Television Feature length documentaries

I've seen lots of recommendations for Blackfish, but I saw Free Willy as a kid. I think I get the point without seeing it. Would you all agree?
 
Marina Abramovic - The Artist is Present

Amazing and moving look at the life of the "grandmother" of performance art, Marina Abramovic, culminating in her 2010 show at New York's MOMA, "The Artist is Present." Well worth a watch, and it's hard not to come away feeling affected by this extraordinary Serbian artist.

"mother took complete military-style control of me and my brother. I was not allowed to leave the house after 10 o'clock at night till I was 29 years old. ... [A]ll the performances in Yugoslavia I did before 10 o'clock in the evening because I had to be home then. It's completely insane, but all of my cutting myself, whipping myself, burning myself, almost losing my life in the firestar, everything was done before 10 in the evening."
 
Im watching Craiglist Joe on Netflix at the moment, it is putting my faith back into humanity at the moment to be honest, people can be incredible.

 
I re-watched Streetwise a while back. I’m sure it’s already been mentioned but it’s still very much worth a watch. Even though I remembered bits, it’s a bit disorientating to start with lots of noise and different people, before it settles in and starts to focus on a certain few and their stories.

A pretty good interview for after you’ve watched it. A followup on film Tiny's life since, is being made.

Also watched a couple of Martin Bell’s other films for the first time. Prom (just short interviews with American teens whilst they’re being photographed for prom) - which was great. There’s no way to phrase this in a way that doesn’t deserve the two fingers down the throat gesture, but it seemed like the perfect balance to the everyday impression of teenagers being dicks. And Alexander, a short film about life for an Icelandic couple and their heavily disabled son. It was good just for being neither especially mawkish nor cheaply sentimental. There was a great bit showing sound therapy with a stringed instrument that doubled as a cot, so a child could be rocked whilst feeling the vibrations.

Have also seen that Marina Abramovic documentary Nobby mentioned above, it is brilliant; and that criterion package of different documentaries and clips of Martha Graham. The American Masters doc. isn't a bad overview of her career but all the extras are incredible. The recorded rehearsals/instructional videos with her narration are really cool to watch, & an interview with dancers from her company is good too. There's also an amazing breakdown of the tv film of Appalachian Spring, compared with theatre footage of her dancing it a decade earlier.
 
LoveInTheAsylum said:
I re-watched Streetwise a while back. I’m sure it’s already been mentioned but it’s still very much worth a watch. Even though I remembered bits, it’s a bit disorientating to start with lots of noise and different people, before it settles in and starts to focus on a certain few and their stories.

A pretty good interview for after you’ve watched it. A followup on film Tiny's life since, is being made.

Also watched a couple of Martin Bell’s other films for the first time. Prom (just short interviews with American teens whilst they’re being photographed for prom) - which was great. There’s no way to phrase this in a way that doesn’t deserve the two fingers down the throat gesture, but it seemed like the perfect balance to the everyday impression of teenagers being dicks. And Alexander, a short film about life for an Icelandic couple and their heavily disabled son. It was good just for being neither especially mawkish nor cheaply sentimental. There was a great bit showing sound therapy with a stringed instrument that doubled as a cot, so a child could be rocked whilst feeling the vibrations.

Have also seen that Marina Abramovic documentary Nobby mentioned above, it is brilliant; and that criterion package of different documentaries and clips of Martha Graham. The American Masters doc. isn't a bad overview of her career but all the extras are incredible. The recorded rehearsals/instructional videos with her narration are really cool to watch, & an interview with dancers from her company is good too. There's also an amazing breakdown of the tv film of Appalachian Spring, compared with theatre footage of her dancing it a decade earlier.
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Turns out Marina Abramovic is going to present a similar if not the same performance featured in this documentary in London this summer. I will be in London this summer as well with my french girlfriend and will definitely check it out. Can't wait to sit in front of her and look into her eyes. Seems like a very powerful experience.
 
Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction - A short and intimate look into his rich life that still left him shrouded in mystery a bit, thankfully...An American movie isn't quite an American movie without Stanton in it.
 
Stories We Tell - Sarah Polley (2012)

Not really a fan of the Canadian Sarah Polley's acting nor her direction, but on this documentary she really pulls off an incredible piece of film and storytelling. She has the massive cojones to remove the shroud of her own families secret history, and gets them to whole heartedly participate in what becomes an amazing act of living art. Sort of a very personal, intense journalism. Fair play to her. She really blew me away with this.
 
I don't know if anyone has mentioned this… but The Ambassador might be the most mind boggling documentary I have ever seen. It is also quite comical at times. Very good watch
 
Currently watching I Know That Voice , documentary about voice actors

As a big fan of animations, it's great to put a face on the voices
 
The Central Park 5.

Wrong place, wrong time.....and some fairly shocking police work to boot.
 
I'm sure some people will hate this and say "Grrrr, those crazy bastards should die, look at all the havoc they're causing. I hate cyclists" but I really enjoyed watching this, great soundtrack to go with it too.

Lucas Brunelle - Line of Sight

 
A mini series rather than a feature length but last week I watched Stephen Hawking's Universe and it was very good. Did exactly what it said on the tin, basically, it kind of blew me away but only in the way I knew it would because of the subject matter. But easy to understand - OK quite a bit went over my head but I caught enough to make it worthwhile. Quite an achievement to translate that subject into language someone like me can understand. Kind of whetted my appetite for a bit more of it to be honest but I fear if I try and dig deeper into the subject Ill quickly get out of my depth.
 
Artifact - It was originally meant to be a simple documentary of the creation of 30 Second to Mars' new album, but within a couple of days of filming they were hit with a $30m lawsuit and got involved in a David v Goliath legal battle with the record company. It used that as an entry point into the discussion about how the current record company-artist relationship is a broken system, about how the record companies started taking bigger and bigger %'s of artist' merchandising, touring and even non-musical performances to compensate for dying record sales and ultimately how artists' can make millions in sales and somehow manage to end up in more debt with the record company then when they first started off, broke and in need of a helping hand.

Jared Leto's a douchebag and they could have dug a bit deeper into the proposed solutions but it's an interesting watch.

Good ol' Freda - A pretty simple documentary about Freda Kelly, the secretary for the Beatles from beginning to end. Described as "possibly the last true story about the people who were on the other side of Beatlemania". Ends on a very poignant note about the fallacy of fame and all its glories. Nothing groundbreaking but decent enough.

Inequality for All - Former US secretary of labour Robert Reich talks a bit about the growing income inequality in the US. Very engaging speaker and distils the key points nicely. Recommended.

Whores Glory - Another one of those documentaries giving you an insight into a day in the life of sex workers in Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico. Does the job well despite some of it being oddly voyeuristic. At one point a 14/15-year old girl in Bangladesh musters up the courage to speak honestly about life there while everyone around her is simply saying "I have some good customers, some bad ones...but most of them treat me good", she takes a step back and simply says "We women are actually very unhappy creatures. It's very hard to survive as a woman. Why do women have to suffer this much? Isn't there another path for us?". Heartbreaking to think that in their world there really is no other path, and she may never know a world outside of her own.

On a side note, the setup in Thailand is bizarre. Men walk into a sex shop of some kind, sit down on comfy chairs with a drink in hand and just stare into this glass room at dozens of women with numbers on their shirts for as long as they like, before making their decision and saying "I'll have number 238 please" while the host/announcer speaks into a microphone and says "number 238, come on down". I suppose it's just a slightly creepier version of Take Me Out...just with sex workers and physical and emotional abuse. It's just a much stranger, glossier, more impersonal way of doing it than the others...somehow more modern than the traditional Bangladeshi brothels in the slums, or the drive-by brothels in México, and the fact they're developing new ways to do it makes it somehow more depressing. Ultimately the most depressing thing was obviously just the male attitudes to it all and the regularity of it in some communities.
 
Black Fish.

A doc about Orcas and how they are treated in captivity. Really interesting and shocking.

It's available on Netflix
 
b82REZ said:
Black Fish.

A doc about Orcas and how they are treated in captivity. Really interesting and shocking.

It's available on Netflix
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Ive contemplated watching this many times but just cant bring myself to, animal cruelty is someting I just dont deal with very well, it either makes my blood boil or deeply saddens me. Human cruelty I can watch but animals, nope.
 
It's probably been mentioned but Inside Job. I only saw it a few weeks ago and I really wish I had seen it sooner. Thought it was excellent.
 
Brwned said:
Inequality for All - Former US secretary of labour Robert Reich talks a bit about the growing income inequality in the US. Very engaging speaker and distils the key points nicely. Recommended.
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I watched this a while ago and I thought it was great, very interesting.
 
Running from Crazy - Barbara Kopple (2013)

Ernest Hemingway´s granddaughter, Mariel, reflects over her life and the massive dysfunction in the suicidal Hemingway family, reaching some conclusions like that her Dad, Jack, molested her two older sisters, one who´s a manic depressive, the other who killed herself. An interesting, sad look at a vintage American family marred by tragedy who Mariel compares to the Kennedys, but with mental illness.

I´m sort of a Hemingway groupie, and my brother and I have made the pilgrimage to Ketcham, Idaho where the Hemingways lived and where papa shot himself. Actually met his son Jack and chatted with him for a while. The guy had the ruddy, veiny face of an alcoholic, and now it seems strange and a bit creepy after seeing that his daughter is now accusing him of molesting two of his mentally ill daughters. He´s dead now, so I guess the truth may never be known.

Have always thought the name Ernest Hemingway is one of the most beautiful names in the English language. Fitting of such an important writer.
 
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The House I Live In - a look at the war on drugs and the impact it has had and continues to have on society with the rate of incarceration.

Includes contributions from David Simon who created The Wire.
 
Holocaust: Night will fall

It was on C4 a while back but just finally got round to watching it. Would recommend it highly. Pretty unflinching reportage of the holocaust in some respects but the social history side of it was almost more interesting. Basically documents how the onset of the use of video footage during warfare more or less coincided with the liberation of the death camps, so some grisly footage.
Apparently, the British government got the best regarded documentary maker of his day, Sidney Bernstein, to make a documentary on what they found in the camps. He seems to have got swamped in over 39k hours of footage, including Soviet and US footage and the film got hideously delayed. He got Hitchock involved, the only documentary he worked on, but the film was eventually canned.
It took so long that by then, the Allies more or less wanted to put the Nazi atrocities behind them as the Americans wanted to rebuild Germany and the Soviets emerged as the new demon.
EDIT: And they weren't keen on encouraging sympathy for the jews when the Palestine thing was being settled, but let's sweep that one under the carpet.
 
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The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst

Not a feature-length documentary as such, but a 4 hour documentary in a six part mini-series about an eccentric millionaire property developer from New York who was suspected of killing his wife, his best friend and his neighbour. He admitted to killing (and dismembering) his neighbour in front of a jury but somehow managed to be found innocent of murder and during the course of this documentary he admitted to killing all three of them on tape.

Includes about 2+ hours of Robert Durst and Andrew Jarecki - who previously made a movie about the man, prompting Durst to offer to have an intrerview - in a fairly frank and open interview and a key piece of new evidence is shown to Durst for the first time in this very interview. He was subsequently arrested. Quite similar in style to The Thin Blue Line I suppose. Good investigative journalism, good interview and a lot of nicely shot reconstructed scenes (which the filmmaker's liked just a little bit too much).

Pretty chilling stuff.
 
Brwned said:
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst

Not a feature-length documentary as such, but a 4 hour documentary in a six part mini-series about an eccentric millionaire property developer from New York who was suspected of killing his wife, his best friend and his neighbour. He admitted to killing (and dismembering) his neighbour in front of a jury but somehow managed to be found innocent of murder and during the course of this documentary he admitted to killing all three of them on tape.

Includes about 2+ hours of Robert Durst and Andrew Jarecki - who previously made a movie about the man, prompting Durst to offer to have an intrerview - in a fairly frank and open interview and a key piece of new evidence is shown to Durst for the first time in this very interview. He was subsequently arrested. Quite similar in style to The Thin Blue Line I suppose. Good investigative journalism, good interview and a lot of nicely shot reconstructed scenes (which the filmmaker's liked just a little bit too much).

Pretty chilling stuff.
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Did knowing the ending (which is all over the press) spoil it for you?
 
Hard to say because it's difficult to know how you'd have approached it without knowing the ending. You'd have to think it'd be a bit more dramatic. By the time you've heard him speak about any of the cases you already know he's guilty so I don't think it would've been this incredible reveal anyway, but the story unravels in a very natural and intriguing way and the build-up to the ending is still really quite tense, because while you know the end outcome you don't necessarily know how they got there. Certainly wasn't how I expected it anyway, but then I only saw the headline stories so perhaps that's been covered in the news already too?
 
iSparky said:
Im watching Craiglist Joe on Netflix at the moment, it is putting my faith back into humanity at the moment to be honest, people can be incredible.

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Good docu...but lets be honest, some of those did what they did because the camera was there. But yea for the most part, people are generally good.
 
Brwned said:
Hard to say because it's difficult to know how you'd have approached it without knowing the ending. You'd have to think it'd be a bit more dramatic. By the time you've heard him speak about any of the cases you already know he's guilty so I don't think it would've been this incredible reveal anyway, but the story unravels in a very natural and intriguing way and the build-up to the ending is still really quite tense, because while you know the end outcome you don't necessarily know how they got there. Certainly wasn't how I expected it anyway, but then I only saw the headline stories so perhaps that's been covered in the news already too?
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Cool, thanks. Will watch.
 
Plus one for The Jinx, I thought it was amazing. I didn't hear any spoilers either so it was even better.

Into Eternity: Documentary about all the nuclear waste we're producing and what to do with it. In Finland, they're building an underground repository to store nuclear waste, and this documentary looks at that and how we'll let future generations know whats inside and how we'll warn them; the repository will have to hold the waste for 100,000 years. Very interesting documentary, I'd really recommend it. Starts a tad boring but then turns very interesting and creepy in a way.
 
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