Must Watch Documentaries

In the eastern Congo lies Virunga National Park, one of the most bio-diverse places on Earth and home to the planet’s last remaining mountain gorillas. In this wild environment, a small and embattled team of park rangers - including an ex-child soldier turned ranger, a caretaker of orphan gorillas and a dedicated conservationist who’s a member of the Belgian royal family - protect this UNESCO world heritage site from armed militia, poachers and the dark forces struggling to control Congo's rich natural resources. When the M23 rebel group declares war, a new conflict threatens the lives and stability of everything they've worked so hard to protect, with the filmmakers and participants are caught in the crossfire. A powerful combination of investigative journalism and nature documentary, VIRUNGA is the incredible true story of a group of courageous people risking their lives to build a better future in a part of Africa the world’s forgotten, and a gripping exposé of the realities of life in the Congo.

For a nation that proudly declared it would leave no child behind, America continues to do so at alarming rates. Despite increased spending and politicians’ promises, our buckling public education system, once the best in the world, routinely forsakes the education of millions of children. Oscar®-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim reminds us that education “statistics” have names whose stories make up the engrossing foundation of Waiting for “Superman.” As he follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, Guggenheim undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying “drop-out factories” and “academic sinkholes,” methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems. However, embracing the belief that good teachers make good schools, Guggenheim offers hope by exploring innovative approaches taken by education reformers and charter schools that have—in reshaping the culture—refused to leave their students behind.

Winner of the 77th annual Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. A tribute to the resiliency of childhood and the restorative power of art, Born into Brothels is a portrait of several unforgettable children who live in the red light district of Calcutta, where their mothers work as prostitutes. Zana Briski, a New York-based photographer, gives each of the children a camera and teaches them to look at the world with new eyes.

Bill Maher interviews some of religion's oddest adherents. Muslims, Jews and Christians of many kinds pass before his jaundiced eye. Maher goes to a Creationist Museum in Kentucky, which shows that dinosaurs and people lived at the same time 5000 years ago.

The words "health care" and "comedy" aren't usually found in the same sentence, but in Academy Award winning filmmaker Michael Moore's new movie 'SiCKO,' they go together hand in (rubber) glove. While Moore's 'SiCKO' follows the trailblazing path of previous hit films, the Oscar-winning BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE and all-time box-office documentary champ FAHRENHEIT 9/11, it is also something very different for Michael Moore.

RESTREPO is a feature-length documentary that chronicles the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. A Film by Sebastian Junger & Tim Hetherington.

Korengal - A feature-length follow up to RESTREPO.

Shot on board with the paramedics of Pretoria and Johannesburg, "Tell Me And I Will Forget" illuminates the new social challenges in South Africa, 15 years after the end of its oppressive Apartheid era. Desperate human circumstance and a wave of violent crime have put immense pressure on the medical system, which is now as divided as the country's dual economy.

One of the most controversial and provocative films of the year, Fahrenheit 9/11 is Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore's searing examination of the Bush administration's actions in the wake of the tragic events of 9/11. Moore considers the presidency of George W. Bush and where it has led us. He looks at how - and why - Bush and his inner circle avoided pursuing the Saudi connection to 9/11, despite the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis and Saudi money had funded Al Qaeda. Fahrenheit 9/11 shows us a nation kept in constant fear by FBI alerts and lulled into accepting a piece of legislation, the USA Patriot Act, that infringes on basic civil rights. It is in this atmosphere of confusion, suspicion and dread that the Bush Administration makes its headlong rush towards war in Iraq and Fahrenheit 9/11 takes us inside that war to tell the stories we haven't heard, illustrating the awful human cost to U.S. soldiers and their families.

The cocaine trade of the 70s and 80s had an indelible impact on contemporary Miami. Smugglers and distributors forever changed a once sleepy retirement community into one of the world's most glamorous hot spots, the epicenter of a $20 billion annual business fed by Colombia's Medellin cartel.

Not exactly a traditional documentary, but educational and enlightening nonetheless. Based on Christopher Buckley's acclaimed 1994 novel of the same title and adapted for the screen by Jason Reitman, Thank You for Smoking is a fiercely satirical look at today's culture of spin! Aaron Eckhart stars as Nick Naylor, a sexy, charismatic spin-doctor for Big Tobacco who'll fight to protect America's right to smoke - even if it kills him.

The hit of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED is an unprecedented undercover investigation into the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) film ratings system and its profound impact on American culture. Featuring insightful and often hilarious interviews with John Waters, Matt Stone, Mary Harron, Kimberly Peirce, Atom Egoyan, and Kevin Smith, the film reveals how the ratings system restricts the exhibition independent and foreign films, gay themed films, and rates sexuality much more harshly than violence. Maintaining power through secrecy, the MPAA refuses to let the public know even the names of the people who rate the films. To overcome that secrecy, the filmmakers team up with a female private investigator and follow her as she goes deep inside the ratings system – what they discovered compelled the MPAA to finally make long overdue changes to its ratings system.

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults. Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

The impact of An Inconvenient Truth is unprecedented. Since its release in 2005, the film has helped to galvanize governments, leaders, organizations and individuals worldwide to take action on global warming. More than a billion people are now aware of the issue and have been motivated to act.

The KONY 2012 campaign started as an experiment. Could an online video make an obscure war criminal famous? And if he was famous, would the world work together to stop him? The experiment yielded the fastest growing viral video of all time.

Oscar-winning film director Kevin Macdonald's Life in a Day was born out of a unique partnership between Ridley Scott's Scott Free UK and YouTube. The film is a user-generated, feature-length documentary shot on a single day—July 24, 2010. Enlisted to capture a moment of the day on camera, the global community responded by submitting more than 80,000 videos to YouTube. The videos contained over 4,500 hours of deeply personal, powerful moments shot by contributors from Australia to Zambia, and from the heart of bustling major cities to some of the most remote places on Earth. Life in a Day brings together the most compelling footage from YouTube to create a 90-minute film crafted by Macdonald, executive producer Ridley Scott, producer Liza Marshall, and their teams. The film offers a unique experience that shows—with beauty, humor, and joyful honesty—what it's like to be alive on Earth today.

BHOPALI: A documentary by Van Maximilian Carlson about the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster of Bhopal, India.

A 2008 documentary film that explores the contemporary experience of childbirth in the United States. Produced by Ricki Lake, it compares various childbirth methods, including midwives, natural births, epidurals, and Cesarean sections. The film criticizes the American health care system with its emphasis on medicines and costly interventions and its view of childbirth as a medical emergency rather than a natural occurrence. The film documents actual home births and water births. They follow a midwife, Cara, in New York as she takes care of and attends several births. They then give the audience several statistics about our current birthing techniques and challenges today's doctors. Many experts are interviewed and they cite a multitude of reasons for these, such as the overuse of medical procedures in the interest of saving time.

New Guinea is the largest tropical island in the world. In the era of satellites, this country of mysteries, myths and undiscovered secrets hides behind green walls of impenetrable deep forest. In a labyrinth of dark swamps, people live high in the trees, in primitive conditions that have changed little since the Stone Age. The natives had not yet come in contact with white people, or with the conquests of our civilization. Entering their territory is a dangerous adventure. These places are discussed quietly and with respect. According to the missionaries, the natives practice cannibalism. Adventurer and documentarian Pavol Barabas takes an unforgettable trip and captures it for us.

About 'Requiem For The Big East' Film Summary "Requiem For The Big East" explores the meteoric ascension of the Big East Conference and how, in less than a decade under the innovative leadership of founder and commissioner Dave Gavitt, it became the most successful college sports league in America.

"Bowling for Columbine" is an alternately humorous and horrifying film about the United States. It is a film about the state of the Union, about the violent soul of America. Why do 11,000 people die in America each year at the hands of gun violence? The talking heads yelling from every TV camera blame everything from Satan to video games. But are we that much different from many other countries? What sets us apart? How have we become both the master and victim of such enormous amounts of violence? This is not a film about gun control. It is a film about the fearful heart and soul of the United States, and the 280 million Americans lucky enough to have the right to a constitutionally protected Uzi.