The violinist teaches in Beijing and Shanghai in 1979, three years after the Cultural Revolution ended.
Peter Davis on Vietnam, cutting between the men who ordered the war and the people it was fought on.
Disney in the Arctic - and the film whose staged lemming sequence created a myth that outlived it.
A season on the rodeo circuit, following a world champion and the young rider chasing him.
Michelangelo told entirely through his own sculpture and painting, with a camera that moves like an eye.
A year aboard an American aircraft carrier in the Pacific, filmed in colour by the crew themselves.
Cousteau’s Conshelf II: six men living for a month in a steel house on the floor of the Red Sea.
Ira Wohl films his cousin Philly, fifty-two and intellectually disabled, learning to live without his parents.
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.
Peter Watkins films a nuclear strike on Kent as if it were news; the BBC banned it for twenty years.
Thor Heyerdahl’s own 16mm footage of the balsa raft that drifted from Peru to Polynesia in 1947.
The Allied advance from Normandy to the Elbe, assembled by Carol Reed and Garson Kanin from a thousand cameramen.
A year inside a North Philadelphia primary school and the principal holding it together.
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.
Five Hungarian Jews return to the places they were deported from in 1944; Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation.
Barbara Kopple returns to labour: the Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Austin, Minnesota, and the union that split over it.
An Afghan taxi driver dies in American custody at Bagram, and Alex Gibney follows the policy that killed 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.
A Nigerian village builds a maternity hospital, filmed by the British Crown Film Unit at the end of empire.
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.
Sixteen hours of a Carl Rogers encounter group cut to ninety minutes; group therapy as it was actually practised.
The displaced-persons camps between 1945 and 1948, and the founding of Israel seen from inside them.
Disney on the American plains, and the bison birth that got the film briefly banned in New York.
The chorus of the San Francisco Opera, who sing every night and are never the ones being watched.
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