Directed by Sergei Eisenstein • 1925 • Soviet Union

Sergei Eisenstein's feature film debut, 'Strike' details the violent uprising in 1903 by factory workers in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Known widely as one of the founding films of soviet realism and the montage techniques Eisenstein would beco...

Directed by Emilio Gómez Muriel and Fred Zinnemann • 1936 • Mexico
Starring Silvio Hernández del Valle, Antonio Lara, Miguel Figueroa

Early in his career, the Austrian-born future Oscar winner Fred Zinnemann codirected with Emilio Gómez Muriel the politically and emotionally searing REDES. In th...

Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville • 1949 • France
Starring Howard Vernon, Nicole Stéphane, Jean-Marie Robain

Jean-Pierre Melville began his superb feature filmmaking career with this powerful adaptation of an influential underground novel written during the Nazi occupation of France. A cultured, ...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1952 • Japan
Starring Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Kyoko Seki

One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, IKIRU shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an exploration of death. Takashi Shimura beautifully portrays Kanji Watanabe,...

Directed by Andrzej Wajda • 1958 • Poland

On the last day of World War II in a small town somewhere in Poland, Polish exiles of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of a new day and a new Poland. In this incendiary environment we find Home Army soldier Maciek Chelmicki, who...

Directed by Masahiro Shinoda • 1960 • Japan

An alienated young man flirts with extremism during a major student protest. Directed by Masahiro Shinoda.

Directed by Robert Drew and Richard Leacock • 1961 • United States

In this Drew Associates classic, Richard Leacock photographs the first week of school integration in November 1960 in New Orleans. As black students enter their new schools under the escort of U.S. Marshals, their classmates’ whi...

Directed by Robert Drew • 1963 • United States

CRISIS: BEHIND A PRESIDENTIAL COMMITMENT provided filmmaker Robert Drew, his crew and his audience the rare opportunity to watch a President of the United States deal with a national crisis. In this case, the crisis of the title was the attempted in...

Directed by Mario Monicelli • 1963 • France, Yugoslavia, Italy
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot

In turn-of-the-twentieth-century Turin, an accident in a textile factory incites workers to stage a walkout. But it’s not until they receive unexpected aid from a travel...

Directed by Liliana Cavani • 1965 • Italy

Made for Italian television, this powerful documentary by iconoclastic auteur Liliana Cavani profiles a number of women who participated in the Italian Resistance and survived the German invasion of Italy during World War II. Cited by Cavani as the inspi...

Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo • 1966 • Algeria, Italy
Starring Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef

One of the most influential political films in history, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the o...

Directed by Alberto Isaac • 1969 • Mexico

Mexican former Olympic swimmer Alberto Isaac's record of the Mexico City Olympic Games is a celebration not of national achievement (very few national anthems are heard during the film), but of individual heroism. This thoughtful and comprehensive film b...

Directed by Costa-Gavras • 1969 • Algeria, France
Starring Yves Montand, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Irene Papas

A pulse-pounding political thriller, Greek expatriate director Costa-Gavras’s Z was one of the cinematic sensations of the late sixties, and remains among the most vital dispatches from t...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1970 • United States

Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton. In addition to evincing Varda’s fascination with her adopted surroundings and her empathy, this perceptive sho...

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...

Directed by Barbara Kopple • 1976 • United States

Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning HARLAN COUNTY USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikeb...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1977 • France
Starring Valérie Mairesse, Thérèse Liotard, Ali Raffi

In the early 1960s in Paris, two young women become friends. Pomme is an aspiring singer. Suzanne is a pregnant country girl unable to support a third child. Pomme lends Suzanne the money for an illegal...

Directed by Saul J. Turell • 1979 • United States

Saul J. Turell's Academy Award-winning documentary short Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist, narrated by Sidney Poitier, traces his career through his activism and his socially charged performances of his signature song, "Ol' Man River."

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz • 1995 • France
Starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, Saïd Taghmaoui

Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with LA HAINE, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-in...