters of the series from our library when I was a kid.
Becoming Human by Nova is sorta like an updated Walking with Cavemen, though to be fair it's probably been a while since (oh god it's 13 years) that was released but the information should be a bit better.
Amazing Dinoworld was pretty interesting and quite visually good too but the episode on the polar dinosaurs implying they were on the verge of evolving human-like intelligence was a bit far for speculation.
To be honest my good natural history content has shifted onto youtube where they might spend 10 minutes talking about a specific topic rather than create a large involved piece, but they also don't need to go wild with making dinosaurs fight to the death for entertainment value.
Natural World Facts has some really well done videos on ocean life.
Journey to the Microcosmos does a lot looking at microscopic life, something often not expressly shown on camera.
SEA does a bit longer form stuff about specific topics related to the universe rather than life on earth, practically the same length as a TV hour long documentary minus the commercials to be honest.
its been mentioned before on this thread but it cannot be stressed enough that dominion is the single most important documentary you can watch (cw: extremely graphic violence)
Sir! No Sir! “ an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history. This movement didn’t take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point. And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam. It was a movement no one expected, least of all those in it. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile. And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. Yet today few people know about the GI movement against the war in Vietnam.
The Vietnam War has been the subject of hundreds of films, both fiction and non-fiction, but this story–the story of the rebellion of thousands of American soldiers against the war–has never been told in film.This is certainly not for lack of evidence. By the Pentagon’s own figures, 503,926 “incidents of desertion” occurred between 1966 and 1971; officers were being “fragged”(killed with fragmentation grenades by their own troops) at an alarming rate; and by 1971 entire units were refusing to go into battle in unprecedented numbers. In the course of a few short years, over 100 underground newspapers were published by soldiers around the world; local and national antiwar GI organizations were joined by thousands; thousands more demonstrated against the war at every major base in the world in 1970 and 1971, including in Vietnam itself; stockades and federal prisons were filling up with soldiers jailed for their opposition to the war and the military.”
Inside Job “ From Academy Award® nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson ("No End In Sight"), comes INSIDE JOB, the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, INSIDE JOB traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia.”
The Vanishing City “Global trends in major cities around the world have changed rapidly in the last several decades. As cities become more interconnected, and less dependent on localized economic models, domestic issues of increased class inequality and sustainability have emerged as central components to city planning debates. These trends are perhaps best exemplified in the city of New York.
Told through the eyes of tenants, city planners, business owners, scholars, and politicians, The Vanishing City exposes the real politic behind the alarming disappearance of New York’s beloved neighborhoods, the truth about its finance-dominated economy, and the myth of “inevitable change.” Artfully documented through interviews, hearings, demonstrations, and archival footage, the film takes a sober look at the city’s “luxury” policies and high-end development, the power role of the elite, and accusations of corruption surrounding land use and rezoning. The film also links New York trends to other global cities where multinational corporations continue to victimize the middle and working classes.”
Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin “… a visionary strategist and activist who has been called “the unknown hero” of the civil rights movement. A disciple of Gandhi, a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., and the architect of the 1963 March on Washington, Rustin dared to live as an openly gay man during the fiercely homophobic 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.”
**WikiLeaks: War, Lies & Videotape - (2011) ** (Not the Alex Gibney hit piece)
Sir, No Sir! is excellent. Really puts a different spin on socdems insisting we should respect the troops because they're coerced to be there when you had troops forced at gunpoint to go to Vietnam and they then had to invent a new word for throwing grenades in your CO'S sleeping quarters because it happened so many times.
