The best documentaries for a marathon of stories

Throughout audio-visual history, the best documentaries have delved into the mysteries of film, the secrets of history, or the fascination of wild nature. Often, they have also served as social denunciations and opportunities to tell silenced stories.

Best historical documentaries

• Man with a Movie Camera (1929): Dziga Vertov shows us the course of a day in a Russian city through a bare and unadorned cinematic narration. Among the fragments of everyday life in the Soviet Union, this documentary takes advantage of editing possibilities to introduce the viewer directly to Russian life and reality, without filters or fictional intentions.

• The Triumph of the Will (1935): Leni Riefenstahl filmed this propaganda documentary about the National Socialist Party congress in Nuremberg in 1934 Germany. Despite its artistic value, it is remembered as a great document about Hitler’s rise to power and the exaltation of the values of the German people and the Aryan race.

• Nanook of the North (1922): Considered one of the first documentaries in history, in black and white and without sound. Its director and creator, Robert Flaherty, spent much time among the Inuit tribe to tell the daily life of an Eskimo family and the protagonist “Nanuk,” who goes fishing, rests in his igloo, and visits a local market, among other things.

What are the best cult documentaries?

• Shoah (1985): Filmed over 11 years, in fourteen different countries and with more than 9 hours of footage, this documentary is a testimony of the Jewish Holocaust during the Second World War. French director Claude Lanzmann gathered enough audio-visual material to create this feature film in which he gave voice to the victims, but also to the executioners and secondary witnesses.

Cool documentaries

• I’m Not Your Negro (2016): A story of racism in the United States through several of the most important voices of the generation that fought against existing prejudices in American society. It is based on the unfinished novel by writer James Baldwin and filmed by Raoul Peck.

Caption: Mr. Luther King at the march on Washington in 1963.

• Man on the Wire (2009): This documentary film tells the daring feat of Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker who walked on a wire stretched between the now-gone Twin Towers. Through photos and reconstructions of the moment, director James Marsh tells Petit’s feat, a story based on a book by the circus artist that later became a fiction film.

• The Gleaners and I (2000): Gleaners or gatherers search the world and trash for objects that others do not want and have already decided to discard. French director Agnès Varda signs this personal and authentic documentary about the life of these people.

• Capturing the Friedmans (2003): Through a clear and crosswise look, Andrew Jarecki dusts off the bitter story of the Friedmans. A family broken by accusations of child abuse against the father and one of the sons. Jarecki weaves home videos of the family with testimonies of the events to narrate the family’s progressive breakdown and the (sometimes) fruitless search for the truth.

• Inside Job (2010): Investigations, interviews with politicians, financiers, and scholars. One of the best documentaries to understand the economic crisis that broke out in 2008, its repercussions on the economy and society, and the “modus operandi” of banking entities that led to the system’s collapse.

• Zeitgeist (2007): Questioning everything, Zeitgeist – a German expression meaning “the spirit of the time” – has been one of the most significant documentaries of the first decade of the 21st century. It consists of three parts, in which it exposes the most accepted truths and dissects them: Christian religious beliefs, the movements of international leaders to dominate the world economy, and the shadows of terrorist attacks.

Financial crisis. Source PXhere.

• Bowling for Columbine (2002): This famous documentary directed by Michael Moore puts on the table one of the most pressing problems of recent decades, violence in America that takes 11,000 lives a year.

Poster of Super Size Me. Gaurav Mishra (https://bit.ly/2C0EBB4)

• Super Size Me (2004): How long can a human endure living on hamburgers? A documentary in which its creator explores the limits of his own body by eating three times a day at McDonald’s.

• Waltz with Bashir (2008): An animated documentary about one of the massacres that took place in Sabra and Shatila (Lebanon) in 1982. The story begins one night, in a bar, when two friends recall the mission they carried out for the Israeli army. That conversation leads the protagonist to unravel his memories about that night and that period of his life, of which he remembers nothing.

The best documentaries about Spain

• Las Hurdes (1933): A short documentary and an approach to the social reality of the humblest classes of Cáceres directed by Luis Buñuel. In the 27 minutes of footage, the director denounces the conditions in which the inhabitants of a poor and forgotten land live, the Extremaduran region of Las Hurdes in 1932.

• The Disenchantment (1976): An intrusion into the life of the Panero family, a family of poets filmed by director Jaime Chávarri. Before our eyes appear the memories of the widow of the Falangist poet Leopoldo Panero, Felicidad Blanc, and those of his three sons, Juan Luis Panero, Michi Panero, and Leopoldo María Panero. A family marked by art and appearances, rooted in the Spanish cultural ecosystem.

• Many Children, a Monkey, and a Castle: Humor and nostalgia combined in a documentary project in which director Gustavo Salmerón tells the story of his family through fragments of home videos. The viewer sees the unconventional Salmerón family, which over the years has lived in a castle, gone bankrupt, and accumulated many objects from all origins.

Documentaries about art

• David Lynch, the Art of Life (2016): An intimate approach and journey to the formative period of artist David Lynch, a search to understand his obsessions and mysteries.

• Exit Through the Gift Shop: One of the best documentaries to get close to Banksy, the most famous urban artist in history.

• The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018): Directed by Terry Gilliam, it is a dazzling journey, full of comic and quixotic adventures, a plea of passion towards the immortal work of Miguel de Cervantes.

• The Salt of the Earth (2014): A project by photographer Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and filmmaker Wim Wenders, this visual poem delights in combining the most spectacular images of planet Earth trying to capture humanity’s changes.

• Lumière! The Adventure Begins (2016): One of the most documented documentaries; film about the origin of film. In fact, it all began when the Lumière brothers invented the cinematograph. After that brilliant invention, the Lumières began filming all kinds of audio-visual material, from small shots to the first fiction shorts, creating a new way of seeing. The documentary is the work of Thierry Frémaux (director of the famous Cannes Festival since 2001 and director of the Lumière Institute in Lyon). He himself gathers a total of 108 restored films shot by the Lumières that transport us to the birth of the art of film and the creation of a new way to look at and show reality.

• Searching for Sugar Man (2012): A rescued story that arises from chance, the life of a mysterious artist unknown in his own land, Sixto Rodríguez, famous on the other side of the world. From the United States to South Africa, the oblivion of a musician, symbol of a revolution.

Documentary series on Netflix

• Wild Wild Country (2018): In six chapters, this documentary series offers a view of what the followers of the revered Hindu guru Bhagwan, controversial leader of the Rajneesh sect, were like. In search of a new society, better and freer, they tried to build on a large plot of land in the USA under the watchful and distrustful eyes of the local neighbors. The conflicts with the community crossed the borders of the USA.

• Making a Murderer (2015): How can justice become entrenched in an error or doubts about guilt in a process where a person’s freedom is at stake? What is the truth?