The Lovely Month of May (1963), Regret to Inform (1999), End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock (2021), The Royal Ballet (1960), Paris Is Burning (1990), Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country (2008), An Unlikely Weapon (2008), Totally Under Control (2020) ... Let's take a look at the ranked list of the best Historical Record movies.
Storyline: Actors Yves Montand and Simone Signoret narrate an introduction to springtime in Paris, as described by its citizens.
Plot Keywords: documentary, paris, 1960s, cinéma vérité, social observation, everyday life, politics ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: At the age of 24, American director Barbara Sonneborn lost her husband in the Vietnam War. Twenty years after his death, Sonneborn sets out to interview other American and Vietnamese women whose spouses died in the conflict. Along the way she meets a Vietnamese woman who was forced into prostitution during the war, an American woman whose husband died of chemical poisoning years after the conflict ended and a woman who worked as a North Vietnamese spy.
Plot Keywords: war, documentary, vietnam war, grief, memories, female perspective, history ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Indigenous women unite to stop the oil pipeline that threatens their land, water, and very existence.
Plot Keywords: documentary, environmental, social movement, protest, female leadership, activism, climate change ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Filmed on the stage of London's Covent Garden. Includes extracts from Swan lake, Ondine & The Firebird.
Plot Keywords: ballet, dance film, performing arts, stage performance, black and white film, 1960s, british culture ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: This is a documentary of 'drag nights' among New York's underclass. Queens are interviewed and observed preparing for and competing in many 'balls'. The people, the clothes, and the whole environment are outlandish.—Robbie Smith <robsmith@u.washington.edu>
Plot Keywords: documentary, lgbtq+, new york, 1980s, african american, identity, marginalized communities ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Thousands of citizens of Myanmar take to the streets in several cities to protest the Asian nation's repressive regime. The protests take on a new degree of seriousness when dozens of monks launch their own marches down city streets. This documentary from Anders Ostergaard focuses on the work of videographers and citizen journalists who defy the government's crackdown on the media -- a brave bunch who manage to transmit footage of the uprising to the outside world.
Plot Keywords: documentary, journalist, protest, human rights, press freedom, political, revolution ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: In 1968, in 1/500th of a second Eddie Adams photographed a Saigon police chief, General Nygoc Loan, shooting a Vietcong guerrilla point black. Some say that photograph ended the Vietnam war. The photo brought Eddie fame and a Pulitzer, but Eddie was haunted by the man he had vilified. He would say, "Two lives were destroyed that day, the victim's and the general." Other's would say three lives were destroyed. Eddie Adams, like most artists, was tortured by his need for perfection. Nothing he did ever satisfied him. He carved out many careers shooting covers for Life, Time, and even Penthouse. Yet, somehow, he was always pulled back into documenting wars, 13 all together. Finally he hit the wall and couldn't take it anymore. He began shooting celebrities because "It doesn't take anything from you." Eddie was comfortable with kings and coal miners. During his time with Parade magazines he photographed Clint Eastwood, Louis Armstrong, Mother Teresa, and Pope John Paul.—Isaac Hagy
Plot Keywords: war, vietnam war, documentary, history, journalism, photography, media ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: An in-depth look at how the United States government handled the response to the COVID-19 outbreak during the early months of the pandemic.
Plot Keywords: documentary, pandemic, u.s. government, public health, crisis management, corruption, investigation ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Documents one year in the life of Nanook, an Eskimo (Inuit), and his family. Describes the trading, hunting, fishing and migrations of a group barely touched by industrial technology. Nanook of the North was widely shown and praised as the first full-length, anthropological documentary in cinematographic history.—<xaviermartin@hotmail.com>
Plot Keywords: documentary, silent film, arctic, expedition, survival, nature, hunting ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: The Maysles brothers pay visits to Edith Bouvier Beale, nearing 80, and her daughter Edie. Reclusive, the pair live with cats and raccoons in Grey Gardens, a crumbling mansion in East Hampton. Edith is dry and quick-witted - a singer, married but later separated, a member of high society. Edie is voluble, dresses - as she puts it - for combat in tight ensembles that include scarves wrapped around her head. There are hints that Edie came home 24 years before to be cared for rather than to care for her mother. The women address the camera, talking over each other, moving from the present to events years before. They're odd, with flinty affection for each other.—<jhailey@hotmail.com>
Plot Keywords: documentary, biography, true story, mother-daughter relationship, social outcasts, american culture, high society ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Following up on 'Bowling for Columbine', film-maker Michael Moore provides deep and though-provoking insights on the American security system, the level of paranoia, fear, uncertainty, false values and patriotism, which all combined together to set a stage for George W. Bush to launch a war on Iraq instead of focusing on getting the real culprit(s) behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This documentary also focuses on how some Saudis were safely and secretly flown out of America while planes were ostensibly grounded after the attacks. Archived film footage, candid interviews with politicians, and an overall waste of public funds for a war that was initiated on false pretension to wit: a weapon of mass distraction - to take the focus away from the real enemy and get Americans glued to their TV sets to watch innocent Iraqis and Afghans getting killed. And a war that would eventually alienate the U.S.A. and it's citizens from almost every country on Earth.—rAjOo (gunwanti@hotmail.com)
Plot Keywords: political documentary, anti-war, 9/11 attacks, iraq war, conspiracy theory, war propaganda, social justice ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Who Will Write Our History tells the story of Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, the secret archive he created and led in the Warsaw Ghetto. With 30,000 pages of writing, photographs, posters, and more, the Oyneg Shabes Archive is the most important cache of in-the-moment, eyewitness accounts from the Holocaust. It documents not only how the Jews of the ghetto died, but how they lived. The film is based on the book of the same name by historian Samuel Kassow.—Katahdin Productions
Plot Keywords: history, documentary, world war ii, holocaust, jewish, resistance, true story ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Shin Dong-Huyk was born on November 19, 1983 as a political prisoner in a North Korean re-education camp. He was a child of two prisoners who had been married by order of the wardens. He spent his entire childhood and youth in Camp 14, in fact a death camp. He was forced to labor since he was six years old and suffered from hunger, beatings and torture, always at the mercy of the wardens. He knew nothing about the world outside the barbed-wire fences. At the age of 23, with the help of an older prisoner, he managed to escape. For months he traveled through North Korea and China and finally to South Korea, where he encountered a world completely strange to him.—Anonymous
Plot Keywords: documentary, concentration camp, human rights, survivor, interview, true story, dictatorship ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: This documentary from director Steven Rosenbaum presents the experiences of a diverse group of regular Americans in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Featuring footage from the area surrounding the World Trade Center shot as early as 10:05 a.m. on the day of the tragedy, SEVEN DAYS IN SEPTEMBER looks at the way 9/11 changed the lives of a firefighter's wife, a Muslim-American woman, an 11-year-old boy, and many others.—Anonymous
Plot Keywords: documentary, 9/11 attacks, american history, trauma, collective memory, eyewitness, patriotism ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: The meaning of art itself comes into question in this documentary about Shelby Lee Adams' controversial photos of families in Appalachia.
Plot Keywords: documentary, photography, american culture, poverty, rural life, social documentary, art ...
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