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Lo más cercano a Land Without Bread primero
Titicut Follies 1967
Documentary
Employing methods of direct cinema–observation, limited stylization, and non-intervention–this stark look into the State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts shows its denizens, who were often kept in barren cells and infrequently bathed, forced to strip naked publicly, force feeding, and the indifference and bullying by many of the hospital's staff.
The sides of Titicut Follies
- Bridgewater State Hospital in 1967
- Patients and guards with no narration
- A variety show put on by staff and inmates
Good for you if
- you want to see a real prison hospital with no narrator telling you what to think.
- you like raw black and white footage from the 1960s.
- you want to see what total power over patients looks like.
Bad for you if
- you can't watch patients stripped, mocked and force fed.
- you need some hope by the end.
About: confinement · dignity · cruelty

Isle of Flowers 1989
Documentary
A tomato is planted, harvested and sold at a supermarket, but it rots and ends up in the trash. But it doesn’t end there: Isle of Flowers follows it up until its real end, among animals, trash, women and children. And then the difference between tomatoes, pigs and human beings becomes clear.
The sides of Isle of Flowers
- A tomato from a field to a dump
- A narrator explaining everything like a textbook
- People waiting after the pigs for food
Good for you if
- you like a cold, deadpan voice that makes you laugh before it hurts.
- you can take an ending that leaves you with nothing to hold on to.
- you want something that hits hard in thirteen minutes.
Bad for you if
- you won't read subtitles, even for a short film in Portuguese.
- you can't bear to see hunger and poverty on screen.
About: poverty · money · dignity

À propos de Nice 1930
Documentary
What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Côte d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.
The sides of À propos de Nice
- A silent portrait of Nice in 1930
- Wealthy tourists on the Promenade
- The poor streets behind the postcards
Good for you if
- you love silent films from 1930.
- you like Jean Vigo's quick, mocking montage.
- you want something under half an hour.
Bad for you if
- you're put off by avant-garde cutting. Vigo jumps from carnival floats to cemetery statues.
- you want a person to follow, not a portrait of a town.
About: wealth · class · the city
Night and Fog 1956
Documentary
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.
The sides of Night and Fog
- The grass grown back over Auschwitz ten years after
- Archive film and photographs from the camps
- A commentary written by a deported poet
Good for you if
- you want the camps documented a decade after, while the sites were still standing.
- you want the record itself, the archives and the places as they were left.
- you can face what was done there, stated plainly.
Bad for you if
- you can't look at archive images of the dead and the survivors of the camps.
- you need a film to leave you some hope, and this one closes by asking who is still keeping watch.
About: the camps · memory · war
Salesman 1969
Documentary
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 Bull" Martos. Times are tough for this hard-living quartet, who spend their days traveling through small-town America, trying their best to peddle gold-leaf Bibles to an apathetic crowd of lower-middle-class housewives and elderly couples.
The sides of Salesman
- Four Bible salesmen on the road
- Sales pitches in working-class living rooms
- Motel rooms between visits
Good for you if
- you like watching real door-to-door salesmen at work in 1960s America.
- you like following Paul Brennan as his pitch stops working.
- you enjoy black and white documentaries from the sixties.
Bad for you if
- you need more happening than sales pitches in living rooms.
- you need music to carry a film. There's no score and no narrator, just the salesmen talking.
About: work · failure · the American dream
Hearts and Minds 1974
Documentary
Many times during his presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson said that ultimate victory in the Vietnam War depended upon the U.S. military winning the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. Filmmaker Peter Davis uses Johnson's phrase in an ironic context in this anti-war documentary, filmed and released while the Vietnam War was still under way, juxtaposing interviews with military figures like U.S. Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland with shocking scenes of violence and brutality.
The sides of Hearts and Minds
- Interviews with generals and veterans
- Vietnamese villagers after the bombing
- The Vietnam War filmed while it was still going on
Good for you if
- you want to see what the Vietnam War did to the people on both sides.
- you like a film made in the middle of the events it shows.
- you like seeing official speeches set against what happened on the ground.
Bad for you if
- you can't watch real footage of napalm and wounded civilians.
- you find seventies footage dated.
About: war · propaganda · guilt
Waltz with Bashir 2008
Documentary
A film director from Israel interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.
The sides of Waltz with Bashir
- An Israeli director who can't remember his war
- Interviews with fellow veterans of Lebanon, 1982
- Animated memories that end on real footage
Good for you if
- you want to know what a war does to the memory of those who fought it.
- you like a director investigating his own past.
- you like dreamlike animated images, like soldiers rising from the sea at night.
Bad for you if
- you'd rather not see a war documentary in animation.
- you won't read subtitles. It's in Hebrew.
- you can't take a film about guilt and the dead of a war, seen through a soldier's nightmares.
About: memory · guilt · war
Roger & Me 1989
Documentary
A documentary about the closure of General Motors' plant at Flint, Michigan, which resulted in the loss of 30,000 jobs. Details the attempts of filmmaker Michael Moore to get an interview with GM CEO Roger Smith.
The sides of Roger & Me
- Michael Moore chasing the head of General Motors
- Flint, Michigan after the plant closures
- Evictions at Christmas
Good for you if
- you like laughing at a town's collapse to keep from crying.
- you like seeing who pays when a giant company leaves.
- you want the real people of Flint telling their own story.
Bad for you if
- you need some hope, and Flint keeps losing.
- you can't watch families being evicted from their homes on camera.
About: unemployment · corporate power · a hometown
LA 92 2017
Documentary
Twenty-five years after the verdict in the Rodney King trial sparked several days of protests, violence and looting in Los Angeles, LA 92 immerses viewers in that tumultuous period through stunning and rarely seen archival footage.
The sides of LA 92
- The Rodney King beating on videotape
- Six days of riots in Los Angeles
- Archive footage with no narrator
Good for you if
- you want to see the 1992 Los Angeles riots as they were filmed at the time.
- you want to see how a city answers police brutality and a verdict that cleared four officers.
- you like the feeling of a city coming apart hour by hour.
Bad for you if
- you can't watch real beatings and fires on screen.
- you'd rather not sit through real racism and real deaths.
About: racism · police · anger
El faro 2019
Película
Ambientada a finales del siglo XIX, cuenta la historia de dos fareros que trabajan juntos en una misteriosa isla perdida de Nueva Inglaterra.
Las caras de El faro
- Dos fareros en una isla remota en la década de 1890
- Una tormenta que no termina
- Una luz que el joven farero nunca puede tocar
Buena para ti si
- quieres ver a Willem Dafoe y Robert Pattinson destrozarse el uno al otro.
- te gusta una imagen cuadrada en blanco y negro que parece una fotografía antigua.
- te gustan las sirenas, las gaviotas y una locura que no distingues de la realidad.
Mala para ti si
- el blanco y negro se te hace pesado.
- quieres saber al final qué era real.
Temas: el aislamiento · la locura · el poder
One Child Nation 2019
Documentary
Through interviews with both victims and instigators, Nanfu Wang, a first-time mother, breaks open decades of silence on a vast, unprecedented social experiment that shaped — and destroyed — countless lives in China.
The sides of One Child Nation
- China's one child policy
- A new mother going back to her village
- Officials, midwives and families speaking
Good for you if
- you want to hear the people who lived the policy, in their own words.
- you want to see how a state reaches into every family.
- you like a filmmaker questioning her own parents and relatives.
Bad for you if
- you can't face forced abortions and abandoned babies, even in testimony.
- you need some hope by the end of a documentary.
About: state control · silence · motherhood · guilt

The House Is Black 1963
Documentary
Set in a leper colony in the north of Iran, The House is Black juxtaposes "ugliness," of which there is much in the world as stated in the opening scenes, with religion and gratitude.
The sides of The House Is Black
- A leper colony in northern Iran
- Poetry read over the images
- Children at school in the colony
Good for you if
- you like black and white images that stay with you.
- you have twenty minutes, not two hours.
- you want to see real lives most people never look at.
Bad for you if
- you'd rather not see illness and disfigurement up close.
- you find black and white films from the sixties dated.
- you won't read subtitles over Persian poetry.
About: suffering · faith · dignity

Bus 174 2002
Documentary
On 12 June 2000, in Rio de Janeiro, Ônibus 174 was taken by an armed young man, threatening to kill all the passengers. Transmitted live on all national networks, this shocking and tragic event became one of violence's most shocking portraits, and one of the most terrifying examples of police incompetence and abuse in recent years.
The sides of Bus 174
- A bus held hostage in Rio in 2000
- Live television footage of the standoff
- The life of the young man holding the gun
Good for you if
- you want to understand a real hostage crisis that Brazil watched live.
- you can sit through hours of a standoff that could break at any second.
- you can take a true story with no comfort at the end.
Bad for you if
- you can't watch real footage of a hostage taking that ends in death.
- you can't face a street kid's life of loss, prison and police abuse.
- you won't read subtitles for a film in Portuguese.
About: poverty · police violence · invisibility
Dark Days 2000
Documentary
A cinematic portrait of the homeless population who live permanently in the underground tunnels of New York City.
The sides of Dark Days
- People living in the train tunnels under New York
- Shacks built in the dark beside the tracks
- A crew made up of the tunnel residents
Good for you if
- you want to see how people really lived under Manhattan.
- you like hearing people tell their own lives with humour and honesty.
- you like a DJ Shadow score under grainy images.
Bad for you if
- you can't watch addiction and poverty up close.
- you find grainy black and white footage hard to watch.
About: homelessness · dignity · community
The Image Book 2018
Documentary
In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.
The sides of The Image Book
- A collage of film clips, paintings and archives
- Godard's voice over fragments of music and books
- Five chapters about images and violence
Good for you if
- you like images cut, saturated and set against each other.
- you're happy to be left with ideas rather than answers.
- you enjoy working out why Godard puts two images side by side.
Bad for you if
- you need people and a story, and there are none here.
- you won't read subtitles over dense French narration.
- you can't stand archive footage of war and killing.
About: cinema · violence · memory · the Arab world
The Act of Killing 2012
Documentary
After befriending documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer, former Indonesian death squad leaders reenact their real-life mass killings in the style of various American film genres. As they recreate their past atrocities, the line between reality and performance blurs, exposing the lingering impact of Indonesia's 1965-66 anti-communist purge and the unsettling psychology of its perpetrators.
The sides of The Act of Killing
- Men who led death squads in 1965 Indonesia
- Their killings restaged as film scenes
- A country where the killers were never tried
Good for you if
- you want history told by the people who carried it out.
- you can sit with a story that offers no comfort at the end.
- you want to see who stayed in power after the killings.
Bad for you if
- you can't take mass killing described calmly by the men who did it.
- over two and a half hours of this is too much for one evening.
- you won't read subtitles, and the film is in Indonesian.
About: impunity · memory · guilt
Harlan County U.S.A. 1976
Documentary
A heartbreaking record of the thirteen-month struggle between a community fighting to survive and a corporation dedicated to the bottom line.
The sides of Harlan County U.S.A.
- Coal miners on strike in Kentucky
- Wives and mothers on the picket line
- Armed strikebreakers at dawn
Good for you if
- you want to stand on a real picket line for thirteen months.
- you like seeing a mining town take on a corporation.
- you like the union songs that run through it.
Bad for you if
- you find 1970s footage dated.
- you can't watch a community living with guns on the picket line and miners sick with black lung.
About: labour · solidarity · class
Hitler: A Career 1977
Documentary
A keen chronicle of the unlikely rise to power of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and a dissection of the Third Reich (1933-1945), but also an analysis of mass psychology and how the desperate crowd can be deceived and shepherded to the slaughterhouse.
The sides of Hitler: A Career
- Archive footage of Hitler's rise
- Crowds at Nazi rallies
- The Weimar Republic sliding into dictatorship
Good for you if
- you want to understand how the Weimar Republic fell to the Nazis.
- you're interested in how crowds are swayed by propaganda.
- you want the story told through footage from the time.
Bad for you if
- two and a half hours of archive footage is too much for you.
- you can't sit through so many images of Nazi crowds and war.
About: propaganda · mass psychology · dictatorship
The Salt of the Earth 2014
Documentary
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 and exodus… He is now embarking on the discovery of pristine territories, of the wild fauna and flora, of grandiose landscapes: a huge photographic project which is a tribute to the planet's beauty. Salgado's life and work are revealed to us by his son, Juliano, who went with him during his last journeys, and by Wim Wenders, a photographer himself.
The sides of The Salt of the Earth
- Forty years of photographs by one man
- A gold mine crowded with thousands of workers
- A dead family farm replanted into a forest
Good for you if
- you can look at black and white photographs for nearly two hours.
- you want the man who took the pictures to tell you where he was standing.
- you like whales, glaciers and a forest growing back.
Bad for you if
- you can't look at photographs of famine and massacre.
- you won't read subtitles while the photographer speaks his own language.
About: humanity · despair · renewal
El hoyo 2019
Película
Un lugar misterioso, una prisión indescriptible, un agujero muy profundo. Un número desconocido de niveles. Dos reclusos viviendo en cada nivel. Una plataforma descendente que contiene alimentos para todos ellos. Una lucha inhumana por la supervivencia, pero también una oportunidad para ser solidario.
Las caras de El hoyo
- Una prisión en forma de torre con una sola plataforma de comida
- Niveles de arriba abajo
- Quién come y quién no
Buena para ti si
- te gustan las historias extrañas y alegóricas.
- te gusta una idea cruel y sin rodeos.
- te gusta no saber en qué nivel despertarás.
Mala para ti si
- el gore y el canibalismo te arruinan la película.
Temas: la desigualdad · la solidaridad · la codicia