Popular Documentary Movies on Kanopy - Page 262

The Poetry of Exactitude

2009

The Poetry of Exactitude

2009
Since 1946, Lucien Mouchet has been making small-scale reproductions of carousels and fairground scenes that existed in the past or are still in operation today. A machinist by trade, Mouchet retired nearly two decades ago, but his obsession with precision and detail has continued. To date, he has created 48 carousels; each is a functioning masterpiece that is constructed to be exactly 1/20 scale of the original. Mouchet works from photographs and measurements he has taken over the years of carousels that have toured France and across Europe. Mouchet tediously prepares shop drawings and hand-tooled parts, analyzing the different modes of assembly and the varying principles of movement. He combines an expertise in engineering with whimsical recreations of the carnival atmosphere, replete with electrical motors, lights, signage, transport trucks and miniature people, made by him and hand-painted by his wife, Georgette.
Araucaria Araucana

2018

Araucaria Araucana

2018
8
In the Southern Andes, a living being survives since 200 million years: the "Araucaria Araucana" with its incredible history, little known and forever linked to an Amerindian people of Chile: Pehuenches. This isolated community survived during centuries thanks to the Araucarias. A perfect harmony between man and nature, forever upset by the invasion of the Spanish colonists, the conflicts of territories and the increase of logging. Protected today, this sacred forests are the refuge of a unique and wild nature; but fires threaten this balance. What remain of these people and the link with this tree? What can they teach us about our environmental problems?
A Death in St. Augustine

2013

A Death in St. Augustine

2013
6
On the night she broke up with her boyfriend, a Florida deputy sheriff, Michelle O'Connell was found dead from a gunshot in the mouth. Next to her was her boyfriend's semi-automatic service pistol. The sheriff's office called it suicide, but was it? FRONTLINE and The New York Times investigate this death of a young, single mother, and what can go wrong when the police are faced with domestic violence allegations within their own ranks.
10 Buildings That Changed America

2013

10 Buildings That Changed America

2013
10 Buildings that Changed America presents 10 trend-setting works of architecture that have shaped and inspired our American landscape. These aren’t just historic structures by famous architects. These buildings have dramatically influenced our built environment in many ways – and in one case, for over two centuries.
Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi

2015

Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi

2015
7.5
A fragile and depressed university student disappears from his apartment in the middle of a cold winter's night. Four weeks later his name and photo explode across social media and into the mainstream media as 'suspect 2' in the Boston Marathon bombings. The search for truth by citizen journalists, mainstream journalists and members of social media Web sites derails with tragic consequences as collective fear and suspicion rule the day and rain down upon a vulnerable family. Exclusive access and never released footage reveal the enduring love of a family in crisis.
Healing a Soldier's Heart

2015

Healing a Soldier's Heart

2015
Healing a Soldier’s Heart transports us into the troubled hearts and minds of four Vietnam veterans as they begin the courageous healing process to alleviate their severe PTSD. Still traumatized 40 years later, the veterans bravely journey back to the sites where they witnessed and committed atrocities of war. In the process, they come face to face with victims and experience Vietnamese culture through a new lens that fosters the compassion and the mutual forgiveness necessary for healing.
Whispers of Angels: A Story of the Underground Railroad

2002

Whispers of Angels: A Story of the Underground Railroad

2002
Combining archival photographs, interviews with historians and dramatic reenactments starring Blair Underwood and Ed Asner, this documentary recounts the gripping story of the Civil War-era Underground Railroad that shepherded slaves to freedom. Harriet Tubman, Thomas Garrett and William Still, whose tireless public efforts and clandestine activities kept the Railroad running, are among the abolitionist personalities highlighted.
Emptying the Skies

2015

Emptying the Skies

2015
6.3
If you want to impress your dining companions in Cyprus, it's not caviar that you order, but ambelopoulia: a tiny songbird. But as this gripping doc reveals, the cost to bring such delicacies to the table is enormous. Bestselling novelist Jonathan Franzen takes a break from the world of fiction to guide us through an all too horrifying reality: tens of millions of protected migratory songbirds are illegally killed every year. Franzen, a longtime bird lover, accompanies young staffers of the Committee Against Bird Slaughter on their expeditions. With police enforcement in Southern Europe practically non-existent, they risk their lives to rescue trapped birds, and confront hostile poachers. It's a topic that proves a cultural flashpoint -- the Cypriot landowners cannot understand why a bunch of Italians can tell them what to do on their land.
Broken on All Sides

2012

Broken on All Sides

2012
The project began as a way to explore, educate about, and advocate change around the overcrowding in the Philadelphia jail system. It has come to focus on mass incarceration across the nation and the intersection of race, poverty, and the criminal justice and penal systems. The documentary centers around Michelle Alexander's theory in her book, The New Jim Crow: since the rise of the drug war and explosion of prison populations, because discretion within the system allows for prosecution of people of color at disproportionately high rates, mass incarceration is a new version of Jim Crow. The movie also dissects the War on Drugs and 'tough on crime' movement, and offers possible reforms and solutions to ending mass incarceration and this new racial caste system.
How Smart Are Animals?

2011

How Smart Are Animals?

2011
9
Investigates animal intelligence in dogs, dolphins, and cephalopods. It also profiles Irene Pepperberg and her talking parrot Alex.
Yorky Billy

1980

Yorky Billy

1980
YORKY BILLY is set in Ngurgdu (Spring Peak) in the Northern Territory, an area irrevocably disturbed by uranium mining. There, 80-year-old William Alderson (known as "Yorky Billy") reflects on his life in the outback. Yorky's mother was an Aboriginal woman who died when he was three, and his father was an Englishman who spent 45 years in Australia and "tried everything" as a prospector, railwayman, drover and buffalo hunter, often with his young son working with him. After the WWII, Yorky married an Aboriginal woman and worked in various jobs. He and his wife had a large family, and in 1977, Yorky Billy recorded his story and died soon thereafter, and was buried near his father at Ngurgdu. Filmed simply with minimal editing, this is a poignant, elegiac reflection on a disappearing way of life, capturing Yorky's slow and quiet rhythm of speech, his wry humour, and with his weather-beaten face only just emerging from the deep shadows inside his corrugated iron shack.
China's Artful Dissident

2019

China's Artful Dissident

2019
8
Follows a Chinese political artist in exile, on a personal challenge to stop the Communist regime's whitewashing of history and abuse of human rights - and in the process, risking his family's freedom.
95 and 6 to Go

2016

95 and 6 to Go

2016
6
Filmmaker Kimi Takesue captures the cadence of daily life for Grandpa Tom, a retired postal worker born to Japanese immigrants to Hawai’i in the 1910s. Amidst the solitude of his home routines — coupon clipping, rigging an improvised barbecue, lighting firecrackers on the New Year — we glimpse an unexpectedly rich inner life.
Cuban Missile Crisis: Three Men Go to War

2012

Cuban Missile Crisis: Three Men Go to War

2012
Explore the inside story of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear holocaust. In the first major feature documentary on the subject, the film brings to life the three central characters - Kennedy, Castro and Khrushchev - and explores how the world's most powerful men fell into an abyss of their own making and outlines the courage and luck it took to climb out again.
Burning Daylight

2007

Burning Daylight

2007
Burning Daylight is a dance/film project. The performance is set from late one night until dawn in a transit zone outside a notorious pub on a Broome-style Karaoke night. A series of contemporary dance scenes unfold expressing the...
Love in Bright Landscapes

2022

Love in Bright Landscapes

2022
An engrossing portrait of the rise and untimely demise of David McComb, the virtuosic frontman of Australian rock band The Triffids.
Burma Diary

1997

Burma Diary

1997
This acclaimed documentary explores the revolutionary movement fighting for democracy in Burma and depicts how young people, in particular, are affected by the human rights abuses of Burma’s military government. Burma Diary focuses on the story of Tint Aung, a young Burmese man who was actively involved in the protest movement while in college. He is forced to flee from his home and take refuge in the jungles of the Burmese-Thailand border along with his wife and his two young daughters. As the film chronicles four harsh years of Tint Aung’s struggle to survive, it provides a passionate and at times heartbreaking study of the hopes of and the obstacles facing the Burmese democracy movement.
Two for the Opera Box

2021

Two for the Opera Box

2021
2.5
In the Hollywood's studio system, sets and equipment were used over and over again. Maybe this is why movies seem to have a dream logic today. A feeling of déjà vu as if we have already been there - and sometimes we have.
Sylvie of the Sunshine State

2022

Sylvie of the Sunshine State

2022
Second grader Sylvie navigates the absurdities and emotional turbulence of her eccentric, multigenerational Jewish matriarchy, a dad who lives far away and life gone virtual, seen through the lens of her filmmaker single mom.
Thomas Sankara

1991

Thomas Sankara

1991
6
Captain Thomas Sankara was the leader of the Burkinabe Revolution. This film is a biographical profile of the revolutionary, the improvements he generated in his country and the new socio-political dimension he instituted in Burkina Faso.