Poetic Documentary Movies

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...

Ibuka follows Valentine and Jean-Claude, a new couple, at the very beginning of the civil war and the massacres that swept through Rwanda in 1994....

A day in a retirement home.

Part two of Leni Riefenstahl's monumental examination of the 1938 Olympic Games, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls...

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions...

Through an unsent letter, the author travels through time and recalls moments when love affected him intensely. Evocative images explore how pain and...

What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Côte d'Azur, especially its...

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

A poetic short film showing a day in the 2019 protests in Santiago, Chile through documentary images.

A rural town in Ireland swells to a population of half a million for one week during the world’s largest annual celebration of Irish music,...

A man's virginity causes the stock market to collapse and doom the world.

In this short film the director reflects on the feeling of being on the wrong path in your life, that you have no control over your own life. But...

Filmed during lockdown 2020, ‘de Luz/Of Light’ explores fleeting perceptions and cyclic rituals of Portuguese coastal landscapes,...

An experimental half-documentary half-fiction about a young person’s routine of getting to sleep and waking up.

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 filmmaker, Alexandros Papathanasiou, travels to Crete to meet Lefteris Eliakis, a guerrilla fighter during the Greek Civil War and a political...

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