1. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
After bassist Jason Newsted quits the band in 2001, heavy metal superstars Metallica realize that they need an intervention. In this revealing documentary, filmmakers follow the three rock stars as they hire a group therapist and grapple with 20 years of repressed anger and aggression. Between searching for a replacement bass player, creating a new album and confronting their personal demons, the band learns to open up in ways they never thought possible.
It has an average vote of 7.009 on TMDB.
2. Spectrum (Spectrum)
A 1963 timelapse recording shows the effects of air pollution during an entire day on Santa Monica Bay in Los Angeles. A machine interpretation of an unstable version of the original file is divided into slits and rearranged in time, giving rise to a time panorama that mirrors an uncertain, abstract future lying ahead of us.
3. Sieben Mulden und eine Leiche (Sieben Mulden und eine Leiche)
Thomas Haemmerli is about to celebrate his fortieth birthday when he learns of his mother's death. A further shock follows when he and his brother Erik discover her apartment, which is filthy and full to bursting with junk. It takes the brothers an entire month to clean out the place. Among the chaos, they find films going back to the 1930s, photos and other memorabilia.
It has an average vote of 8.2 on TMDB.
4. #Familiar #Touch #Lost #Figures
Can we reinvent our lost queer histories? #Familiar #Touch #Lost #Figures is about queer ancestry and diaspora, a hybrid of cultural traditions and contemporary queer identity. It explores feelings of guilt and joy, and intimacy between femmes of colour.
5. Bobby Sands: 66 Days
By the early 1980s, after two decades of violence and unrest, the situation in Northern Ireland took a sudden and profound turn inside the infamous Maze Prison. Seeking the right to be treated as political prisoners rather than common criminals, Irish Republicans led by Bobby Sands began a prison hunger strike that would draw international attention to the conflict. In the 66 days that he refused food, Sands would be elected to the British Parliament, put the Irish Republican struggle centre stage on the world news agenda, and pay the ultimate price for his political convictions. The film combines a powerful mosaic of archival materials, reconstructions and the illuminating accounts of former prisoners, commentators and key players in the drama. With Sands's evocative prison diary at its core, the film brings fresh insight to an iconic figure who single-handedly created a transformative moment in Ireland's history that had global aftershocks.
It has an average vote of 7.1 on TMDB.
6. Escape from the World's Most Dangerous Place
Successful model Samira Hashi makes an emotional return to Somalia, one of the most dangerous places in the world and the place she was born. Civil war broke out in 1991, 10 days after Samira's birth, but two years later her family managed to flee the country and she grew up in the UK.Now, as Samira and the war both turn 21, she's going back for the first time to visit the people and places she left behind. The contrast with her safe and glamorous life in London could not be starker as she experiences firsthand the war's effect on a generation of young people growing up in conflict.
7. The Walk (The Walk)
Asil is a young Syrian refugee awaiting documents in Turkey while processing the trauma of losing her home and family. Her story gives voice to a charming gigantic puppet named Amal, who represents millions of migrant and displaced children in a walk from the Syrian border in Turkey all the way across Europe. Escorted and animated by a group of puppeteers who are themselves refugees, Amal’s epic journey is one of compassion and discovery.
8. Young Plato
Mr. McArevey is a visionary headmaster at a Catholic primary school in one of the toughest neighborhoods of Belfast, Northern Ireland. He loves Elvis and teaches his students to connect with their feelings, while taking on the legacies of the “The Troubles.” In this exceptional portrait of a community still healing from trauma, we follow this educator extraordinaire as he uses Ancient Greek wisdom as an antidote for pessimism, violence, and historical despair.
It has an average vote of 5.6 on TMDB.
9. Bouche sans fond ouverte sur les horizons (Bouche sans fond ouverte sur les horizons)
In 1971 Thierry Zéno creates a fascinating portrait of artist Georges Moinet in the form of a 16 mm medium-length film. A schizophrenic who lives in a psychiatric hospital near Namur, Moinet paints. After being mute for 24 years he chooses this cinematic encounter to explain his artist approach, revealing what lies behind his personal cosmogony. But this long logorrhoea proves disturbing and fails to provide possible clues to understanding his work, gradually becoming a form of music that blends in with the sounds and distant, invisible hubbub of the hospital. With Alessandro Ussai behind the camera and Roger Cambier responsible for the sound, Zéno gets up close to Moinet to better capture him in all his demiurgical excessiveness, his existence on the fringes but also his humanity, deconstructing in a series of very tight shots the man and his canvasses.
10. The Seeker
A lyrical portrait of an excommunicated Amish woodworker struggling with spirituality, poverty, and life as an outcast from his strict, insular community.
11. The Bloody Border (Blutige Grenze – Die Geschichte Irlands)
The painful story of Ireland and the Irish people, who struggled for centuries to free themselves from the tyrannical clutches of the British Empire; an epic tale of poverty, hunger, despair, violence and unyielding courage.
It has an average vote of 6.3 on TMDB.
12. 14 Days
Over fourteen days in March 1988, a sequence of traumatic events shook Northern Ireland to its core and shocked the world. But it was also 14 days that compelled one man, Redemptorist priest Fr Alec Reid, to find a way out of the deadly cycle of violence.
13. The Magic Box
A special live broadcast on both BBC and UTV, hosted by Eamonn Holmes, celebrating the best of Northern Ireland television over the past 60 years and marking the occasion of digital switchover.
14. Our Southern Home (ปักษ์ใต้บ้านเรา)
A documentary film tells the true story of the locals in southern of Thailand through the life of 4 families that live in different provinces, but hand and share their kindness to one another. The reality of their life is arranged into the story disclosing beautiful sides of the southern of Thailand and changing the point of view about the violence that's been happened in the area.
15. Nuytten/Film (Nuytten/Film)
A meeting between two friends: the cinematographer Caroline Champetier shoots a documentary about cinematographer Bruno Nuytten, making a film about his gesture and the relation between film art and craftwork.
16. Rêve Rive
Dreamy images, often in slow motion, stirred or stirring, filmed along the banks of the Seine. Close-ups of water, blurred outdoor shots, shadows and silhouettes of people. A phenomenological portrait of the city, in a joint project with Andrea Emonds, whose voice enhances synesthetic experience.
17. Inconsolable Memories
Inconsolable Memories is a black and white film installation consisting of two 16 mm film loops projected alternately onto one screen in a dark gallery space. Both films feature archival documentary material, including footage of the streets of Havana and black and white photographs of artists and intellectuals in Cuba, combined with scenes filmed by Canadian artist Stan Douglas on a set in Vancouver. One of the films consists of five sequential parts, while the other has only three parts. The five-part film is almost twice as long as the three-part film, so that although both loops start playing together, they quickly go out of sync with one other.
18. Unquiet Graves
This feature-length documentary investigates the role the British government played in the murder of over 120 civilians in Counties Armagh and Tyrone from July 1972 to 1978.
It has an average vote of 8.3 on TMDB.
19. Daughters of the Troubles: Belfast Stories
The women of Belfast played a unique role in holding together their families and communities during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Filmed during the fragile 17-month paramilitary cease-fire, Daughters of the Troubles: Belfast Stories looks at the challenges facing women trying to put their direct experience of grassroots problems on the agenda of the established political parties. Their strength, first exhibited on the community level, started to reach a wider public.
20. RING (RING)
Ring is an experimental 16mm short film. It is composed by 20 shots of 30 seconds each, of landscapes and situations following the 35,7 km of the Berlin S-Bahn Ring. An hypnotic flow of fixed shots will transform the experience of observation of the journey only through the internal rhythm, textures and composition of the shots, and where the main subject matter will be time and the present as a symbol of itself.
