Documentary Recommendations

In a cluttered news landscape dominated by men emerges India's only newspaper run by Dalit women. Chief reporter Meera and her journalists break traditions, redefining what it means to be powerful.

The film explores the campaign waged by the right-wing Hindu nationalist organisation Vishva Hindu Parishad to build a Ram temple at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, as well as the communal violence that it triggered. 

A university student in India writes letters to her estranged lover. These letters grant insight into the drastic changes taking place around her and the life of her and her fellow students.

Exploring various aspects of the lives and politics of Dalit people in Mumbai, the filmmaker Anand Patwardhan talks to the families of those killed in the Ramabai shootings in 1997.

Pieced together from Timothy Treadwell's actual video footage, Werner Herzog's remarkable documentary examines the calling that drove Treadwell to live among a tribe of wild grizzly bears on an Alaskan reserve.

One night in November 1976, after his car breaks down on a road outside Dallas, Randall Dale Adams accepts a ride from teenager David Harris.

In the late 1970s, as renegade filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola struggles to complete an epic allegory of the Vietnam War, "Apocalypse Now," his wife, Eleanor, films his daily travails with a camera of her own.

Director Faiza Ahmand Khan follows a group of quirky no-budget film-makers in Malegaon, one of Maharashtra's big cities that has often become fraught with tension between its Hindu and Muslim populations.

Three generations of the Phadke family live and work together in South Mumbai. As they prepare for a family wedding, director Archana Atul Phadke, who is not in any hurry to marry, observes the shifting, often very funny household dynamics, as both her mother and grandmother wonder how they have tolerated their husbands for so long.

Two Indigenous fishermen are driven to desperation by a dying sea. Their friendship begins to fracture as they take different paths to provide for their struggling families.

The movie is a true story of a poor man who impersonates director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and gets into a rich household on the pretext that he wants to use them and their house in his next film.

Filmmakers expose the horrifying mass executions of accused communists in Indonesia and those who are celebrated in their country for perpetrating the crime.

A look at tightrope walker Philippe Petit's daring, but illegal, high-wire routine performed between New York City's World Trade Center's twin towers in 1974, what some consider, "the artistic crime of the century".

Part documentary and part cinematic art, this film follows a city in the 1920s Soviet Union throughout the day, from morning to night. Directed by Dziga Vertov, with a variety of complex and innovative camera shots, the film depicts scenes of ordinary daily life in Russia.

​As legions of birds fall from New Delhi's skies and the city smoulders with social unrest, two brothers race to save one of the casualties: a majestic black kite, a bird of prey essential to their city's ecosystem.

Arvind Kejriwal, the head of the Common Man's Party, confronts the status quo of corruption in India politics.

Something Like a War is an Indian documentary by Deepa Dhanraj made in 1991. It examines India's family planning program revolved on the gender it primarily affects: women.

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. 

Ten years after the Holocaust, Alain Resnais documents the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz while reflecting on the rise of Nazi ideology and the harrowing lives of the camp prisoners using haunting wartime footage.

A glimpse into the raw and simple power of nature through encounters with farm animals, the eponymous Gunda, a mother pig, two cows and a one-legged chicken.