Cinéma Vérité: Defining the Moment

A documentary about direct-cinema from its very beginnings (Nanook of the North) to the fake-direct-cinema of the Blair Witch Project. All the important direct-cinema filmmakers are portrayed and/or interviewed: Leacock, Wiseman, Maysles, Pennebaker, Reisz and others.

2000-06-09 | en

Back to the Land

Feature-length documentary as part of Pierre Perrault's Abitibian Cycle. The filmmaker questions the past and present of Abitibi and draws up, face to face, the promises of colonization in the 1930s and the great disappointment caused by the closing of the land in the 1970s. There are witnesses to the heroic era, including the cultivator Hauris Lalancette, as well as extracts from films by Father Maurice Proulx (1934-1940).

1976-01-01 | fr

Belle famille

A working class family leaves St-Henri quarter in Montréal to build a new home in the countryside.

1978-07-11 | fr

Friday: About Cars

"Montréal under the snow and the cold winter. It is the period of the year when the garage owners strike it rich. The automobile at the service of man? This small opus would rather show the contrary. This is one in a series of eight films titled “Chronicle of Everyday Life,” a project that filmmaker Jacques Leduc took four years to realize, and whose goal was to revisit Direct Cinema at a moment when it was already heavily “contaminated” by mainstream TV." - Anthology Film Archives

1978-01-01 | en

Cesar's Bark Canoe

"This documentary depicts a canoe being built in the traditional manner. Cesar Newashish, a 67-year-old Attikamek of the Manawan Reserve North of Montréal, uses only birchbark, cedar splints, spruce roots, and gum. With a sure hand he works methodically to fashion a craft unsurpassed in function or beauty of design. Building a canoe solely from the materials that the forest provides may become a lost art, even among the Native Peoples whose traditional craft it is. The film is free of spoken commentary but text appears on the screen in Cree, French, and English." - Anthology Film Archives

1971-01-01 | fr

The Things I Cannot Change

"This feature documentary is considered to be the forerunner of the NFB's Challenge for Change Program. The film offers in inside look at 3 weeks in the life of the Bailey family. Trouble with the police, begging for stale bread, and the birth of another child are just some of the issues they face. Through it all, the father tries to explain his family's predicament. Although filmed in Montreal, the film offers an anatomy of poverty as it occurs throughout North America." - NFB

1967-01-01 | en

Little Burgundy

"This film is one of the first French Unit productions of the “Société Nouvelle/Challenge for Change” program. When an old area of Montréal is to be demolished to make way for a new low-income housing development, is there anything the residents can do to protect their own interests? The film documents such a situation in the Little Burgundy district of Montréal and shows how the residents organized themselves into a committee that successfully influenced the city’s housing policy." - Anthology Film Archives

1968-01-01 | fr

Virgil Abloh: How To Be Both

Film exploring the life of legendary designer Virgil Abloh. It tracks his spectacular ascent from Kanye West’s right-hand man to his role as artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton.

2023-02-11 | en

The Era of Giants

Italian documentary illustrating the xylella virus devastation of the olive-growing flora in Apulia by the xylella virus. In Apulia, a region in south-eastern Italy, the most serious botanical pandemic of the century is underway: a quarantine bacterium, Xylella Fastidiosa, is killing millions of olive trees. Disrupting landscape, economy and human relations. The Era of Giants narrates Giuseppe’s journey to his father’s land, in the Plain of the Monumental Olive Trees, where the epidemic is imminent. He will have to explain to the old farmer how their lives will be disrupted by this invisible bacterium, hitherto unknown in Italy.

2023-03-16 | it

Monterrico Beach Meditation in Guatemala

Watch the waves from above on Monterrico Beach in Guatemala while listening to ambient music from around the world.

2023-01-01 | en

24.60 Édition spéciale : Le Québec en deuil de Michel Côté

2023-06-04 | fr

State Entry into Delhi of Lord Curzon, the Viceroy

Film showing the Viceregal party entering Delhi on lavishly decorated elephants, as part of the Coronation durbar of 1903.

1903-01-31 | en

The Big Brass Ring

George Hickenlooper filmed five pages (two scenes) from Orson Welles' screenplay of "The Big Brass Ring" in 1997 in the hope of attracting interest in the project. The feature film version was released in 1999.

1997-12-01 | en

Hacking Justice

Since he took on the case in 2012, defending Julian Assange has put judge Baltasar Garzón's talent and ability to the test. They've won a few battles, but nobody knows how the war will end.

2017-05-20 | en

Suppressed 2020: The Fight to Vote

Deeply personal accounts from voters of color across the state of Georgia reveal deliberate, widespread voter suppression in the 2018 midterm election where Stacey Abrams fought to become the first Black female governor in the U.S. Polling place closures, voter purges, missing absentee ballots, extreme wait times and voter ID issues were in full effect again during the 2020 primaries and are on-going across the country right now, all disproportionately affecting Black Americans and minorities from casting their ballots. Now, amidst a global health crisis, the cruel weaponization of vote-by-mail restrictions has turned the constitutional right to vote into a choice between life and death.

2020-08-20 | en

Our King Emperor and Queen Empress Hold a Durbar in Delhi

King George V and Queen Mary hold ceremonial court in Delhi.

1912-01-01 | en

Invisible Hand

INVISIBLE HAND is a “paradigm shifting” documentary about the creation of ‘Rights of Nature.’ The defining battle of our times where nature, democracy and capitalism face off in rural America. From Executive Producer Mark Ruffalo comes INVISIBLE HAND, the world’s first documentary film on the Rights of Nature Movement. A “paradigm shifting” story about the fate of capitalism and democracy where we find out "Who speaks for Nature?"

2020-09-04 | en

Stille Sommer

Escape from everyday life in freedom and community and live utopias - for many organizers and artists, the secret of the music festivals that make culturally weak Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania a place of pilgrimage for tens of thousands of people every summer. But instead of freedom, community and utopia, there was one thing above all in the festival summers of 2020 and 2021: silence.

2023-02-17 | de

Hold Your Breath: The Ice Dive

Follow free diver Johanna Nordblad in this documentary as she attempts to break the world record for distance traveled under ice with one breath.

2022-05-02 | en

Ayahuasca: Einer uralten Medizin auf der Spur

2017-10-03 | de