Documentary Recommendations - The topic of the documentary doesn't matter

If you enjoy the Fallout games or are a fan of nuclear genocide in general, give Atomic Cafe a shot. It's a highlight reel of the funniest stuff to come out of the cold war.
 
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Redpill yourself on the African continent:

Empire of Dust - Chinese engineers struggle to complete an ambitious road construction project in the Democratic Republic of Congo due to problems with an incompetent and unmotivated Congolese workforce and local contractors.

Africa Addio - an Italian film crew documents the decolonization of Subsaharan Africa during the chaotic years of the mid-60s. Highlights include gruesome footage of the ethnic cleansing of the Zanzibar Arabs in East Africa and iconic, dare I say, kino footage of the suppression of the Simba Rebellion by European mercenaries in the Congo.

Don't watch if you don't like seeing animals and people being killed in cruel ways.

The footage is all 100% real and not staged, though the audio is recreated in studio, since Italian film crews of the era did not record live sound.
 
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Some I remember months after watching:

Missing 411: The Hunted - there's a whole series. Missing people is one of my favorite rabbit holes. It's well made, even though the guy behind it used to do Bigfoot stuff before, lol

Struggle - about an extraordinary artist. Fun plot twist - the producers (the DiCaprio family) learn half way the guy might have had some problematic political opinions.

The Murder of Laci Peterson - interesting not so much because it's arguing for a convicted murder's innocence, but because there's an episode that shows the embarrassing disaster the jury turned out to be. I was pretty shocked by what's allowed in a jury trial.

this channel has a bunch of potato quality documentaries and videos about the Clinton family related murders in Arkansas. I binge watched it in a single night. Wendigoon has a shorter, more easily digestible video summarizing it.

Oh, also, Convicting a Murderer - much better than I expected. Would recommend even to fans of the original Netflix series.
 
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Light and Magic
6-part series about the early days of ILM. Great stuff

Hearts of Darkness
Coppola's wife's documentary about making of Apocalypse Now

RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop
4-part series about RoboCop. Has interviews with basically every living member of the cast, production leads, etc.

Last Days in Vietnam
The best war documentary I've ever seen. Entirely made up of real footage of the evacuation of Saigon and interviews with people involved. Directed by one of Bobby Kennedy's non-retarded children.

The Day After Trinity
If you're not still sick of Oppenheimer this is a non-sensationalized version of his story.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093548/
Cold War-era documentary about the minuteman program (aka the guys who would fire the 200-foot bomb at the Russians)
 
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Law and Disorder in Johannesburg - a Louis Theroux BBC documentary about how much of a shithole South Africa is. Confirms much of a famous 4chan story to be true. Especially prescient with South Africa currently undergoing a reversion to living in mud huts.
johannesburg.jpg​


Murder Mountain - a miniseries about unsolved murders in Emerald Triangle with a secondary storyline about the harsh reality weed legalization had on unlicensed growers who'd been in the area for decades. This one hit close to home for me as I lived in the area for about a year unaware of how dangerous it really is.

David Holthouse's Sasquatch - a three part series about getting closure on an experience with a "sasquatch" he had as a young man. Subject matter goes hand in hand with Murder Mountain.

edit: a word
 
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Hands on a Hardbody: In 1995, 24 contestants competed to be the last one standing with their hand on a new pickup truck at a Texas dealership.

Icarus: What starts as a documentary about a cyclist training for a prestigious race turns into an investigation into Russia's Olympic doping program.

20 Days in Mariupol: One of the best war documentaries of the 2020s. A filmmaker and photographer travel to Mariupol, Ukraine, as Russian forces advance and surround the city.

Boys State: A documentary about the 2020 Texas Boys State conference, where high school boys from across the state gather and build a government from the ground up. The sequel, Girls State, captured the same spirit but wasn't as interesting.

Free Solo: A hair-raising, gripping documentary about Alex Honnold, a professional rock climber, who does the first-ever free solo climb (no harness or safe equipment) of El Capitan, in Yosemite Park. The cinematography alone makes this a thrilling film.

O.J.: Made in America : A exhaustive, seven-hour profile of O.J. Simpson, from his early days as a football star to his infamous murder trial, and his impact on football and the American public.
 
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Almost all Adam Curtis films are interesting. I recommend Bitter Lake, Hypernormalization, and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving grace. The Mayfair Set, the first one or two in particular, are pretty good too. Most of these are available on Youtube.
Bitter Lake attempts to explain several complex and interconnected narratives. One of the narratives is how past governments, including Russia and the West, with their continued, largely failing, interventions in Afghanistan, keep repeating such failures, without properly understanding the country's cultural background or its past political history and societal structure.

The film also outlines the US's alliance with Saudi Arabia, especially the US's agreement to buy Saudi oil, for control of a key energy supplier during the cold-war era, with Saudi Arabia gaining wealth and security in return. Part of the agreement provided that Saudi Arabia was allowed to continue its violent and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, free from external influence. Saudi support for Wahhabism fed many of the militant Islamic forces from the 1970s to the present, including the Mujahideen, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State.
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Another one I like that I've posted about before is The Mena Connection. Its IMDB has been wiped of synopsis, but its about how the Clintons were involved with drug smuggling, the Contra affair, and possibly the murder of two teenagers.
Hear the 'Fat Lady' Sing.....

This revealing documentary contains rare and unauthorized footage of C-123 coded-named "The Fat Lady" - The plane that nearly brought down the Reagan/Bush Administration when it was shot down in Nicaragua loaded with guns while piloted by an ex-Air America crew. Hear her astonishing life story. For the first time ever The Fat Lady sings....

The Mena Connection takes you into the dark history of CIA's covert operations in Arkansas - Back to a time in which a young Governor, desperate to build power base from which to launch a bid for the Presidency, made a pact with the real power brokers behind America's secret goverment.

all in the name of National Security, Bill Clinton 'rented' his state to CIA for covert arms manufacturing and shipment - at a time in which Congress had banned support for Nicaraguan Contras.The illegal activity led to subversion of our Judicial System, which then allowed drugs and drug profits to freely flow through America's heartland.

Follow the trials and tribulations of former CIA asst Terry Reed and his family as they valiantly attempt to bring this saga to Federal Court. Told through a multitude of interviews and rare footage. The Mena Connection tells of those individuals whose lives have been changed forever as a result of the ongoing cover-up and containment of what is perhaps America's darkest secret - the successful, silent coup that set up the unelected, elitist micro-government now firmly enriched in power
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A few months ago I watched this lesser known Werner Herzog film called Ballad of the Little Soldier.

It is available on Tubi for free right now, but I found out about it in the Rarelust documentary category. It was made for German TV and only shown a few times.
Here is a description from an IMDB review:
This is a powerful, 40 minute long documentary about child soldiers fighting for an Indian tribe known as the Miskitos against a communist enemy. In the first half there are interviews, which are quite painful to watch, with people in the tribe who've seen awful events such as their children being killed before their own eyes because of the enemy.

The second half manages to be equally upsetting, painful, and disturbing, as Werner Herzog documents the child soldiers, preparing to go to war. The fact that such young children are going through such difficulties is greatly upsetting, and this film manages to be VERY powerful. However, at only 40 minutes, it STILL seems to need some editing! With such a short runtime, it feels quite long!

Although there's some flaws, it is pretty great and pretty emotional. If you're into more disturbing documentaries, this is one you have to see!
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There is a new HBO documentary about the OKC bombing that came out a few weeks ago, An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th. I'm not sure if you can watch it online right now, I torrented it. It was pretty good but IMO it relied too heavily on official sources and feds. To be fair, they did interview and consult with some of the longstanding critics of the official narrative, which is a cut above the 2017 American Experience treatment.
A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City is great film about the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building and the conspiracies surrounding it. I love this one. It's available on Bitchute, Archive.org, and Tubi.
Description:
Hoping to shed light on answers long ignored and censored, both by prominent media outlets and the U.S. government, A Noble Lie peels back what we thought we knew about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and its perpetrators.
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IMDB user reviews:
This particular documentary gives the viewer an inside look into the missing pieces of an investigation that was fast tracked by the government, anyone alive at the time remembers how easily the pieces fit into the constructed explanation, with what amounted to the lone gunman theory. Worth watching if you're interested in finding out more about the events, using some archive footage the director weaves a masterpiece exposing the holes in the story whilst still meshing the interviews of those actually involved in the events. This documentary not only raises more questions it answers some, I highly recommend this film to people who like to look at situations from all aspects and don't always accept the manufactured answers we're given when such atrocities occur.
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I was very impressed with the way A Noble Lie tells the story of the OKC bombing. The film makers don't use cheesy sound fx, savvy editing or the like to add fluff here. Any documentary that does usually means the content is not strong enough to rest on its own. That is not the case with this one.

A Noble Lie uses physical evidence, eye witness testimony, media reports, and court documents to allow the viewer to come to their own conclusion. All in all it was very informative, and did not pile on too much at the same time. I would like to see some things discussed more in detail, like Tim McVeigh's interviews in prison, and I'm hearing a sequel is in the works, so hopefully that happens.

Any person with a critical eye that likes to think for themselves, I recommend checking this one out.
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Just one - Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room.

VERY enlightening. Sheds light on just how fucking brazen these "people" are. Ever wonder why Arnie ended up as governor of California and how does it tie into their power outages throughout the early 2000s? Well, now you'll know!
 
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XboxAhoy​

Ahoy makes video game documentaries, of which all of them are pretty informative, but his documentaries stick out to me the most because his has one of, if not the best, graphic designs of documentaries. He has his own Multimedia thread in the Farms, although it's pretty dead.

The First Video Game​

Although it was informative to know the ancestors of the first video game, I was underwhelmed by the documentary's conclusion. But wow, the overhead projector graphic that he used to convey his presentation is just too perfect.

Polybius​

Possibly more journalistic than a documentary, Ahoy explores the roots of the Internet urban legend and attempts to find the ominous game's developer and its true death-causing gameplay. This is best video game documentary that I've seen.

Documentaries about Rhodesia​

Documentaries about the state of Rhodesia, the predecessor state of Zimbabwe, has a certain charm to them, as reporters had more integrity. Despite the segregation, both blacks and whites of Rhodesia speak really intelligently and watching these documentaries make me learn about the unique social dynamic of the country.

Australian TV News Report on Rhodesia (1976)​

Although the documentary is intended for an audience that is anti-racist, the reporter does showcases the views of both sides, such as Ian Smith and the black nationalist leader Joshua Nkomo, and showcases how life in Rhodesia, despite being unequal, is still better than the country's neighbors.

Children of Rhodes | What the young say? | This Week (1971)​

A British reporter investigates the views and beliefs of white and black students within Rhodesia's education system. The thing I love about this documentary is how the black students speak so intelligently back in Rhodesia, and though most of them are idealists for black majority to come to the country, I enjoy seeing some of the realists among them. Also, seeing the white students feel sympathetic for the blacks unable to find jobs does feel heartwarming.

Frontline Rhodesia (NSFW)​

Possibly the best combat documentary that I've seen. Rhodesian forces of black troops under white commanders undergo what is considered as the best counter-insurgency operations in history against black nationalist guerrilla fighters under the command of Mugabe or Nkomo with support from communist superpowers like the USSR and China. One of the reporters died in combat during filming.
 
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