Now Streaming on Kanopy

A tragicomic glimpse inside a traditional Iranian dating agency, The Broker introduces us to Mrs. Sadri and her cadre of female employees who are determined to find their clients a husband, at all costs. The documentary offers an acute reminder that the fiercest agents of the patriarchy aren't always men.

A new documentary from the groundbreaking filmmakers behind Leviathan, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Caniba reflects on the discomfiting significance of cannibalistic desire in human existence through the prism of one Japanese man, Issei Sagawa, and his mysterious relationship with his brother, Jun Sagawa.

2018 Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary Short Subject, Heaven is an extraordinary documentary, a portrait of artist Mindy Alper, whose astonishing body of work – drawings and sculptures of powerful psychological clarity – reveals a lifetime of struggle with debilitating mental illness.

“In 1946, my great-grandfather murdered a black man named Bill Spann and got away with it.” So begins this acclaimed documentary which takes us on a journey through the American South – interweaving scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird and Rosa Parks’ investigation into the Recy Taylor case – to uncover the truth behind a horrific incident and the societal mores that empowered it.

“In our culture, almost everyone fears death,” says Ram Dass, the noted spiritual guru and author, and one of the subjects in this extraordinary documentary. Directed by John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik, who underwent training as doulas in order to accompany people nearing death, End of Life is a deeply moving, revelatory work that captures the last years of five individuals in the process of dying.

A captivating documentary about the ethics of activism in the modern media age, A River Below examines the efforts of two conservationists in the Amazon – one, a marine biologist, the other, an animal activist and host of a popular National Geographic TV show – whose methods to save the mythical pink river dolphin from extinction trigger unforeseen consequences.

An essential documentary on women tech entrepreneurs, She Started It upends the popular perception of a male-dominated Silicon Valley. Featuring interviews with leading female CEO's and entrepreneurs, it follows four passionate, trailblazing young women as they strive to launch their companies in the ruthlessly competitive world of high tech start-ups.

Embodying the spirit of his poems, the new film from Billy Woodberry, director of Bless Their Little Hearts, is a vivid appreciation of Bob Kaufman, the legendary Beat figure, featuring interviews with his contemporaries, readings, rare photos and footage, and a soundtrack with the likes of Billie Holiday and Ornette Coleman.

Using letters Anna Magdalena Bach wrote to her husband, Johann Sebastian, filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet created one of the most precise, rewarding biopics ever put to screen. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, this masterpiece has been immaculately restored.

One of Straub-Huillet's major films, this adaptation of Schoenberg’s unfinished opera is a thrilling and rigorous consideration of Biblical and archaeological history; set almost entirely within a Roman amphitheater whose history lends every precise line-reading and gesture, every startling camera move and cut, a totalizing force.

Inspired by questions that followed screenings of Sundance winner Last Men in Aleppo, this short documentary (produced by Last Men director Feras Fayyad) is a portrait of ordinary people's lives as they try to live through a normal day in the besieged city of Aleppo.

From the directors of Marwencol, Spettacolo tells the story of a small town in Tuscany that came up with a remarkable way to confront their issues – they turned their lives into a play. Every summer for the past 50 years, their piazza has become their stage and residents of all ages play a part – the role of themselves.

Directed by Michael Almereyda and executive produced by Wes Anderson, a journey through 20th-century Hollywood via the experiences of Hampton Fancher – flamenco dancer, actor, and unlikely producer and screenwriter of Blade Runner - showing how one man's personal journey can shape a medium's future.

From director Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times, Ivory Tower) comes an electrifying portrait of writer and performer Okwui Okpokwasili and her acclaimed one-woman show "Bronx Gothic," a story about two 12-year-old black girls coming of age in the 1980s.

Filmed on the set of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula starring Christopher Lee, Portabella’s masterpiece mixes making-of footage and an electronic soundtrack for an investigation into the figure of the vampire - as both a reflection on fascism and cinema - to create a subversive fever dream of a meta-film.

2018 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad’s breathtaking work – a searing example of boots-on-the-ground reportage – follows the efforts of the internationally recognized White Helmets; ordinary citizens who are the first to rush towards military strikes in the hope of saving lives.

MILWAUKEE 53206 is America’s most incarcerated zip code; 62% of adult males in this mostly African-American community have spent time in a correctional facility. This urgent documentary examines how decades of poverty, unemployment, and a lack of opportunity has contributed to the crisis of mass incarceration in this and other communities across the nation.

With intimate access to the lives of women veterans, After Fire is an observational documentary that throws a spotlight on the human toll of military service - including military sexual trauma, combat injuries and bureaucratic dysfunction - examining the challenges faced by the fastest-growing group of American veterans: women

The first railway line in Thailand was inaugurated in 1893 – a sign of progress and prosperity. Shot over eight years on every active line of the railway system, this extraordinary documentary, produced by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, offers an unprecedented immersion into the country’s past and present.

An exploration of recent social and political upheavals across the Middle East, The Dream of Shahrazad contextualizes these events within a broader historical and cultural legacy by drawing on the famous collection of stories known as “The Arabian Nights."

Forced to flee his country after filming politically sensitive events such as the Saffron Revolution, a Myanmar filmmaker finds himself a refugee amongst refugees in Thailand, where he discovers the plight of fellow migrants working under slavery-like conditions.

Shot over the course of five years, Hugh Gibson's award-winning documentary examines the lives of habitual drug users at an urban health center staffed by both former and current users; expanding into a wide-ranging portrait of the conditions that can nurture addiction and the social and legal structures that surround it.

Assembled from over 100 hours of home movies shot by an unknown man of his family over a period of 7 years and uploaded to Youtube, Fraud is a daringly innovative work – a found footage thriller – that reveals one family’s struggle for the American Dream and the nature of truth in the internet age.

In his first commissioned body of work, Walker Evans travelled to Cuba in 1933 to document life under the Machado regime. Nearly 75 years later, renowned photographers return to Cuba to retrace Evans' footsteps at a new historical tipping point.

The newest work to emerge from Harvard’s groundbreaking Sensory Ethnography Lab, Joana Pimenta’s An Aviation Field is a mesmerizing short film, a ghost story about buried cities, lost civilizations and Western colonialism.

The tormented romance between celebrated poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann – a Holocaust survivor and a daughter of a Nazi party member – is the subject of this innovative documentary in which two actors read from their nearly two decades worth of correspondence.

Referencing the digital display of electric appliances after the power’s been repeatedly cut off, Isiah Medina’s audacious experimental work – one of the most acclaimed in recent years – is a personal meditation on family, friendship and the experience of living in poverty.

Voiced and executive produced by Tilda Swinton, Letters from Baghdad is a visually rich, beautifully crafted documentary that tells the story of Gertrude Bell, who, more influential than her friend and colleague Lawrence of Arabia, shaped the modern Middle East in ways that still reverberate today.

One of the year’s most bracingly original debuts, The Human Surge is a global journey that jumps from Argentina to the Philippines to Mozambique, a road movie that fuses fiction and documentary for a portrait of today’s youth at a time of economic uncertainty and illusory hyper-connection.

Academy Award winning filmmaker Ruby Yang’s My Voice, My Life follows a group of students from underprivileged families who are cast in a musical theater performance. A moving story about the importance of art education in our schools.

From urban farms in Detroit to Native-owned agriculture projects across the midwest to guerrilla gardens in Zurich, Wild Plants is a kaleidoscopic portrait of activists around the world who are creating their own botanic utopias.

In recent years, the town of El Remolino in Chiapas, Mexico has suffered from some of the country's worst flooding. This lyrical documentary surveys the social and ecological impact, from schools that can't open to farms that can no longer operate.

Using found snapshots, diary entries and 16mm Chinese melodramas, filmmaker Jason Byrne resurrects the ghosts of a decommissioned cargo ship - once used to carry coal along the Yangtze - as it crosses the Indian Ocean to be salvaged for scrap.

After returning from Vietnam, Paul bought a mobile home for his family. Unhappy with its construction, he decided to build his own house around it. 38 years, 4 floors and 100 windows later, Paul is nearly finished.

Winner of the Critics Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Oliver Laxe’s stunning new film, Mimosas, is a breathtakingly-shot Western that follows a mysterious caravan transporting a dying sheikh into the Moroccan Atlas Mountains.

Often cited as one of the great documentary achievements, Wang Bing's dazzling tour-de-force — a gripping monologue recounting five decades in the life of a once-ardent socialist in the new China — is a testament to the power of oral history and the strength of one extraordinary woman. Never before available.

Drawing on the work of German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann (1892-1939), filmmaker Jumana Manna sets out in search of the musical diversity of historical Palestine in this magical documentary.

In a remote arctic village, a young Inuk boy's transition into adulthood becomes a quiet and devastating portrait of the issues facing the entire Inuit community in the outstanding documentary Living with Giants

Filmmaker Deborah Stratman recounts eleven episodes in American history — from the violent eviction of the Cherokee to the invention of the nuclear reactor to the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton — to consider how societies are shaped by belief and ideology.

Renowned cinematographer and artist Christopher Doyle celebrates Hong Kong and its people with this vibrant documentary that focuses on the city's residents in their childhood, youth, and old age.

Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Robert Greene's incisive documentary exploring the story of a newswoman who committed a shocking act on live TV in the 1970s is an inquiry into our culture, media, the role of women in society and the workforce.

Beginning with a mining explosion in Mongolia and ending in a ghost city west of Beijing, political documentarian Zhao Liang's visionary new film details the social and ecological devastation behind an economic miracle that may yet prove illusory.

A remarkable record of black life in the 1940s, as found in the films of Spencer Williams, the pioneering African American filmmaker. A new essay by Thom Andersen, director of Los Angeles Plays Itself.

Beginning with Ozu's 1936 The Only Son, Thom Andersen's latest cinematic treat, a documentary short, is an anthology of train arrivals, comprising 26 scenes from movies, 1904-2015.

An inspirational new documentary from Oscar-winner Ruby Yang (The Blood of Yingzhou District), a profile of the renowned Asian Youth Orchestra, founded 25 years ago with the aim of connecting the region’s young people through music.

Conceived as a documentary, director Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden) had to change course when his lead, a humble shepherd turned local hero, passed away during production. The resulting film is a beautiful and fantastical ode to his memory and their beloved country.

An enormous shipping freighter drifts endlessly across the Atlantic Ocean; its' crew toiling tirelessly below. At times resembling a dystopian science-fiction film, this is trenchant commentary on global trade, labor and capitalism.

From Alison Klayman, director of The Brink and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, the remarkable story of Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera, a pioneering abstract painter in the '40s and '50s who only found recognition as she approached her 100th birthday.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, a farmer ekes out a solitary existence within the radiation zone. This astonishing documentary reveals the surreal scope and devastation of the nuclear tragedy, and the stubborn signs of life.

The final year in the life of a small farm in Southern Oregon is vividly captured in this study of a way of life quickly disappearing due to strict government regulations and competition from corporate farms.

Candid, haunted and often shocking interviews with warlords from Liberia’s First Civil War form the core of this transfixing inquiry into Africa’s modern history and the nature and essence of war itself.

Lav Diaz' follow up to his acclaimed Norte, the End of History, is an extraordinary epic examining the conditions that led to the rise of the Marcos regime in 1970s Philippines.

In this remarkable documentary, filmmaker Brett Story excavates the often unseen links and connections that prisons – and our system of mass incarceration – have on communities and industries all around us. Widely acclaimed, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an essential documentary, a portrait of our criminal justice system in which we never see a penitentiary.

Capturing one year in the life of a historic garden, this magnificent documentary is an ode to nature and the delicate, interdependent relationship between man and the natural world.

A bracingly original debut, filmmaker Benjamin Crotty uses the tragicomic plight of a frail young man stranded at a military outpost amid a lascivious band of army wives to craft a queer soap opera for the ages.

This beautiful, evocative documentary captures the life, work and struggle of one of the most original yet under-recognized artists of the 20th century – the writer and visual artist Mu Xin.

A university professor espouses the role of muses in art and literature as a means of romancing his students in this breathtaking new film from the acclaimed director of In the City of Sylvia.

When an isolated village in rural Laos becomes a popular destination for Western tourists, it exposes, in microcosm, the economic and social challenges of our modernizing world.

Can one taste a color or see a sound? This fascinating short documentary explores the brain and a neuro-cognitive phenomenon known as synesthesia where multiples senses are blended together.

One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, a documentary about Robert Frank, the legendary photographer and filmmaker behind the seminal book “The Americans” and landmark films like Pull My Daisy.

A haunting, apocalyptic vision rendered in vivid black & white tableaux, a striking short film from the long-form master, Lav Diaz.

An artful meditation on Colombia's 70-year civil war--and the culture of violence that pervaded every aspect of society--through the marks, traces and images it left behind.

A stunning, dreamlike debut, a country doctor's search for an abandoned child takes him to a mysterious place where past, present and future become one.

An exceptional, inspirational documentary about three gay Palestinian friends in Tel Aviv who form a non-violent group to fight for gender and national equality.

In this wondrous documentary, celebrated filmmaker Jose Luis Guerin peers inside an 18th century painting hidden away in a French cathedral to vividly recount a little-known, but pivotal slave revolt on the high seas.

This documentary on the friendship between these renowned filmmakers explores the connections and divergences in their approach to life and cinema.

Does the Internet dream with our electric memories? What happens to all those photos and videos we upload? A poetic exploration of time, memory and technology.

A beautiful filmed short documentary about the life cycle of the arctic fox. A treat for nature and animal lovers alike.

A courageous, essential portrait of what its like to be gay in Russia today, from Alina Rudnitskaya, one of the country's most important filmmakers. 

A revelatory documentary exploring the physical act of looking; from the work of an eye surgeon to a NASA explorer to a human rights lawyer.

In only his second feature, Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa (Horse Money) brilliantly reworked Jacques Tourneur's classic I Walked with a Zombie into a reflection on his country’s colonial legacy. Never before released in the U.S. and now beautifully restored.

An in-depth look at the secretive world of trend forecasting - how a small group of individuals predict (or in some cases, engineer), the cultural and social trends of tomorrow.

The first film made outside his native Baltimore, a luminous short film exploring place, character and transition from filmmaker Matt Porterfield (Putty Hill).

A richly digressive journey through cinematic history from master cinematic essayist Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself).

With readings by John Berger, Taskafa offers a brilliantly incisive meditation on urban space and city life by investigating the complex history of Istanbul’s street dogs.

A pilot program in which female prisoners work at a nursing home for the elderly and disabled while serving out their sentences.

With striking b&w photography, this acclaimed documentary from Philippine master Lav Diaz takes stock of the devastation caused by typhoon Yolanda.

An evocative short documentary that juxtaposes the solitude and transformation of a political prisoner with the cicada, an insect that spends 17 years underground.

The struggles of a girls soccer team in a mostly hispanic, inner city neighborhood reveals the obstacles that low-income students face in their quest for higher education.

An acclaimed, award winning documentary about the women of a remote mining town in Bolivia where life above ground is just as dangerous as below.

Mahboba Rawi, founder of Mahboba’s Promise, has dedicated her life to helping orphans, widows and schooling girls in Afghanistan. In this documentary, we follow her efforts to challenge centuries-old traditions to make a love marriage happen for a young couple.

The extraordinary story of an ordinary couple who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history.

A fascinating documentary about the men and women who travel to work at an old Soviet settlement in the arctic, where not much has changed in nearly 100 years.

A story of marital intrigue and betrayal set against the backdrop of the Persian New Year from the Academy Award winning director of A Separation.

The utopian dream of public housing is explored in this incandescent, artful documentary.

A singular portrait of a nomadic goat herding family whose livelihood and traditions are being threatened by an increasingly urbanized world.

The mysterious work of Nicola Costantino, one of Latin America’s most controversial and admired artists.

The impact of global industrial overfishing on a small community of fishermen in the Azores is explored in this intimate, beautiful documentary.