Best Documentary Feature Bucket List

Operation Highjump: four thousand American servicemen and thirteen ships sent to map Antarctica in 1946.

Hitler told through Goethe’s Reynard the Fox, in woodcuts and archive, narrated by Marlene Dietrich.

The forced relocation of Navajo families from Big Mountain, narrated by Martin Sheen.

Cousteau’s Conshelf II: six men living for a month in a steel house on the floor of the Red Sea.

The Nobel laureate at his hospital in Lambarene, filmed in Gabon in his eighties.

Bernhard and Michael Grzimek count the herds from a zebra-striped aeroplane to argue for the park’s borders.

John Ford filmed the battle from the roof of a power station and was wounded doing it; eighteen minutes of 16mm colour.

A palomino called Nautical goes from a New Mexico ranch to the Olympic show-jumping team.

The Soviet account of the counter-offensive that stopped the Wehrmacht outside Moscow, re-cut for American cinemas.

Ali against Foreman in Kinshasa, 1974, with the Zaire 74 festival playing beside the fight.

Cousteau and Louis Malle invent the underwater documentary, in colour, from aboard the Calypso.

Juvenile offenders spend an afternoon with lifers at Rahway prison; the film that invented the format.

Thor Heyerdahl’s own 16mm footage of the balsa raft that drifted from Peru to Polynesia in 1947.

One California family, nineteen adopted children, most of them disabled or refugees from Vietnam.

Jacques d’Amboise teaches a thousand New York schoolchildren to dance, and films what it does to them.

The British account of El Alamein, cut from footage shot by cameramen who went forward with the infantry.

The Allied advance from Normandy to the Elbe, assembled by Carol Reed and Garson Kanin from a thousand cameramen.

A Canadian crew traces what happened to a nineteen-year-old who disappeared driving through Colorado.

Australian newsreel from the Kokoda Track in New Guinea, shot by Damien Parer, who was killed two years later.

Five panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and the five lives they were sewn for.

The clarinettist who walked away from the biggest band in America and never went back.

The 1989 American invasion of Panama and the civilian casualties the networks did not show.

The chorus of the San Francisco Opera, who sing every night and are never the ones being watched.

RKO’s post-war explanation of Japan, written by Theodor Geisel - Dr. Seuss - before he wrote for children.

The pianist at eighty, playing and talking, filmed across Europe and America.

The people who knew her and hid her, including Miep Gies, filmed while they were still alive to speak.

The architect who won the Vietnam Memorial competition at twenty-one, and the abuse that followed.

Six weeks with an American platoon in Vietnam, filmed by Pierre Schoendoerffer, who had been a prisoner at Dien Bien Phu.

Barbara Kopple returns to labour: the Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Austin, Minnesota, and the union that split over it.

A year inside a North Philadelphia primary school and the principal holding it together.