Best Documentary Feature Bucket List

Five Hungarian Jews return to the places they were deported from in 1944; Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation.

The Munich Olympics hostage crisis of 1972, minute by minute, including the interview with the surviving gunman.

A fictional entomologist argues that insects will inherit the earth, over real macro photography that makes the case.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Holocaust documentary, narrated by Orson Welles and Elizabeth Taylor.

The displaced-persons camps between 1945 and 1948, and the founding of Israel seen from inside them.

RKO’s adaptation of Rachel Carson’s book - she hated the script and never sold film rights again.

The ten thousand children Britain took in before the war, told by the children themselves at eighty.

A Nigerian village builds a maternity hospital, filmed by the British Crown Film Unit at the end of empire.

A fifteen-year-old is arrested for a Jacksonville murder and his public defender takes the case apart.

An Afghan taxi driver dies in American custody at Bagram, and Alex Gibney follows the policy that killed him.

The San Francisco supervisor, his election, his murder and the candlelight march that followed.

Yuichiro Miura skis eight thousand feet down the Lhotse Face on a parachute, and does not entirely stop.

Marcel Ophuls spends four and a half hours on the Butcher of Lyon and the people who protected him.

Lee Grant on the farms, factories and welfare hotels of the Reagan recession.

A French expedition crosses New Guinea on foot in 1959 and films the first contact along the way.

Robert McNamara's eleven lessons on Vietnam and Cuba; Errol Morris's Interrotron interview.

Al Gore's slideshow on climate change; the cherry picker up the CO2 graph.

Philippe Petit walks a wire between the Twin Towers in 1974, told as a heist.

Three days of peace and music in 1969, in split screen; Scorsese edited.

A Kentucky coal strike in 1973, filmed from the picket line; Barbara Kopple's Oscar.

Eight hours on Simpson, race and Los Angeles; the documentary that won an Oscar as a film.

Alex Honnold climbs El Capitan without a rope; you know he lives and it is still unbearable.

Alexei Navalny phones his own poisoner; the documentary made before his death.

Amy Winehouse in home videos and voicemails; Asif Kapadia's archive method again.

Laura Poitras in the Hong Kong hotel room as Edward Snowden hands over the files.

AP journalists inside the besieged city in 2022; Ukraine's first Oscar.

Activists film the dolphin hunt at Taiji with hidden cameras.

Emperor penguins walk seventy miles to breed in the Antarctic winter; Morgan Freeman narrates.

The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival footage found after fifty years; Questlove's Oscar.

Michael Moore asks why America shoots itself; the K-Mart bullets and Charlton Heston.