Movies: Direct cinema

A detailed chronicle of the famous 1969 tour of the United States by the British rock band The Rolling Stones, which culminated with the disastrous and tragic concert held on December 6 at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, an event of historical s...

In this wildly entertaining vision of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Bob Dylan is surrounded by teen fans, gets into heated philosophical jousts with journalists, and kicks back with fellow musicians Joan Baez, Donovan, and Alan Pri...

A stark and graphic portrayal of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and documents the various ways the inmates are treated by the guards, social workers, and psychiatrists....

Featuring performances by popular artists of the 1960s, this concert film highlights the music of the 1967 California festival. Although not all musicians who performed at the Monterey Pop Festival are on film, some of the notable acts include the Ma...

A behind-the-scenes documentary about the Clinton for President campaign, focusing on the adventures of spin doctors James Carville and George Stephanopoulos....

Primary is a documentary film about the primary elections between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in 1960. Primary is the first documentary to use light equipment in order to follow their subjects in a more intimate filmmaking style. This unconve...

Simon is a street retailer, his shop a corner on the lower east side in New York, his stock bootleg cassette tapes, the ambience provided via boombox. He scrounges food from restaurants, exists on vodka and peanut butter, sleeps on the floor, and car...

Edie Bouvier Beale and her mother, Edith, two aging, eccentric relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, are the sole inhabitants of a Long Island estate. The women reveal themselves to be misfits with outsized, engaging personalities. Much of the convers...

After consolidating itself as a tourist destination in the mid-1960s, this small coastal village has become the dormitory town for the workers of a Nuclear Power Plant. With the liberal promise of prosperity and socioeconomic wellfare, many workers l...

Living among the percebeiros of the Coast of Death (Galicia), this documentary shows a unique relationship between man and his surroundings, man and the sea. At the end of Europe, years after the Prestige oil spill disaster, these fishermen face an u...

During a two-day period before and after the University of Alabama integration crisis, the film uses five camera crews to follow President John F. Kennedy, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, Alabama governor George Wallace, deputy attorney general N...

This documentary from Albert and David Maysles follows the bitter rivalry of four door-to-door salesmen working for the Mid-American Bible Company: Paul "The Badger" Brennan, Charles "The Gipper" McDevitt, James "The Rabbit" Baker and Raymond "The Bu...

A family-oriented man is caught off-guard when his number is misused by a bunch of gangsters. He then tries to find a way out this trouble, highlighting how people, especially the youth, should use technology wisely and be wary of being too exposed t...

A group of young architects, confined to a forest in Barcelona during the COVID crisis, explore the problems generated by the ambition of wanting to be completely self-sufficient....

A group of artists set out on a quest of organising their own biennale in Istanbul....

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,...

Jakob returns to his white whale in an attempt to rectify his past failures, ultimately realizing the powerful depths of what human beings are capable of....

Four intimate friends who dream to make a film. Plot The film traces the journey of four friends as they strive to give life to their dream cinema. And how their lives are upturned as the cinema becomes their life....

Can a candidate with no political experience and no charisma win an election if he is backed by the political giant Prime Minister Koizumi and his Liberal Democratic Party? This cinema-verite documentary closely follows a heated election campaign in ...

Years after the crime, three clueless investigators discuss the disappearance of a young tourist in a small French town....