Essential Documentaries

Essential Documentaries

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

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Essential Documentaries
  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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,...

  • 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...

  • Parkland of Decay and Fantasy

    Directed by Chenliang Zhu | 101 mins | 2022
    Technology and spirituality are parallel forces in an abandoned and possibly haunted Chinese amusement park once taken over by outsider artists. If it is true that at the moment of death, consciousness sends out its last waves of thought into the univer...

  • Physician, Heal Thyself

    Directed by Asher Penn | 79 mins | 2023
    "Physician, Heal Thyself" offers a searingly intimate portrait of the celebrated expert on addiction, stress, and trauma, Gabor Maté. The documentary follows Gabor’s life’s journey, from his start as a young contrarian to a contemporary icon still strugglin...

  • 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...

  • 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

    Leaving November 1

    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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...