The film interweaves the stories of four obsessive men, each driven to create eccentric worlds of their dreams, all involving animals: Dave Hoover, a lion tamer who idolizes the late Clyde Beatty, and who shares his theories on the mind of wild animals; George Mendonça, a topiary gardener who has devoted a lifetime to painstakingly shaping bears and giraffes out of hedges and trees; Ray Mendez, who is fascinated with hairless mole-rats, tiny buck-toothed mammals who behave like insects; and Rodney Brooks, an M.I.T. scientist who has designed complex, autonomous robots that can crawl like bugs without specific instructions from a human controller.
Agnès Varda's exuberantly inventive follow-up to her critically lauded essay film, in which she revisits characters from the original and further explores what it means to be a "gleaner." Varda's own ruminations on her life as a filmmaker (a gleaner of sorts) give her a connection to her subjects that creates a touching human portrait.
A documentary film about the South African neo-Nazi leader Eugene Terreblanche, and Nick Broomfield's attempts to get an interview with him. His failed attempts lead him to become acquainted with Terreblanche's driver JP and his family.
Roger and Me is a feature-length documentary film chronicling the efforts of the world's largest corporation, General Motors, as it turns its hometown of Flint, Michigan, into a ghost town.
A landmark American documentary, Salesman captures in vivid detail the bygone era of the door-to-door salesman. While laboring to sell a gold-embossed version of the Good Book, Paul Brennan and his colleagues target the beleaguered masses—then face the demands of quotas and the frustrations of life on the road. Following Brennan on his daily rounds, the Maysles discover a real-life Willy Loman, walking the line from hype to despair.
Few films can claim as much influence on the course of cinema history as Chronicle of a Summer. The fascinating result of a collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this vanguard work of what Morin termed cinéma- vérité is a brilliantly conceived and realized sociopolitical diagnosis of the early sixties in France.
Night Mail remains one of the most popular and instantly recognised films in British film history, and was one of the most critically acclaimed films to be produced with the British documentary film movement. Night Mail is an account of the operation of the Royal mail train delivery service, and shows the various stages and procedures of that operation.
An exploration of miners' living conditions and the mining industry of interwar Britain, Coal Face was the first influential film to be made by the GPO Film Unit.
Baby Timothy James Jenkins is born on 3rd September 1944, as an end to the war appears finally within reach. What does the future hold in store for him.
Members of Alford House Youth Club in Kennington, London, are seen at school, at work, and taking part in the club's activities.
Famous documentary film about a strike and the misery of miners in the region of Borinage, an industrial area in Belgium that used to be one of the most important coal mining areas in Europe.
The infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany.
How local councils are tackling the problem of slum clearance. New housing schemes are shown to be working, and cottage estates and blocks of flats are seen being constructed.
The Plow That Broke the Plains is a short documentary which shows what happened to the Great Plains region of the United States and Canada when uncontrolled agricultural farming led to the Dust Bowl.
The film depicts life in Nice, France by documenting the people in the city, their daily routines, a carnival and social inequalities.
Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera is considered one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era. Ostensibly, it shows a cameraman's day, as he records the city around him.
A silent 1927 Soviet documentary gathering together reams of archive footage to form a loose chronicle of events from 1913-1917.
As one of the earliest ethnographic films, it documents the life of the Svan people in the isolated mountain village of Ushguli in Svanetia, in the northwestern part of the Georgian Soviet Republic.
The Saltmen of Tibet is an award-winning 1997 film that chronicles the trek undertaken by a clan of Tibetan salt harvesters across scenic but dangerous territory from their settlement to the sacred lakes where salt is harvested.
Robert Flaherty's classic film tells the story of Inuit hunter Nanook and his family as they struggle to survive in the harsh conditions of Canada's Hudson Bay region. Enormously popular when released in 1922, Nanook of the North is a cinematic milestone that continues to enchant audiences.
Combining drama and documentary, The Story Of The Weeping Camel is a lovingly observed and fascinating journal of day-to-day survival in the Mongolian Gobi desert.