For me it would be the Paradise Lost documentaries (Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and Revelations about the West Memphis Three murder case (which has been discussed heatedly on these boards) in which three teens were convicted for 1st degree murder (one of them sentenced to death) on the word of a fanatic with a mail order Ph.D. in occultism and on the flimsiest of evidence. It’s a disgusting case and I’ve read everything I could find on it in order to find the truest light, and everything convinces me “these weren’t great kids, and I’m not even 100% sure of their innocence [I’m about 95% sure], but nobody can say they had a fair trial or there was no reasonable doubt as to their guild”. Horrible case.
Daughter from Danang also moved me. Heidi is a girl from Pulaski TN who has very few Asian features (you may assume she had a Cherokee grandfather or something) but who was brought to the U.S. at 7 when her Vietnamese mother put her on a plane for fear the Vietcong would kill her (as it was rumored they planned to do to all Amerasian children). After growing up with an emotionally frigid adoptive mother and then marrying and having two children, she returns to Vietnam to see her mothera nd half siblings for the first time in 22 years and it does not go well. The family is delighted to see her, but she is incredibly insulted when they ask her (repeatedly) for money to help support them.
I have to admit I wanted to slap her at the end of the documentary. Admittedly, somebody should have given her a crash course in Vietnamese culture (particularly that they do not have American notions of space and are very touchy/feely, and that they are very blunt and straightforward about money and particularly about the child’s obligation to help support the parents), but even so her (imo) overreaction was embarassing as an American. She’s not wealthy (her husband’s an enlisted navy man and she has 2 kids) but my understanding is that that even $10 or $20 a month (which she could somehow manage probably) could be a tremendous help to the family.
What documentaries have you seen that made you happy or sad or angry or whatever?
I saw Titicut Follies more than 30 years ago, and it made a lasting impression. This film was, for me, a shattering, deeply disturbing experience, and I wish I hadn’t seen it.
The Panama Deception was the first political documentary I ever saw and has stuck with me over the years. It confirmed what I thought was a BS affair, and the main reason I stayed out the military when I graduated high school. I did not care for, and certainly did not trust the commander-in-chief at the time.
It also began my disillusionment with the media, or rather, the major press should be used only as a starting point and to look behind the stories to try to find the truth.
The extra scenes–which served as an even more dramatic indightment of the system which (almost certainly) unfairly persecuted the Friedmans–are well worth seeing.
Errol Morris has a knack for making astonishingly insightful documentaries, but Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara are the best of the lot. Leutcher comes off as being the poster boy for why the Holocaust Revisionist movement is morally, ethiclally, and intellectually bankrupt, and McNamara offers insights of his own failures and follies as the Secretary of Defense (although Morris doesn’t challenge him as much as he probably should have).
Although not a feature-length movie, did you catch the documentary on that Black Congressional Medal of Honor recipient? What an amazing and tragic life that man had until he and his men (many posthumously) got their full recognition. After grabbing dogtags of the many that died the day of his ambush, he returned to request that these men receive their proper respects in death when all some desk jockey could say is “Where’s your helmet?”
Thank God this man never stopped fighting both against the enemy and his fellow ignorant man! - Jinx
#1 in a general sort of way is Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread, a slightly-surrealist documentary about a pitifully impoverished province of Spain.
In a “had the strongest emotional impact on me” kind of way, an NPR radio documentary by the Kitchen Sisters, documenting the various sounds people associated with the World Trade Center and their anecdotes about what it meant to them. I think it was called “A Memoral in Sound.” It took something that’s easy to abstract and made it… not abstact at all.
For the most part I wasn’t thrilled with Fahrenheit 9/11; I oppose the war but a lot of the movie was transparently misleading, and it seemed too focused on the wrong things at times.
But there’s a scene later in the movie where the dead soldier’s mother breaks down on the Mall, crying “I want my son, I want my son.” It was a moment of true heartbreak, a person suffering the most unbearable loss a human being can suffer. Just the thought of it brings tears to my eyes. Rarely has the true cost of war been so effectively shown on film.
Dunno if it’s offically considered a documentary, but Boys Don’t Cry, the store of Brandon Teena, broke my heart. It’d already gotten to me when I read it on the Crime Library, and the movie only made it worse. I still kind of think about Brandon sometimes, and about small-town America. I’ve never really experienced small-town America, but I’ve heard so many horror stories about it (even on these boards!) that I’d rathr not.
Being born in South Africa, I grew up surrounded by SA music like Johnny Clegg, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, kwela, mbube, that kind of stuff.
I never knew about the protest music of South Africa. I never knew about the sheer emotional power it brought, about what an outlet it was in the worst times of apartheid. That’s why I’ll vote for Amandla!. I knew “Nkosi Sikelel iAfrica” abstractly, but I didn’t know how subversive, how much emotion, a song entitled “God Bless Africa” could become when outlawed by an oppressive regime. I didn’t know that people like Vuyisile Mini were executed for their songs.
I found Capturing the Freidmans incredibly powerful as well, especially one of the DVD extras of the premiere of the thing in the community that the Friedmans lived in. Lots of people involved (the judge, the prosecuter, the inept defense attorney) were in the audience and gave feedback – most of them still defended their decisions, albeit poorly. It was one of those things that left me deeply unsettled.
I recently watched Ken Burns’ The Civil War miniseries. I knew the basics of the war already, and the major battles, but Burns really drove home the true costs of the war on both sides. For instance, I never really knew some of the major military blunders the Union made early on in the war. General McClellan had several opportunities to drive back the Confederates with decisive attacks, but instead he sat on his ass waiting to amass more and more troops. Later he ran against Lincoln while the war was still on, on a platform of appeasing the South. I think it’s safe to say that if McClellan had won, this country would be a vastly different place today.
I knew it! It’s all true!
Most recently, it was The God Who Wasn’t There. It was probably the angriest documentary I’ve ever seen. A former fundamentalist Christian makes a case against Christianity – its absurdities, its hypocrisies. He comes off so angry at his Christian upbringing, it’s almost sad. The feeling I got from him was that he was pissed off that he wasted most of his life worshiping a non-existent god. At the end of the movie, he interviews the dean at the Christian school he attended and he was barely able to hold back years of pent-up anger. The dean finally just walked out of the interview.
The bit when she’s outside the White House(or Capital I can’t remember) you can see that the grief in full. She is literally bent over with pain when she tries to talk. I have never been able to see this without crying and thinking of my mother and how she’d be if I got killed. Heartbreaking.
Ken Burns Civil War had many very moving moments. The diary entries of the normal soldiers really brought the horror that those poor men on both sides had to live with daily.