The Best Documentary You've Ever Seen

[BonsaiK]

Vice TV has the best documentaries I've ever seen.


Their one on Dubai's slave labour is amazing, the best one of the lot, but I can't find a YouTube of it.

 

[Caligulust]

I found American Hardcore fairly enjoyable.

Oh, Planet Earth and whatnot.

 

[mighty_honour_korea]

Louis Theroux's documentaries are pretty fascinating, I thought the 'African Hunting Holiday' documentary was particularly interesting, especially the man who ran the game preserve.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Louis_Theroux_Documentaries

I'd say the same for Ross Kemp's work, who produced a documentary series on the world's gangs, Afghanistan and a very interesting documentary called 'Battle For The Amazon,' which was an investigation into the alarming speed of de-forestation in that area of the world. He also just recently released 'in Search of Pirates,' where he went on the hunt for Somalian pirates. The pirate documentary in particular was incredibly shocking, the conditions people live in in that area of the world will floor you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Kemp_on_Gangs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Kemp

Bill Maher's Religulous is also worth the watch, for the humour - if nothing else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religulous

You should be able to find all of these online, streaming or torrents.

 

[Neverhoodian]

The Battlefield series. Hands-down, it's the best World War II documentary I've ever seen. My family caught it on PBS back in the '90s and taped quite a few episodes. I watched those tapes so much growing up that they practically fell apart.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Planet Earth is good.

I like Stranded [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1157720/] too, that film makes you think about what you would do if it came to that...

The Battlefield series. Hands-down, it's the best World War II documentary I've ever seen. My family caught it on PBS back in the '90s and taped quite a few episodes. I watched those tapes so much growing up that they practically fell apart.

Oh, I love those XD

 

[Nouw]

Walking with Dinosaurs among the masses of Documentaries I've seen but can't recall. This one is part of my mind forever for it helped forge my childhood =D

 

[Carboncrown]

I'm sure I still have the Walking With Dinosaurs tapes somewhere around here...

Other than that, nothing has made me want to try weed as much as Life. [sub]With David Attenborough.[/sub]

Tough it did fuck up what could've been the most epic Space Odyssey reference of all time.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

One Day in September, a film most assume is about the events of September 11, 2001 but instead follows a day that was, in it's own time, just as infamous: the day that terrorists captured the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, Germany.

 

[Toaster Hunter]

Walking with Dinosaurs and Planet Earth from the Discovery Channel.

Also, Pumping Iron needs to be mentioned. It follows Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, Ed Corney, Franco Columbo, and others of the "Golden age of bodybuilding" preparing for the Mr. Olympia contest. Very well made.

 

[the Dept of Science]

2 that I have watched recently which have really moved me:

Grizzly Man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogYDUmIigw0
This is a look at the life of Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent a large part of his life living in the forests with Alaskan grizzly bears, before they mauled him to death. Its made by Werner Herzog whos specialised in movies about the near mad but brilliant men following impossible dreams (Aguirre, Fitzcorraldo). Herzog took all of Treadwells films, interviewed his family and friends and put together a fasinating portrait of this guys life. Its also got tonnes of cool wildlife footage in it as well. It won tonnes of awards and stuff and is really worth watching.

Anvil: the Story of Anvil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF4H8lB2Y_o
I'll say this right now, I'm not a metalhead, but this really made me feel for the music and the people involved in it. It follows the titular Anvil, who once played on the same stage as Scorpions and Bon Jovi and are considered an influence by Metallica and GnR (and so by proxy 99% of all metal nowadays), but who are now just playing tiny pub gigs. It follows their comeback tour around Europe. Its like a real life Spinal Tap, funny and heartwarming. I'd really recommend it to everyone, metalhead or not.

 

[Horizontalvertigo]

Any of the classic national geographic documentaries, the ones about pretty much anything but usually about nature and animals and stuff, the ones with the opening whith the picture inside the golden frame that then flies off into the collection with all the others (Or the other way round, I forget it's been a while since NatGeo has played any I think*) with the classic National Geographic Theme played in the background. I love those documentaries, I watched those instead of having friends as a kid.

When I have a child I'll get a complete collection and me n them will sit down every sunday morning and we'll watch one together

*A footnote of RAGE: Why in god's name has the National Geographic Channel gotten rid of those classic, awesome documentaries? I haven't seen one on for years. It used to be Discovery channel had all the stupid useless serials about loggers and buildings and what not, and NatGeo had the good documentaries! But then NatGeo got onto the stupid serial shows about nothing in particular, Discovery got worse and then the history channel started its 24/7 Nazi appreciation service I am disapoint NatGeo. Disapoint indeed. - Sorry about the nostalgic rage.

 

[Mckin3228]

The stanford prison expiriment was pretty interesting

 

[dsmops2003]

Restrepo. Fantastic film, no bias. It was by far the most incredible documentary ever made by human hands.

I just watched that last night. It was one of the best I have seen. People need to check this one out.

 

[Goldeneye103X2]

What, so no-one's seen Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop? That was one of 2010's best films! It was funny, stylish, cool, and in som twisted way, the film itself is like some strange work of art built by Banksy, because it's hard to tell whether the story in the film was made up, or is completely guneuine.

 

[Zykon TheLich]

I'd have to go for Life on Earth, or The Living Planet...I can't distinguish between the 2, probably because I'm old enough to have seen them 1st time round, it all gets a bit cloudy. The World at War gets an honourable mention.

 

[Pills_Here]

I saw one recently called "Get Lamp" about text adventure games like Zork, which was pretty damn enlightening overall.

Trailer link, because I don't know how to embed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzOPVe7Usms

 

[RuralGamer]

Walking With Dinosaurs: First aired on the Discovery Channel before the era of Mythbusters, WWD was amazing telling the fantastic story of dinosaurs from the very beginning of the Triassic down to the cataclysm at the end of the Cretaceous period. And who didn't love dinosaurs when they were a kid? If Jurassic Park was the fictional brilliance of the dinosaurs in book and film, WWD would be its nonfictional counterpart. Much of the CG is very stunning, covering several different species of dinosaurs including land, aquatic, and flying types.

HELL YES! I LOVE WALKING WITH DINOSAURS!!!

Slightly less I also love those documentaries about the history of certain movie genres or movie icons, especially the horror ones.
The Freddie and Jason documentaries are a particular favorite.

Still, Walking With Goddamn Dinosaurs definitely ranks at the top.

Man, I really liked WWD as a kid; it was really well done and the animation was awesome, considering how old it is now. I watched all the epidsodes dozens of times over and I still look out for it on TV, although I don't really watch it any more.

 

[Helmutye]

I saw a documentary a short while ago called The Corporation. It was basically about the history of the modern corporation, and explored a lot of the ideas behind it. For example, under the law corporations are considered individual people, and have been able to achieve many of the rights and privileges of personhood--that is, the courts have ruled that corporations have many of the same Constitutional protections as real people. This is a horrifying idea (as the saying goes "a corporation has no soul to save nor body to imprison"), but the documentary goes with it and asks the question: if a corporation is a person, what sort of person is it? They then apply normal psychological diagnostics, and find that most major corporations would be considered Sociopaths if they were real people--persist pattern of law breaking, callous disregard for the feelings and welfare of others, etc. Some of the stories you hear in this documentary make you so sad, so angry, and so frightened, all at the same time.

One particularly scary story is the story of Bechtel in Cochabamba, Bolivia. In order to qualify for a World Bank loan (the country had already been tricked into accepting debt, and was struggling to keep afloat and seeking new capital to help alleviate the suffering of its people), Bolivia was required to privatize most of its utilities, because supposedly this would make the country more economically viable. The water system in Cochabamba ended up being owned by Bechtel, one of the largest companies in the world. In order to make their new acquisition profitable, they jacked up the price of water so that average people were paying more than a quarter of their income to get clean water. They leaned on the government to pass a whole bunch of new laws, and in the end anyone who didn't or couldn't pay their water bill would have their property seized and sold at auction. It was a serious crime even to collect rain water--Bechtel literally owned the WATER THAT FELL FROM THE SKY. The people eventually rioted and put an end to this nonsense, but still!

 

[AssassinJoe]

Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden

It's by the same guy who made Supersize Me

He travels through the Middle East to show the affects of the war on terror on the normal people who live there.