Many have argued that Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts’ immensely powerful For Sama, and not the winner Steven Bognar and Julia Reichart’s American Factory, should have been awarded Best Documentary earlier this year at the Academy Awards. Two films about...
It’s impossible not to sob nor shed a tear in Chris Bolan’s A Secret Love, Netflix’s latest documentary about two lesbians who kept their relationship a secret since the 1940s. During their younger years, female baseball players Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel had to...
While many documentaries have been made about the Syrian conflict, there’s nothing like For Sama, its power, loyalty to the truth, and strong journalistic instincts to efficiently send its message. Waad Al-Kateab was just eighteen when she first documented the civil...
At the heart of Laura Nix’s excellent documentary short Walk, Run, Cha-Cha (2020) is an earnest immigration story of a Vietnamese couple. Paul Cao was a young adult when the war in his home country Vietnam happened, forcing him to leave his girlfriend Millie to go to...
In The Kingmaker, Lauren Greenfield continues to delve deep in the theme of excess and its consequences by documenting Imelda Marcos, the First Lady to former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. Imelda, alongside her husband Ferdinand, has been notorious for...
The most terrifying aspect of Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans lies within its end credits. When the series of interviews and archival footage was laid down and presented –with hopes to draw a clearer vision to a family’s biggest cause of dysfunction – the...
For many Filipinos, working abroad is more of a necessity than something they want in the first place. To be physically distant from loved ones – to spend months and even years alongside a community with different sets of values, culture, and principles – is...
Joshua Oppenheimer’s Act of Killing (2012) paints a haunting recreation of the Indonesian mass killings during the late 1960s, allowing the perpetrators of the actual murders to speak about their previous doings in their preferred fashion. The documentary was a...
Apocalypse Now (1979), Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War movie about a man’s descent into madness to finish a mission, is very reflective of how it was made. Since it began its production in 1976, Coppola’s project was doomed to fail – like a ticking time bomb that...
Netflix’s break-out documentary last 2019, Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, is an investigative thriller that purely hangs on the idea that the best types of mysteries are solved through collaboration. When a video of a man abusing his cat surfaces,...
There is a group in Syria that functions as the immediate responders when an attack happens within a community. They are essentially superheroes who leaps away to help a civilian in the most immediate time possible, going through enormous amounts of rubbles to reach...
Rayka Zehtabchi’s Oscar-winning Period. End of Sentence. is an appeal for change. While hard to believe, the concept of menstruation in some parts of India is still considered taboo. In New Delhi, women of all ages have treated this big part of their femininity as...
It can be argued that Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera can be classified as a documentary. The makings of documentation are there, flashing various footages of the industrial landscape of Russia during the 1920s, capturing streets and avenues without being too...
You can’t help but wonder what would happen if professional racing driver Ayrton Senna had survived his fatal crash in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. His short-lived career was already a huge feat to accomplish, from having won the World Championship three times to...
Benjamin Nolot’s Liberated: The New Sexual Revolution is an unflinching observation of today’s hook-up culture, largely contributed by a generation who has continued to be less conservative about their lifestyle. At the start, the documentary claims that the popular...
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