From Paris is Burning to My Octopus Teacher, they'll raise your consciousness and expand your heart
This is a nuanced list. I knew of about half of these, so I have some adds to my must-watch list.
I would add four exceptional documentaries to this list:
32) Before They Die, 2008.
Compelling documentary about The Tulsa Race Massacre. When this was filmed, nearly 90 years on from the massacre, an astonishing number of survivors were still living.
Directors: St. Clair Bourne, J. Denise Clement, Michael Hausfeld
This film is enlightening, empowering, emotionally moving. It will also piss you off.
***
33) Jazz on a Summer's Day, 1958.
Famed photographer Bert Stern's sole film. Visually gorgeous, freeze any frame and it's almost certainly an exquisite still image. Extraordinary line up: Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, Thelonius Monk, etc, etc. Anita O'Day just owns it here.
Not about racism, but that is definitely a takeaway. Subtly, you note the racial integration of the jazz world of the time.
***
34) The Sorrow and the Pity / Le Chagrin et La Pitié, 1969-ish.
It's in French. It's long. It's in black and white. Buck up: think of it as a mini-series, (unless you're a native speaker) get the BluRay and have the pause button ready. It is well worth it.
Directed by Marcel Ophuls (son of Max Ophuls) this was filmed in the late 1960s with funding from the French government. Completed in 1969, French TV refused to show it. Apparently, it did not comport with prevailing beliefs about the responses of French citizens to totalitarianism. It was eventually shown in a small cinema in France in 1971, the same year it was nominated for an Academy award.
The Sorrow and the Pity focuses on a single village in Nazi-occupied France during WWII. Twenty plus years after WWII in the 1960s there are swastika-wearing Nazis, former members of the Resistance, and people who wished the fucking war would just all go away. There is also a fierce drag queen. It took me about an hour to realize the people on screen were often talking about each other!
"A film about history that changed the course of history." That New Yorker review is possibly, the single best film review EVER.
In 2026 America, with fascists no longer just at the door, this is a MUST watch.
***
35) The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, 1993.
No film has ever had a better title.
This film is about Leni Refenstahl, Hitler's favorite director, she made Olympia (1936) and Triumph of the Will (1935). One of the most significant filmmakers of all time. Definitely on the short list of greatest female directors.
Not a Nazi but a "fellow traveler." If not an Nazi, an opportunist. She spent the last 65 years of her life rationalizing her actions of the 1930s and 40s.
She did many things that are considered positive: She prevailed in male-dominated fields, and made important work. She was a survivor, and a thriver. Riefenstahl made fascinating bodies of photographic work first in in Africa and later underwater. She began underwater photography in her 70s (lying about her age to receive certification) and seems to have continued that underwater work into her 90s! Her second husband was 40 years her junior!
