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Great, weird, funny at times, worrying at others.

See also Lost in La Mancha

pretty much the most crushing thing like, for longtimezz

http://drownedinsound.com/community/boards/social/4277319

It was really good.

aka Blood Trail. It follows a photojournalist from his rookie days in Sarajevo through to assignments in Chechnya and Iraq. He's a complex and self destructive character, and at times difficult to like, but it's interesting to watch him change over the years. Probably not a good one to watch if you're squeamish.

and Anvil: The Story of Anvil - "you're my fucking brother maaaan"

Former US Secretary of Defense Jon Voight talks about American foreign policy during the 60s and 70s and his role within it. Interesting.

Here's the link so just buy it now: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hoop-Dreams-DVD/dp/B003NEQ76G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309944102&sr=8-1
Other great ones:
The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris
Hearts of Darkness, about the making of Apocalypse Now
Dark Days, about a bunch of homeless guys living in the Amtrak system (with a score by DJ Shadow)
Portrait of Jason (which I wrote about here: http://bit.ly/o8SqDz)
Capturing the Friedmans

Loads more, looking forward to some good recommendations in this list

Pure class, made me want to be an astronaut.

especially the guy eating the rat.

The King Of Kong
Anvil! The Story of Anvil

All of these are brilliant and fantastically funny.

http://thedocumentarian.tumblr.com/post/6144363854/teenage-diaries-in-bed-with-chris-needham-thrash
they post a lot of excellent stuff
http://thedocumentarian.tumblr.com

It's by Werner Herzog, so it sound like it's being narrated by a gruff Terminator. It's about meeting scientists & others who live in Antarctica. Mixes some beautiful shots / nature & some often really funny short interviews.

Although a great documentary about art/it's legitimacy is My Kid Could Paint That, really interesting film.

Hearts and Minds (about the Vietnam War)
Dig! (the Brian Jonestown Massacre/DAndy Warhols thing)
American Movie (some aspiring not too talented Americans try to make a horror movie)

Sigh. (Thanks)

Keep getting put off my the advertising poster which is headed with a giant quote from Jeremy Clarkson.

Don't understand all the publicity/festival bookings/etc that's happened since that came out. They aren't a good band, that's kind of the tragic point.

See also.. 'Armadillo'
Dogtown and Z Boys

evah

Thanks for posting this

Love watching that even though I've never followed or liked either of those groups.

Can't argue with that.

saw it the other day and it was excellent.

Also, Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World is pretty good. Funny people in Antarctica.

and I don't even like formula one or nuffin

Also Deep Water, which I just remembered in that film thread the other day despite it being about 5 years since I saw it. I might buy it myself, it was pretty compelling. It's about the first round-the-world boat race.
Seem to remember* they did a good job of Touching the Void too, although I'd read the book probably about 6 times before I saw it so my opinion may differ from others.

*I certainly don't remember hating it, which I would've done if it was too bad...

But 'of time and the city ' is a really beautiful piece of work.

But 'of time and the city ' is a really beautiful piece of work.

anything by Marc Isaacs
'Lift' is brilliant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJNAvyLCTik but there are longer ones.
all of Errol Morris, especially Mr. Death, Gates of Heaven, Thin Blue Line
Ray Gosling - Whittingham Hospital Asylum is great.
Burden of Dreams - about Fitzcaroldo
Salesman - self explanatory but v. good
Frederick Wiseman - Titticut Follies is my favourite.

semi-documentaries
sleep furiously...
Gallivant

+
The Times of Harvey Milk
The Celluloid Closet
The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife
Hotel Auschwitz

yes you do. festival books novelty act shocker.

Weirdly I too watched Exit Through the Gift shiop last night.
and yes entertaining, but i'm left trying to figure out now real mr brainwash was...

I remember Wisconsin Death Trip being a weird documentary when i saw it a while back.

oh Burden of Dreams was the first suggestion. i am a dick.

All about the cult bad movie Troll 2.

also - pretty much anything by Nick Broomfield

esp - Biggie & Tupac & Aileen Wuornos

A sort of really personal documentary about the hold your hometown can have on you.

oh yeah. i love that movie. My Dad is 100 years old is another good semi-docu-something.

I do understand that festivals book things that people will be interested; I don't understand why people extend a joke beyond its usefulness.

Recommended this to so many people

which adds to the entertainment value i suppose.

the other thing is there are people that genuinely enjoy that kind of music.

I'm going trekking to that waterfall (Kuata Falls?) in less than a month.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/watch-online/

try not to read anything about it beforehand though.

oh, and be prepared to spend the rest of the day on the verge of tears.

while the people he meets are invariably interesting, he's just so po-faced and irritating. i'm sure once upon a time he used to carry his own boom, but he doesn't need to anymore, he somehow thinks it makes him look more "authentic" to be carrying the equipment.

i also hate his voice and the way he intentionally angers people and then is like "i was sensing a lot of hostility so we drove back for the night" YEAH REALLY NICK?

it's interesting to find out where some of the kids got to.

i know he's a mixed bag but he's got some amazing documentaries. thai brides. the brothel. the wrestling one. the neo nazi one.

i also recommend the white stripes documentary. there's a scene at the end where jack plays something to meg on the piano and she cries, it's so touching.

From a Night Porter's Point of View
and The Office is fun too
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ0wS0F6bkQ

and Night and Fog
srt of Sans Soleil. Sort of A.K. but it's a bit dull
Humphrey Jennings - Spare Time is great
Momma Don't Allow etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je24WUx7EcE

O Dreamland.
Henri George Clouzot's L'Inferno
did I not say London/Robinson in Space etc.? weird. they're only semi-docs. but they're great.

It's a very unusual documentary in that everything is shot as a recreation and it puts as much, if not more, emphasis on tone and atmosphere as it does on historical rigour. Cinematography is beautiful, they shot most sequences slightly overcranked so there's a hallucinatory slow-mo quality, and the black and white contrast is lit and processed to resemble old plate photography. It's from the same director as Man On Wire, kind of the film that made his name.

"Last Train Home" from last year was truly heartbreaking and sobering.

I watched "Client 9: The Rise And Fall Of Eliot Spitzer" on a plane the other week too, and that was another great Alex Gibney film. Gibney's pretty great for his recent political works.

He did a recent one about american prisons.

but an excellent film, nevertheless.

The 60s must have been a crazy time. There's footage of a woman walking her pet cheetah through a market.

but Sean Penn's mumbling and sighing style kind of puts me off watching it again.

Grizzly Man (bears)
Dark Days (homeless in the subway)
The Fog of War (WAR!)

'semi-docu-something' is i think the term for it

Marc Isaacs

and was on true stories a couple of months ago under a different name like 'city of dolls' or something. May be on 4od still, but if not check out some other of the true stories as they are ace

Marathon Boy is ace about a 5 year old marathon runner. i dont think its amazingly rated on imdb, but i thought it was ace and kinda shocking

always makes me think of Match! magazine or something

amazing documentry on the Minutemen, really sad in parts.

http://www.plexifilm.com/title.php?id=all

give a very brief synopsis ffs

Marc Isaacs - Lift/Travellers/Calais - all sad, touching docs just interveiwing the various people in the lift in a london block of flats, people getting trains, and people arriving/leaving Britain.

Titicut Follies/Whittingham Hospital Asylum are both about mental hospitals and are both sad/bleak/touching

Mr. Death - about a man who designed electric chairs then got caught up in his own mythology and became a holocaust denier, that idiots still reference today.

Salesman - doc using lots of handheld cameras showing the lives of 4 door-to-door bible salesman. really good.

The Times of Harvey Milk/The Celluloid Closet -
first is about Harvey Milk, second is a film about presentations of gayness in Hollywood. some pretty great archive footage some really good and some slightly dodgy readings.

Spare Time - doc about pre-war working class hobbies. lots of slightly eccentric genius.
HGC's L'Inferno - doc about Clouzot trying to make his big magnus opus but never getting it done, interspersed w/ weird clips taken from said film.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/chris-petits-content/episode-guide/series-1/episode-1
gone from 4od now though :(

Thirty years ago, Chris Petit directed Radio On, now considered a road movie cult classic which caught the zeitgeist of the Britain of the time.

Now showing in the True Stories strand, Content is described by Petit as, "an ambient 21st century road movie", a meditative essay inspired by the almost trancelike state the act of driving can bring.

With the narrative provided by Hanns Zischler, the film is variously about memories of other journeys from Texas through to Poland, the impact of modern technology and the rise of the huge impersonal factory sheds which now line roads throughout the world.

Otherwise just watch King Of Kong, it's the best. Still hate Billy Mitchell.

but it was good. And it's about the best film for 'describe your penis with a movie title'.

and I knew feck all about the subject matter!

Not just one of the best docos ever, one of the best films ever.

Also in the O-jesus-I-can't-watch-but-I-also-can't-tear-my-eyes-away category there's Grey Gardens, one of the most amazing human trainwreck docos you'll ever see. Hard to sit through, but pretty unforgettable.

I was quite a big fan of Radio on...truly Sting's finest hour

"i'm sure once upon a time he used to carry his own boom, but he doesn't need to anymore, he somehow thinks it makes him look more "authentic" to be carrying the equipment."

Well, you could easily argue that actually just having a very small crew (maybe there's just 2 people filming) allows more intimacy and trust with their subjects, who might baulk at the number of crew otherwise. It's fairly common to have one person on camera and the director interviewing with boom.

I see what u did there...

Say hi to Marc Anthony if you see him.

^

i think that's pretty influenced by London/Robinson in Space as well which is even less of a documentary but very good. especially if you like boring movies. here is a short spoiler-free excerpt for anyone who may be interested
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v84byeueCBI

and come on that isn't boring, it's only surface boring designed to scare people off.

from what i've seen anyway. Really funny. A cinema up here is going to show it soon which is very exciting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwatch
Ghostwatch is a British reality–horror/mockumentary television movie, first broadcast on BBC1 on 31 October (Halloween), 1992.

Despite having been recorded weeks in advance, the narrative was presented as 'live' television. Due to the furore that followed its first and only UK television broadcast, the show is now widely regarded as being one of the most controversial British television events of all time.
Written by Stephen Volk, and directed by Lesley Manning, the drama was produced for the BBC anthology series, Screen One, by Richard Broke, Ruth Baumgarten and Derek Nelson.
As yet, Ghostwatch has only ever been repeated on television outside of the UK - on stations such as the Canadian digital channel SCREAM for Halloween 2004, and the Belgian channel Canvas in 2008. Ghostwatch received a huge audience and an estimated 30,000 calls to the BBC switchboard in a single hour.[1] In 2002, the British Film Institute released a 10th Anniversary edition on VHS and DVD.

exactly. that's why i warned people off the bat

On youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPTDHEeLI0A

Documentary on the Friedmans, a seemingly typical, upper-middleclass Jewish family whose world is instantly transformed when the father and his youngest son are arrested and charged with shocking and horrible crimes.

Definitely worth a watch.

It's meant to be really heavy going right?

But just an incredible watch, especially when you see why it was all being filmed in the first place compared to the subject matter...

Hurry up and watch it, most definitely worth it.

just got round to watching this documentry on Arthur Russell. it was really good, i was nearly greeting like a wee girl at the end.

One Day in September
Last Train Home

all very good

is the extra DVD that comes with it, in which you find out the story of how the guys that made it originally set out to make a doco about birthday party clowns in New York City, and accidentally stumbled on the whole Friedmans paedophilia story, so decided to make the film about that instead.

and not sure if this falls into documentary category but The Great White Silence is amazing

Kind of turns the whole genre on its head.

pretty sure I fell asleep during, but that doesn't mean I can't recommend it

I think it's just photos and the newspaper cuttings but it sounds cool

you can watch it here-http://www.nfb.ca/film/carts_of_darkness/
surprised no one has mentioned Paradise Lost:The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/carts_of_darkness/

you've just given it away. but yeah, that disc is great although its made pretty clear in the actual film why it is they're filming in the first place if I remember correctly?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0832903/

:"(

I went to this and it had a lot of good stuff http://docpoint.info/en

Anything Herzog has been anywhere near is definitely worth watching.

My favourite documentary is about Laibach.

sounds brilliant. Thanks for the tip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Threads:_Stories_from_the_Quilt

Utterly heartbreaking.

has anyone fallen in love w/ Marc Isaacs' movies yet?

http://www.dshed.net/patrick-keiller-conversation

oh this sounds cool. love Anselm Kiefer. don't know how i missed it

watched 'Carts Of Darkness' and 'Dear Zachary' in the last two days. The latter has ruined me.

oh good. you won't be disapointed.

i've never seen either of those actually. i love this cool little interactive game thing by the film board of canada http://blabla.nfb.ca/ tho.

in different ways. I cant even function because of Dear Zachary.

Mugabee and the White African

Jesus fucking Christ :(

Most devastating thing I've seen for a very long time, possible ever.

So disturbing, I'm really not sure how to feel about the whole thing, sickened and repulsed but overwhelmingly just really, really sad.

How and why some of that footage exists is beyond me, what an absolutely insane dynamic for a family to have.

Just terrible.

Really quite disturbing though. You might not think it at the time but it'll stay with you

you can watch this amazing film
http://www.ithinkwerealonenow.com/

"50 Docs To See Before You Die" is on tonight

http://tv.sky.com/50-documentaries-to-see-before-you-die

(Flaming Lips doc)

by John Pilger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_You_Don%27t_See) about the role of the news media in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the Israel/Palestine conflict. Interesting.

about the chimp

its about the Insane Clown Posse and their batshit fans and this festival they have every year. it starts off like a music festival and ends up a dayglo-soda soaked vision of the end times.

"The Cruise".

Brilliant, life-affirming portrait of eccentric NY tour guide guy Timothy "Speed" Levitch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1NeLDTvzQ&feature=related

yeah.

schedule of what's being shown: http://current.com/groups/videos/93364457_50-documentaries-to-see-before-you-die-throughout-august-on-current-tv.htm

The Imposter is one of the best films I've seen this year, incredible story in the purest sense of the word.

Also, any good recommendations for conspiracy/cover up type stuff?

Bobby Fischer v The World - great stuff, even if you don't understand/enjoy chess. Not seen a better film about someone treading the fine line between genius and madness.
Also looking forward to seeing The Imposter: looks amazing

fascinating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzLjFfSmpuo

World leading factual production company, Darlow Smithson (DSP), today announced that it has been commissioned by BBC Three in conjunction with BBC Learning to produce a two part drama series, inspired by real life events.

One Day Like This (working title) dramatizes the events surrounding a fatal car crash which devastated a small community. Set in a town in England, the series is based on extensive interviews and research and tells the story of the collision from the point of view of the people involved.

Starring Sasha Parkinson (Coronation Street), Georgina Henshaw (Waterloo Road), Lewis Rainer (Dani's House) and Lily Loveless (Skins), One Day Like This (working title) will launch on BBC Three in 2013.

Oh that Bobby Fischer doc is great.

Never go to Winnipeg. The equivalent would be for a Canadian to go on holiday in the UK and spend a week in Stevenage.

Think they might struggle for a theme song though

I have an adverse reflex action whenever BBC Three gets mentioned. Can't help it. The first thought that goes through my mind is Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps.

That said, this sounds like it will be more grown-up