Essential Documentaries

Essential Documentaries

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

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Essential Documentaries
  • A Family Called Abrew

    Directed by Maureen Blackwood | 41 mins | 1992
    Founding member of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective Maureen Blackwood crafts a poignant multi-generational portrait of a Black family with deep roots in Scotland: early in the 20th century, well before the post-World War II arrival of the “Windr...

  • Be Pretty and Shut Up

    Directed by Delphine Seyrig | 112 mins | 1981
    In Hollywood and Paris, Seyrig sits down to talk to some of the most famous actresses in the world—including Juliet Berto, Ellen Burstyn, Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine, Jill Clayburgh, Louise Fletcher, Maria Schneider, Barbara Steele, Viva, Anne Wiazem...

  • Don't Hurry Back: A Diaspora Fable

    Directed by Portia Cobb | 26 mins | 1996
    A five-film shorts program curated by LA Rebellion affiliated-filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis, including works by Pierre Desir ("The Gods and the Thief"), Julie Dash ("Four Women"), Portia Cobb ("Don’t Hurry Back: A Diaspora Fable"), and others.

    “These sho...

  • Even Dwarfs Started Small

    Directed by Werner Herzog | 96 mins | 1970
    The New York Times’ Vincent Canby called Werner Herzog’s mutinous second feature a work of “perverse, uninvolved intelligence”; Harmony Korine has called it “the greatest film ever made.” When a gaggle of little folk run riot at the correctional facility...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • I'm British But...

    Directed by Gurinder Chadha | 30 mins | 1990
    The vivacious, Bhangra-infused debut of "Bend it Like Beckham" (2002) writer-director Gurinder Chadha takes an expansive look at what it means to be British through the eyes of second-generation migrants from Asia. From the participants’ heterogeneous ...

  • Land of Silence and Darkness

    Directed by Werner Herzog | 85 mins | 1971
    After a childhood accident caused her an eventual loss of vision at 15 and hearing at 18, Fini Straubinger spent the next 30 years of life bedridden. But by age 56, when she became the subject of Herzog’s documentary feature, she had found her inner stre...

  • Lessons of Darkness

    Directed by Werner Herzog | 54 mins | 1992
    Saddam Hussein ordered the withdrawal from Kuwait at the end of February, 1991, bringing the Gulf War to a nominal close—but the Iraqi troops would wreak a trail of destruction in their retreat: implementing a scorched earth policy, they set fire to arou...

  • Little Dieter Needs To Fly

    Directed by Werner Herzog | 77 mins | 1997
    In the German-born U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, Herzog seems to have met his match: Dengler too is a wily, tenacious adventurer, a skilled raconteur-philosopher, and a dreamer of dangerous dreams. This gripping documentary has Dengler recount—and reen...

  • Maso and Miso Go Boating

    Directed by Nadja Ringart, Ioana Wieder, Carole Roussopoulos, and Delphine Seyrig | 55 mins | 1975
    1975 has been declared Year of the Woman by the United Nations, prompting popular television Bernard Pivot to host then-Secretary of State for the Condition of Women Françoise Giroud on his program,...

  • My Best Fiend

    Directed by Werner Herzog | 99 mins | 1999
    Amidst insults hurled, tantrums thrown, and some literal shots fired, Herzog’s collaboration with the notoriously explosive Klaus Kinski produced five indelible films, from 1972’s "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" to 1987’s "Cobra Verde". “Every gray hair on m...

  • Nuts!

    Directed by Penny Lane | 79 mins | 2016
    Thanks to a preternatural knack for self-promotion and a commitment to the medical possibilities of goat testicles, John Romulus Brinkley, born into poverty in 1885, acquired fame and fortune and very nearly become the governor of Kansas. Director Penny Lan...

  • Our Nixon

    Directed by Penny Lane | 85 mins | 2013
    Using an array of archival materials including television interviews, Nixon’s secretly recorded White House tapes, and more than 500 reels of long-out-of-circulation Super 8 home movies by presidential aides Dwight Chapin, John Ehrlichman, and H.R. Haldeman...

  • Scum Manifesto

    Directed by Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig | 29 mins | 1976
    A crucial piece of early feminist video art from the Les Insoumuses collective that documents a staged reading of would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas’s notorious misandrist call-to-arms of the same name—the acronym sta...

  • 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...

  • Tehran Without Permission

    Directed by Sepideh Farsi | 83 mins | 2009
    Facing strict restrictions placed on filming by the Iranian government but eager nevertheless to capture the tense atmosphere in the streets of Tehran in the months before the controversial 2009 elections, Farsi began shooting with her Nokia cameraphone ...

  • The Alcohol Years

    Directed by Carol Morley | 50 mins | 2000
    The opening of the Haçienda in 1982 begat a pop culture boom in Manchester, and Carol Morley, then just 16 years old, quickly became one of the club’s legendary party people. But Morley herself barely remembers those drink-drenched years: in this unflinch...

  • 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 Heart of the Angel

    Directed by Molly Dineen | 39 mins | 1989
    Molly Dineen's acclaimed documentary follows 48 hours in the life of London’s Angel tube station in the days before its refurbishment.

  • 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 Pain of Others

    Directed by Penny Lane | 71 mins | 2018
    Taking Leslie Jamison’s 2013 Harper’s essay on Morgellons disease as a jumping off point, Penny Lane here assembles clips of YouTube vloggers claiming to suffer from the controversial disease purposefully and with great care. She draws her title from Susan ...

  • 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...