Essential Documentaries

Essential Documentaries

A selection of standout non-fiction films from the Metrograph library.

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Essential Documentaries
  • Agent of Happiness

    Directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó | 93 mins | 2024
    How do you measure joy? For Bhutan—a nation that conceptualized a “gross national happiness" in 1972 and has collected data on its citizens’ satisfaction for almost two decades—the answer might just be mathematical. But the truth is h...

  • Buffalo Juggalos

    Leaving March 1

    Directed by Scott Cummings | 30 mins | 2014
    Smeared in gaudy face-paint and dedicated as much to the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse as they are to generalized debauchery and destruction, the Juggalo remains one of fan culture’s most enduring—and most derided—outsider figures. In ...

  • Goodbye to Language

    Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 70 mins | 2014
    An innovator to the end, Godard’s penultimate feature finds him experimenting with the possibilities of digital 3D, using the technology to plot the disintegration of both a couple’s relationship and the images of the relationship. A film of unpreceden...

  • Portrait of Jason

    Directed by Shirley Clarke | 107 mins | 1967
    A distillation of a single 12-hour interview in a room at the Chelsea Hotel with the charismatic Jason Holliday (“real” name Aaron Payne), a gay, African American cabaret dancer, part-time hustler, and full-time raconteur, Portrait of Jason grows from ...

  • The Competition

    Directed by Claire Simon | 121 mins | 2016
    The Competition begins, significantly, with the image of a locked gate—that of La Fémis, one of the most prestigious film schools in the world, offering hands-on training from working professionals and accepting only 40 students per year from hundreds of...

  • The French

    Directed by William Klein | 130 mins | 1982
    “For me, this film encapsulates everything I loved and love about the tennis of that moment; and in the hands of the great and singular William Klein, it is at once a gripping sports page, a fascinating piece of reportage, and a work of art.”

    —Wes Ande...

  • The Image Book

    Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 84 mins | 2019
    A cinematic collage, an esoteric essay film, a wide-reaching, freewheeling ontological history of the moving image, and a sorrowful survey of the fallen world at the beginning of the 21st century, Special Palme d’Or winner The Image Book is a labyrinth...

  • The Prairie Trilogy

    Directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson | 97 mins | 1978
    John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, co-directors of Cannes Camera d’Or winner Northern Lights and fellow members of San Francisco’s Cine Manifest film collective, collaborated on this remarkable series of documentaries underwritten by the North Da...

  • The Raft

    Directed by Marcus Lindeen | 97 mins | 2018
    In the summer of 1973, a young international crew of six women and five men embarked together on a most unusual sea voyage—a close-quarters trip across the Atlantic from Spain to Mexico on a free-floating raft christened the Acali, initiated by Mexican ...

  • The Windmill Movie

    Directed by Alexander Olch | 82 mins | 2008
    “What if someone else wrote your autobiography?” That is the question posited by Alexander Olch as he tells the life-story of his former Harvard professor, the filmmaker Richard P. Rogers. For twenty years, Rogers worked on an autobiographical portrait ...

  • And When I Die I Won't Stay Dead

    ]Directed by Billy Woodberry | 89 mins | 2015
    Assembled from archival footage, new interviews, and readings from such figures as Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, this high-spirited screen portrait of the late African American Beat poet and bon vivant Bob Kaufman is given an appropriately nimble, jazzy f...

  • Spirits of Rebellion: Black Independent Cinema from Los Angeles

    Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis | 101 mins | 2016
    Davis’s documentary on the LA Rebellion, a surge of artistically ambitious, far-from-the-mainstream Black-American-directed films that came out of southern California—specifically, out of the UCLA film production program—beginning in the late ’70s...

  • Hale County This Morning, This Evening

    Directed by RaMell Ross | 76 mins | 2018
    The results of five years of living among African American families in rural Hale County, Alabama—also the setting of Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Ross’s debut feature documentary is a lyrical and loving treatment ...