Source:  VICE In February 2012, Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin and photographer Paul Conroy illegally snuck into the Syrian city of Homs to cover what would turn out to be one of the bloodiest sieges of the civil war. They embedded themselves on the front...

Source:  Screen Daily Agbogbloshie is a wetland outside Accra, Ghana, and is a dumping site for the world’s unwanted electronics that really does look like hell on earth. The 6,000 men, women, and children who live there – among the emaciated goats and grazing cattle...

Source:  The New York Times What does it take to make a nation reconsider its self-image? That’s the question lying at the heart of the Austrian documentarian Ruth Beckermann’s informative and unnerving “The Waldheim Waltz.” Using mostly contemporaneous material — TV...

Source:  Los Angeles Times A tale of rape and massacre will move the world only so much. Nadia Murad has learned this. There are miles of mass graves, millions of refugees. Only some are heard. But Murad, whose power comes from a brokenness inside, will not let her...

Source:  HBO In 2014, 276 Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped from a school in Chibok, Nigeria and hidden in the vast Sambisa forest for three years by Boko Haram, a violent Islamic insurgent movement. A year ago, 82 girls were released. "Stolen Daughters: Kidnapped...

Source:  The Hollywood Reporter Werner Herzog has directed documentaries all over the world. His latest is not his most visually striking since it's composed primarily of talking heads, but it's certainly one of his most pertinent and fascinating. "Meeting Gorbachev"...

Source:  Variety Life strives to grow and flourish amid catastrophic ruins in “Angels Are Made of Light," James Longley’s stirring and gorgeous documentary about young students and teachers trying to maintain hope in Kabul, Afghanistan. As with his prior “Iraq in...

Source:  Yale Environment 360 The winner of the 2018 Yale Environment 360 Video Contest, “Venerable Augusta,” examines how the people of Augusta, Sicily, led by the town’s priest, are fighting back against a cancer epidemic linked to a massive petrochemical complex....

Source:  The New Yorker A crucial and often overlooked element of documentary filmmaking is standpoint: not the filmmaker’s abstractly intellectual point of view but her physical and visual one—her personal, experiential relationship to her subject. Mila Turajlić’s...

Source:  Variety In France, a man known as Dieudonné appears before crowds who shout out their approval when he claims that the Holocaust has become an engine of “profit.” He then brings an actor onstage in ragged clothes who pretends to be a Jew being deported....

Source:  IndieWire The clock tracking the timeline of the events depicted in the new Netflix documentary series, “November 13: Attack on Paris,” takes up nearly the entire screen. The coordinated terrorist shootings and explosions of that night in November 2015 that...

Source:  CNN Walk around the streets of Duhok in northern Iraq, and you'll see the same face staring back at you. Stoic and square-jawed, the inscrutable portrait is a common sight behind shop counters and stalls in this city, a short drive north from Mosul. Everyone...

Source:  The New York Times A conventional portrait of a highly unconventional woman, Erika Cohn’s documentary, “The Judge,” has a worthy subject in Kholoud al-Faqih, the first woman to be appointed, in 2009, to the Middle East’s religious courts. Dealing mainly with...

Source:  The Hollywood Reporter Good documentaries expose characters and conflicts that are unfamiliar to most audience members. Sometimes, however, these films also open wounds that are almost too painful to behold. "A Sniper’s War," a documentary that received its...

Source:  Variety By turns edifying and frustrating, Hava Kohav Beller’s “In the Land of Pomegranates” focuses on an annual gathering in Germany known as Vacation From War, an event designed to make young Israeli and Palestinian attendees view each other as human...

Source:  Chicago Tribune Can a single-issue protest party come to power? The answer, as shown in "An Insignificant Man," a new documentary by first-time filmmakers Vinay Shukla and Khushboo Ranka, is a resounding yes. "An Insignificant Man," released by VICE in the...

Source:  The Atlantic “Did you kill any members of ISIS?” a hairdresser asks his client. The young man doesn’t answer. He simply stares at himself in the mirror—a soldier clad in camouflage with a rifle casually slung over his shoulder. Another try: “So, did you kill...

Source:  Deadline “This movie is a lot about kids. It’s a younger generation that was born, and in their first steps, they’re going into the war,” Oscar-nominated director Evgeny Afineevsky says, reflecting on his Syrian civil war documentary "Cries from Syria."...

Source:  The Atlantic “The whole world knows about the problems in Darfur,” says Nouri, a recently resettled refugee, in Kristian Engelsen’s moving short film, "Nowhere." "My life was in danger. Many in my family died. So I had to run away.” Now, Nouri lives in...