Movies: Historical documentary

What happened after Einstein fled Nazi Germany? Using archival footage and his own words, this docudrama dives into the mind of a tortured genius....

Using original footage and interviews, this documentary tells the nail-biting story of Apollo 13 and the struggle to bring its astronauts safely home....

Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the United States....

This documentary delves into the mysteries surrounding the Neanderthals and what their fossil record tells us about their lives and disappearance....

Thanks to new excavations in Mauritius and Madagascar, as well as archival and museum research in France, Spain, England and Canada, a group of international scholars paint a new portrait of the world of piracy in the Indian Ocean....

Thirty years after the release of his film JFK (1991), filmmaker Oliver Stone reviews recently declassified evidence related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which took place in Dallas on November 22, 1963....

The moral dimension of humanity's interaction with nonhuman animals and the industries that profit from their exploitation, as informed by world religions. A historical explanation of how the current global situation came to be....

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....

Using archival footage, cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the 85-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts his life, from working as a WWII whiz-kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to managing ...

The story of one of the great environmental disasters to befall the United States, and the terrible movie that helped bring the catastrophe to light....

In an unprecedented and candid series of interviews, six former heads of the Shin Bet — Israel's intelligence and security agency — speak about their role in Israel's decades-long counterterrorism campaign, discussing their controversial methods and ...

In 1968, art students Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell made a trippy photo collage for their musician friends Syd, David and Roger. The resulting album and album cover, A Saucerful of Secrets, helped launch two careers: that of Pink Floyd, one...

Egyptian archeologists dig into history, discovering tombs and artifacts over 4,000 years old as they search for a buried pyramid in this documentary....

The mass murder of Jewish people by the Nazi regime is chronicled, with a warning that anti-Semitism is on the rise and the events of the Holocaust could happen again. The history of European Jewish culture and events before and during the Holocaust ...

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Archival footage, animation and music are used to look back at the eight anti-war protesters who were put on trial following the 1968 Democratic National Convention....

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Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystander...

Western Freemasonry and Eastern communists won WW2, leading to a secret holy war aiming for a one-world government and a single religion in a communist utopia....

On the centenary of Sarah Bernhardt's death, we take a look back at the whimsical life of the whimsical and eventful life of "la Divine", who defied theatrical traditions....