Best Documentary Feature Movies Bucket List

Two South Africans hunt for Rodriguez, a Detroit singer they think is dead.

A cyclist tries doping and stumbles into the Russian state programme; his source flees to LA.

A diver visits the same octopus every day for a year in a South African kelp forest.

A volunteer coach and a high-school football team in North Memphis that had never won a play-off game.

The backing singers behind Bowie, the Stones and Ray Charles, and why the front of the stage never happened.

A Russian primary-school teacher films his own classroom as the war turns it into a recruiting office.

A Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist film the demolition of Masafer Yatta over five years.

A Chinese glass company reopens a shut GM plant in Ohio, and neither side understands the other.

The 2008 financial crisis explained by the people who caused it, narrated by Matt Damon.

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

Peter Watkins films a nuclear strike on Kent as if it were news; the BBC banned it for twenty years.

The First Lady and delegate, from Hyde Park to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The violinist teaches in Beijing and Shanghai in 1979, three years after the Cultural Revolution ended.

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

Sixteen hours of a Carl Rogers encounter group cut to ninety minutes; group therapy as it was actually practised.

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

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

The poet at eighty-eight, teaching and reciting, in the last year of his life.

A season on the rodeo circuit, following a world champion and the young rider chasing him.

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

The first Disney True-Life Adventure feature: the Sonoran desert, and a scorpion square dance nobody has forgiven.

A year aboard an American aircraft carrier in the Pacific, filmed in colour by the crew themselves.

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

Helen Keller at seventy-four, filmed at home and narrated by Katharine Cornell.

The Algonquin Round Table: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and a decade of New York wit.

Children in Calcutta’s red-light district are given cameras, and the film follows what the pictures change.

Marjoe Gortner lets a crew film his last revival tour and explains the con between sermons.