Documentaries
91 Episodes
Meet some of life’s most colorful characters in these true stories.
-
50:15Episode 1
Norman Mailer vs. Fun City
Episode 1
Directed by Dick Fontaine • 1970 • United States
Writer and firebrand provocateur Norman Mailer, accompanied by rabble-rousing journalist Jimmy Breslin, takes to the streets of New York City in his colorful and ultimately failed 1969 run for New York City mayor.
-
1:51:58Episode 2
Hearts and Minds
Episode 2
Directed by Peter Davis • 1974 • United States
A startling and courageous film, Peter Davis’s landmark 1974 documentary HEARTS AND MINDS unflinchingly confronted the United States’ involvement in Vietnam at the height of the controversy that surrounded it. Using a wealth of sources—from intervie...
-
1:12:23Episode 3
Regret to Inform
Episode 3
Directed by Barbara Sonneborn • 1998 • United States
In this powerful and poetic documentary, the legacy of the Vietnam War is explored from a perspective rarely acknowledged: that of the survivors whose lives continue to be impacted by the loss of their loved ones. Twenty years after her husban...
-
1:47:05Episode 4
The Fog of War
Episode 4
Directed by Errol Morris • 2003 • United States
Starring Robert S. McNamaraThis Oscar-winning documentary is a twentieth-century fable, the story of an American dreamer who rose from humble origins to the heights of political power. Robert S. McNamara was both witness to and participant in many...
-
1:09:03Episode 5
Halving the Bones
Episode 5
Directed by Ruth Ozeki • 1995 • Japan, United States
Starring Ruth OzekiSkeletons in the closet? HALVING THE BONES delivers a surprising twist on the old saying. This cleverly constructed film tells the story of Ruth, a half-Japanese filmmaker living in New York, who has inherited a can of bone...
-
Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts Anyway?
Episode 6
Directed by Janice Tanaka • 1992 • United States
Through a brilliant collage of interviews, family photographs, archival footage and personal narration, Japanese American video artist Janice Tanaka documents her search for her father after a forty-year separation. The two reunited when Tanaka fo...
-
27:02Episode 7
Meet Marlon Brando
Episode 7
Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin • 1966 • United States
Starring Marlon Brando, Rex Morgan, Mary FrannMEET MARLON BRANDO is a delightful, unusually candid portrait of the legendary actor during a tongue-in-cheek confrontation with the press. While television journ...
-
54:59Episode 8
Tongues Untied
Episode 8
Directed by Marlon Riggs • 1989 • United States
Made, in director Marlon Riggs’s own words, to “shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference,” this radical blend of documentary and performance defies the stigmas surrounding Black gay sexuality in the belief...
-
28:51Episode 9
Greetings from Washington, D.C.
Episode 9
Directed by Lucy Winer • 1981 • United States
Starring Rob Epstein, Jan Oxenberg, Terry LawlerOn October 14, 1979, LGBTQ+ history was made when tens of thousands of people converged on America’s capital for the first ever National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. This empowering ...
-
53:15Episode 10
Shinjuku Boys
Episode 10
Directed by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams • 1995 • United Kingdom
Starring Gaish, Tatsu, KazukiThis remarkable documentary offers rich insight into gender and sexuality in Japan via a candid portrait of Kazuki, Tatsu, and Gaish, three trans masc hosts working at the New Marilyn Club in Tokyo...
-
ocularis
Episode 11
Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 1997 • United States
This video highlights several narratives concerning video surveillance—not to reiterate the conventional privacy argument but rather to engage the desire to watch surveillance materials and society’s insatiable voyeurism. A variety of subjects...
-
alexia
Episode 12
Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 2000 • United States
ALEXIA is an experimental video about word-blindness and metaphor. Word-blindness is a condition that usually afflicts people who have suffered a stroke, causing them to lose the visual recognition of individual letters but perceive the entire...
-
ekleipsis
Episode 13
Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 1998 • United States
In 1992, Tran T. Kim-Trang came across a New York Times article about a group of hysterically blind Cambodian women in Long Beach, California, known as the largest group of such people in the world. Hysterical blindness is sight loss brought a...
-
kore
Episode 14
Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 1994 • United States
By focusing on the blindfold, KORE explores the eye as purveyor of desire, sexual fear, and the fantasy of blindness. An alternative sexuality is founded in touch-based (feminine?) pleasure as opposed to a vision-based (masculine?) pleasure. A...
-
12:15Episode 15
The Rabbit Hunt
Episode 15
Directed by Patrick Bresnan • 2017 • United States
In the Florida Everglades, rabbit hunting is considered a rite of passage for young men. THE RABBIT HUNT follows seventeen-year-old Chris and his family as they hunt in the fields of the largest industrial sugar farms in the U.S. The film record...
-
aletheia
Episode 16
Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 1992 • United States
The introductory title to The Blindness Series, ALETHEIA presents an indexing of categories investigating different aspects of blindness as metaphor. Stylistic preference for the techniques and conventions of MTV, and American television in ge...
-
13:52Episode 17
Epilogue: The Palpable Invisibility of Life
Episode 17
Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 2006 • United States
EPILOGUE: THE PALPABLE INVISIBILITY OF LIFE is the final chapter in the Blindness Series, a body of eight videos on blindness and its metaphors that was begun in 1992. The inspiration for the series came from a 1990 exhibition Jacques Derrida ...
-
operculum
Episode 18
Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 1993 • United States
The artist visits with seven cosmetic surgeons specializing in blepharoplasty (cosmetic eyelid creasing surgery) in the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills area for initial consultation sessions. The doctors demonstrate different reshaping options an...
-
amaurosis
Episode 19
Directed by Tran T. Kim-Trang • 2002 • United States
AMAUROSIS is an experimental documentary about Dat Nguyen, a blind guitarist living in Little Saigon in Orange County, California. Dat Nguyen was a “triple outcast”: blind, Amerasian, and an impoverished orphan. The video unfolds through layer...
-
16:58Episode 20
So We Live
Episode 20
Directed by Rand Abou Fakher • 2021 • Belgium
Starring Rahaf Alobeid, Amina Al Haj, Luna Al ObeidIn this claustrophobic study of life during wartime, a family in a conflict-ravaged country spends what seems to be a normal evening together. Their conversations shift between casual matters of dai...
-
04:14Episode 22
Heron 1954–2002
Episode 22
Directed by Alexis McCrimmon • 2022 • United States
HERON 1954–2002 is a visual eulogy that taps into the phenomena of makeshift memorials and small gestures of mourning. Honoring the life of a loved one who died due to an accidental opioid overdose, the film materializes the process of overdue ...
-
02:51Episode 23
Maman Brigitte
Episode 23
Directed by Ayanna Dozier • 2022 • United States
MAMAN BRIGITTE stitches together the intimacy of a private ritual involving the Voudou loa Maman Brigitte (who governst the barrier between the living and the dead) with the sounds of the body (spitting, running, vomiting, etc.). These “interior” ...
-
29:15Episode 24
Declarations of Love
Episode 24
Directed by Tiff Rekem • 2022 • United States
A fragmentary rumination on an aging father figure and his nearness to the gender-reveal-party fire that scorched the San Bernardino foothills in 2020.