Movies: Observational documentary

By exploring the relationship between the watched and the watching, our film uncovers the trauma and hope engendered by the Chinese all-surveilling state and lends a voice to those that stand in resilient defiance of such blatant abuse of power....

Ben Fogle spends a week living inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, gaining privileged access to the doomed Control Room 4 where the disaster first began to unfold....

Averroès and Rosa Parks: two units of the Esquirol Hospital, which - like the Adamant - are part of the Paris Central Psychiatric Group. From individual interviews to «carer-patient» meetings, the filmmaker focuses on showing a form of psychiatry tha...

The night is falling and Montreal is under the snow. People line up at the lost and found office of the city’s transit company. They all have lost something, which, upon reflection, becomes the symbol of a deeper loss. Prayer for a Lost Mitten is a c...

Filmmaker Roman Polanski and photographer Ryszard Horowitz meet in Kraków, Poland, where, strolling the streets, they share memories of their childhood and youth, the hardest days of their lives, when, during World War II, they met in the ghetto esta...

During the last forty years, the photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling through the continents, in the footsteps of an ever-changing humanity. He has witnessed the major events of our recent history: international conflicts, starvations a...

Filmed over 23 years, Rise of the Warrior Apes tells the epic story of an extraordinary troop of chimpanzees in Ngogo, Uganda – featuring four mighty warriors who rule through moral ambiguity, questionable politics, strategic alliances and destroyed ...

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This documentary draws on new evidence to reveal that a fire was raging in Titanic's boiler rooms before she left port, that it was kept secret and, it's now believed, that it led to the tragedy...

The White Planet or in French, La Planète Blanche, is a 2006 documentary about the wildlife of the Arctic. It shows interactions between marine animals, birds and land animals, especially the polar bear, over a one year period. The fragility of the ...

They have no roots, no seeds, no flowers, but mosses show immense survival capacities and can suspend their biological activity for long periods. Today, researchers are exploring the exceptional resistance of these archaic organisms. British ecologis...

Chris van Tulleken takes a personal view at why ultra-processed foods are so irresistible and how they have come to dominate food culture....

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What do you know about the Darknet? Silk Road, hitmen for hire and outlets for the most depraved aspects of human behaviour? This film delves beyond this notoriety to reveal to undiscussed depths of this network, exposing how activists from around th...

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For centuries, the Great Pyramids have fascinated Mankind. Patrice Pooyard's The Revelation Of The Pyramids reveals what lies behind the greatest of archaeological mysteries: a message of paramount importance for humanity. From China to Peru, from Eg...

“Olive” is a short documentary that follows Olive Hagemeier, an energetic woman, on her daily routine of salvaging, repackaging and redistributing food, and occasional other types of “waste”, across Atlanta, GA. Presented in a quiet observational sty...

What is the "feeling" of a city? Is it the roads, the light that illuminates them, the people that live there and their stories? It's all these things, but also something else, something requiring time and attention to be understood. The film goes in...

A cinematic essay interweaving private archive images and a mixture of reflective, speculative and poetic intertitles that, like “an old movie from the 20th century”, invites us to meditate on what Des Pallières once liked to call “our old homeland”....

An incredible travel through space and time between the walls of the Paris Observatory, which is celebrating its 350th birthday. Place of discoveries such as speed of light or Neptune’s existence, it is still today one of the oldest operating observa...