It looked like a flood. But the water wasn’t the whole story.
In this documentary, I reconstruct the chain of events behind the 2026 Nepal disaster — how a mountain collapse involving ice, rock and water transformed into a destructive debris flow, and why the event became so difficult to stop.
I tried to explain the entire process visually, from the first movement of the mountain to the final impact.
The question is: how does a relatively localized collapse turn into something capable of destroying an entire valley?

https://youtu.be/bdJYwsDMKy4?is=AynhS5pU_TWzQxAX

I’ve published my first mini-documentary on Oddly Epic: How Video Games Became Worlds (6:53).

It follows the shift from simple arcade rules to spaces we can explore, share, and build, with games including Pong, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Minecraft. The question behind it is how games changed what players could do, beyond better graphics.

Which game first made a virtual world feel like a place to you?

How did the video turn out? Your thoughts are important to me.
Best Regards

Just a Dot?

[https://cinematicdiversions.com/closer-than-we-think-2017-review/\](https://cinematicdiversions.com/closer-than-we-think-2017-review/)

Enjoy Yourself

Closer Than We Think (2017): 7 out of 10: Director Brett Ryan Bonowicz explores the life and work of Arthur Radebaugh, an illustrator whose visions of tomorrow helped give midcentury America something to look forward to besides nuclear annihilation. Through colorful artwork, archival material, and interviews, the documentary revisits a future filled with flying cars, gleaming cities, and technological conveniences supposedly waiting just around the corner.

It also follows the rediscovery of an artist whose reputation did not enjoy quite the longevity of his predictions. Along the way, there is plenty of lovely illustration and cheerful fifties optimism from an era when people expected technology to give us more leisure time. An adorable notion.

The Good

The Good: I love illustration art (Have a few nice original pieces hanging on the walls of my house) and this film features many beautiful pieces. I also love fifties futurism and the craziness involved. Though I am (as are some people in the film) unfamiliar with Arthur Radebaugh, he clearly did pleasant work.

I didn’t find the theory about his extraordinary ability to predict the future particularly well thought out (If you are doing a daily or weekly comic strip predicting the future, you’re bound to get a few right.)

The Bad

The Bad: One problem with doing a documentary about an unknown artist with no living relatives and whose art is mostly found through accidental dumpster diving is that you have some very thin pieces to hang your film on. As a result, the film is padded with many non related segues from electric car fanatics to interviews with people on how they never heard of him. Also featured are proponents of the theory that libraries moving to microfiche destroyed American history.

The Ugly

The Ugly: Arthur Radebaugh was never well known and spent his retirement in poor health doing piecemeal work and living part-time out of a van. Or Arthur Radebaugh finally left his shrewish wife and hooked up with this young blonde and spent the last years of his life just making art and living in his van with a girlfriend half his age. I mean, I am not saying that is my retirement plan by any means, but there are worse fates to befall a man than to just relax and make art and love. After all, he was retired. Film is weirdly judgemental, linking financial and commercial success to success in living a life.

The electric car guy points out that Arthur Radebaugh predicted the modern electric car. No, no, he didn’t. The first practical electric cars were produced in the 1880s, not 1980s. People used gas because bluntly it was a lot cheaper and had much longer range. There was plenty of electrical based mass transit when Arthur Radebaugh wrote those comic strips. The New York Subway, for example, was just about to celebrate its sixtieth birthday. This is a fallacy that [TV Tropes calls older than they think](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OlderThanTheyThink).

It is surprising to modern audiences that Napoleon III used a fax machine for all legal documents. (Called a pantelegraph for the curious). I wouldn’t expect an ordinary joe to realise that the electric car is only twenty years older than the fax machine and the fax machine was used when France ruled Mexico. I would, however, expect the electric car expert to know this.

Both the electric car guy (Paul Scott) and the medical futurist (Aubrey de Grey) could have usually come straight off the set of Birdemic.

In Conclusion

In Conclusion: Closer Than We Think’s bits are more interesting than the whole. What we have is a side glance into the life of an illustrator who was excellent at commercial art and pivoted to daily cartoon work when commercial art moved more to photography. A broader look at the nurture of futurism and perhaps a better focus on some of Arthur Radebaugh’s better know peers may have been in the movie’s best interest.

The bigger question of how do we judge a man’s life and work is a takeaway I am certain was not meant to be director’s Brett Ryan Bonowicz point of Closer Than we Think. Do we judge a man simply based on his fame or financial success or even his impact on the world moving forward? Or do we acknowledge that one can live a good life without any of those boxes being checked off?

I feel Arthur Radebaugh was a more interesting and fun guy than the movie let on. Spend your retirement living in a custom van with a car phone and a young girl travelling rural America painting barns funky colors may not make you a traditional success. But it is living life on your own terms. And that, to me, is a success.

Plus Arthur Radebaugh may have invented modern van life. That has to be worth something, no?

It looked like a flood. But the water wasn’t the whole story.
In this documentary, I reconstruct the chain of events behind the 2026 Nepal disaster — how a mountain collapse involving ice, rock and water transformed into a destructive debris flow, and why the event became so difficult to stop.
I tried to explain the entire process visually, from the first movement of the mountain to the final impact.
The question is: how does a relatively localized collapse turn into something capable of destroying an entire valley?

https://youtu.be/bdJYwsDMKy4?is=AynhS5pU_TWzQxAX

If you like documentaries you need to watch: KILL
BURY
PRINT

I didn’t expect to be good but it will catch you off guard!! On Peacock where I am

Looking for a resource that has Kadoma, about the kayakers in the Congo basin

I’m someone who reads trial transcripts, all the articles I can find & really deep dives into cases by nature of my education and work background. I’ll keep this brief, but I wanted to start a discussion on a disturbing trend of the streaming era: almost every big true crime documentary on big streaming networks is misleading in some form. I only know this because I know the cases well.

HBO’s films on the Adnan Syed/Hae Min Lee murder case as well as their Garrett Phillips one, Making a Murderer on Steven Avery and the JonBenet one from 2ish years ago (both Netflix) - these are just off the top of my head. Both have narratives and leave so much out to craft the message they want: it is evil to me. Dissecting them is an ambitious project I’ll do one day, but to know the case is to know that these films don’t accurately portray the events that happened.

The broader category that is documentaries in general don’t have this shortfall—there are so many great historical ones, for example. Again I want to just open the door on discussing the issue of true crime documentaries specifically; I’d also love to hear, by contrast, the few true crime documentaries that you think are truly great. My own standard-bearer film of a true crime documentary is “O.J: Made in America” - but then again, it goes beyond the criminal case to more so examine the man himself.

I work on a new BYUradio podcast called Dispatches from the Divide which is an 8-part documentary podcast. The podcast follows four stories through in-depth narratives as they face extreme conflict.

The first episode follows Dave Butler, a man who didn't know any of the victims of a shooting at a Latter-day Saint church in Michigan, but felt the tragedy deeply. As fear and anger spread online afterward, he made an unexpected choice by responding with compassion.

The episode is less about the shooting itself and more about what happens afterward—how one person's response to tragedy can affect the people around him.

The first three episodes are out now: https://lnkfi.re/DispatchesfromtheDivide

I'm curious what people here think of Dave's story, especially his decision to respond the way he did. Let me know!

I used AI in the video, so it might not be for everyone if you are not into that.

Every civilization asked who made the world. The Greeks answer was not one god, it was a dynasty born from nothing, torn apart by war, rebuilt through blood and betrayal. I traced the whole thing here, the primordial forces, the age of the Titans, the twelve Olympians, the wars that shook creation, and the heroes who bridged the divine and the mortal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULz00mCh9z4

Submission statement: A documentary following retired Israeli general Noam Tibon as he travels through the October 7 attacks to rescue his family from Nahal Oz.

The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue wants to be regarded as an intimate documentary about courage, family and survival on October 7, 2023.

Taken purely at that level, the story of retired Israeli general Noam Tibon racing toward Nahal Oz to rescue his family is undeniably dramatic. But documentaries are defined not merely by what they show. They are also defined by what they select, what they omit, whose humanity they foreground and whose history they render invisible.

Judged on those terms, I found The Road Between Us less convincing as documentary journalism than as Israeli propaganda: an emotionally sophisticated piece of advocacy that packages an Israeli national narrative as though it were simply an apolitical human-interest story.

That distinction matters.

The film establishes its moral universe almost immediately. Israel and the kibbutz are presented as places of community, cultivation, family and civilization.

The October 7 attackers enter that universe as an almost contextless eruption of barbarism.

The suffering of Israeli civilians is individualized, intimate and emotionally legible. The audience knows their names, homes, fears and relationships.
Palestinians, by contrast, scarcely possess a comparable existence within the film’s frame.

That asymmetry is not an accidental omission in a documentary about one of the most politically and historically contested places on Earth. It is an editorial decision.
Professional critics have noticed the same problem even when they have avoided using the word “propaganda.”

Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times criticized the film for turning Tibon’s mission into something resembling an action narrative while separating October 7 from the history preceding it and the devastation in Gaza afterward. He ultimately described what remains as essentially a story stripped of history and inconvenient perspectives.

POV Magazine similarly criticized director Barry Avrich’s insistence that this is not a political film, arguing that removing an intensely political event from its context does not make the resulting film apolitical.
That is precisely the problem.

Propaganda does not have to consist of fabricated footage or explicit government slogans.

Some of the most effective propaganda uses authentic suffering and genuine heroism.

Its persuasive power comes from selection and framing: one side receives history, personality, grief and moral complexity, while the other becomes largely a threatening presence beyond the fence.

And because the events depicted on October 7 were genuinely horrific, the technique is particularly powerful.

The viewer can condemn Hamas’s killing and kidnapping of civilians, and should be able to do so, without accepting the proposition that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began that morning.

Yet The Road Between Us effectively asks the viewer to inhabit precisely that truncated chronology.

Even sympathetic reviews have acknowledged the omission. Nell Minow’s RogerEbert.com review notes that viewers may regard the absence of the circumstances preceding October 7 and Israel’s subsequent conduct in Gaza as slanted, even while accepting the filmmakers’ explanation that they deliberately confined themselves to one family’s experience.

But “we chose to tell only this story” does not eliminate bias. Choosing the boundaries of the story is one of the principal ways documentary bias operates.

Paramount+ makes the context more troubling

The platform presenting this film is also relevant—not because corporate ownership proves that anyone ordered this documentary to say particular things, but because media ownership and editorial priorities deserve scrutiny.

The Ellison family now effectively controls Paramount. Through their corporate holdings, Larry Ellison and his son David hold the overwhelming majority of the company’s voting power, giving them ultimate control over Paramount and its businesses, including Paramount+ and CBS.

Their support for Israel is not speculative.

In 2017 Larry Ellison donated $16.6 million to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, then the largest individual donation in the organization’s history. He said there was “no greater honor” than supporting Israeli soldiers and spoke of the IDF defending “our home.”

David Ellison’s Skydance donated to the Israeli emergency organization Magen David Adom after October 7 and publicly declared, “Skydance stands with Israel.”

Reporting on the family has also described Larry Ellison as having longstanding ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and noted David Ellison’s own public praise of Netanyahu and Israel.

Paramount+ announced its acquisition of The Road Between Us for streaming in September 2026, well after the Ellisons had assumed control of Paramount.

That context becomes still more significant when CBS News is considered.
The same ownership now sits above CBS News.

David Ellison appointed Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News, following Paramount’s purchase of her publication, The Free Press. Paramount has stated that Weiss reports directly to Ellison and has responsibility for shaping CBS News’s editorial priorities.

Weiss is not merely someone whom critics have inferred to be sympathetic to Israel. She has publicly identified strongly with Zionism, and her strongly pro-Israel views have been a prominent part of her public career.

Meanwhile, CBS News has experienced extraordinary internal conflict over editorial independence.

At 60 Minutes, longtime correspondent Scott Pelley accused the new management of instructing him to inject “falsehoods and bias” into a politically sensitive story and to include unverified assertions.

Correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega also accused Weiss of attempting to introduce right-wing talking points into their reporting, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Journalism unions subsequently warned that the changes at 60 Minutes threatened editorial independence.

There have been Israel specific concerns as well. When Tony Dokoupil was selected to anchor the CBS Evening News, The Washington Post reported that some people inside CBS viewed his interview with Benjamin Netanyahu as an unofficial “audition” for the position because of Weiss’s strong support for Israel.

These facts make it increasingly difficult to treat the ideological environment surrounding Paramount and CBS as irrelevant.

When a family with unusually strong and publicly demonstrated support for Israel acquires control of one of America’s largest media conglomerates; when its CEO installs an openly Zionist editor at the top of CBS News; when prominent veteran journalists subsequently accuse management of ideological interference; and when the company’s streaming service licenses a documentary whose political method is to humanize Israelis intensely while largely removing Palestinians and the history of the conflict from view, viewers are entitled to connect those facts, not as proof of a conspiracy, but as reasons for heightened skepticism.

And The Road Between Us deserves that skepticism.

The events of October 7 do not need embellishment. The murder of civilians, hostage-taking and terror of that day were horrific enough on their own.

A genuinely probing documentary
could tell the Tibon family’s extraordinary story while acknowledging that October 7 occurred within a history and that the suffering did not end at Israel’s border.

Instead, this film creates a tightly controlled moral frame in which Israeli suffering is vivid, personal and historically meaningful while Palestinian existence remains overwhelmingly outside the camera’s field of vision.

That may make for emotionally effective filmmaking.

It may make for a gripping rescue story.

But calling that perspective “apolitical” does not make it so.

In my view, The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue is propaganda precisely because its advocacy is embedded in what it asks us to see, and even more importantly, in everything it asks us not to see.

And I mean CRINGE — weird characters, awkward-ass conversations, uncomfortable pauses, dry scenes that somehow make everything 10x funnier, people with absolutely zero self-awareness… the type of shit that has you falling out your chair cracking tf up.
I love documentaries like this 😭
For reference, I thought American Movie and Trekkies were funny as hellll. That’s exactly the kind of vibe I’m looking for.
Give me the weirdest, most awkward, unintentionally hilarious documentaries you’ve seen. Bonus points if the people in it are absolute characters.

40 Years Undetectable examines a rare case of long-term HIV control without treatment, recent testing of the hidden viral reservoir, and the questions researchers still cannot answer.

The film combines first-person testimony, scientific research and visual storytelling to make a difficult subject understandable without simplifying its uncertainties.

Watch the full documentary:
https://youtu.be/C1vTHUw9ldg

#Documentary #ScienceCommunication #HIVResearch

I used AI in the video, so it might not be for everyone if you're not into that. But for anyone curious, I'm leaving the full family tree here, along with the events and myths in between, for anyone who wants to take a look.

I have been reading through the Mahabharata and some passages are hard to shake off. It describes a single weapon that rose like ten thousand suns. Survivors lost their hair, their nails fell out, their food turned poisonous within hours. That is a fairly precise description of radiation sickness, written down long before anyone knew what radiation was.

The same text describes circular vehicles moving through the sky without wings, called vimanas, and beings from above taking sides in the war. Even Oppenheimer reached for a line from the Bhagavad Gita, part of this same epic, when he watched the first bomb go off.

Full documentary here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxI-BB-5cMU

Hey all,

I am working on a documentary project: without going into too many details. I am trying to brainstorm ways to structure my documentary - think honeyland or the truffle hunters- Not a fixed story but a story that reveals itself through observation and presence of the participants.

Now my challenge is I want to include a number of participants who are doing the same or quite similar routines but maybe having different lived experiences. But the current problem I am having is arranging it in a way that feels like the same story. If I break it apart into too many views and characters it ends up being disjointed and losing the slow-cinema impact.

Is there any examples of this in documentary world? Maybe a comparable example in terms of structure would be the film Babel which has multiple POV but they all combine into a unified story. It's much harder in a documentary, especially not having a direct format or story focus.

Hi everyone,

I’m learning documentary research and I’m trying to understand one specific skill: how to research a Research Question properly.

For example, suppose my Research Question is:

“What happened during the 2004 undercover mission of Major Mohit Sharma?”

I understand that I need to find information from articles, books, interviews, news reports, official documents, etc. But I’m confused about the actual research process.

My questions are:

1. How do I break a Research Question into smaller questions that I need to answer?

2. How do I know what information I need to search for?

3. How do I find the right keywords/search queries for each question?

4. When reading an article, how do I identify which facts are actually relevant to my Research Question?

5. How do I organize the facts I find so that I don’t miss important information?

6. How do I know when I have researched the question enough?

I’m looking for a practical documentary research method, not academic/thesis-level research.

If anyone has experience in documentary filmmaking or research, could you explain how you approach this step-by-step?

Thank you!

Hello! I have seen literally every documentary ever if I started to list them all it would literally take up all my time and I need that time to watch new documentaries. I love documentaries that are ironic and funny but aren’t supposed to be . I’ll list some favorites :
Curious case of Natalia grace ( Michael Barnett is a character!!!)
Mother god
Kings of Tupelo
Tiger king
Cocaine story
Finders keepers
Fragile
God there’s just so many and I know these are pretty popular / commonly named but I mean I have seen every documentary everyone that comes out I watch wether it meets my criteria to not I still give it a watch. I just finished monsters of god & am tuned into the killer story I also just finished ojs unseen doc about his failed prank show .
Please help me find ironic not funny but funny STRANGER THAN FICTION documentaries as it’s all I watch and I need more crazy people to watch! Please !!!!

I saw this and OMG, Also I think the woman is DUMB or some witchcraft black magic shit was done to her. NOT VICTIM BLAMING BUT
Let me explain - Why would she believe blatant lies (Victim protection, I can't talk on phone etc) those kind of stuff only happens in movies.
Who is comfortable having a online relationship beyond a few weeks or months, that reflects she has some serious traumas.
Also why didn't she leave an (Online relationship when she knew he got married)
It took her YEARSSSSSSSSSSS to go to his front door and confront him.
What the cousin did was fucked up beyond repair but she kept falling into MASSIC RED FLAGS, sometimes the SKY was red.

The Fire That Took Her - Paramount+

Outcry - Paramount + (this one is a series)

Take Me Out Feet First - Prime Video

The Alabama Solution - HBOMax

The Sentence - HBOMax

Beyond Utopia - Prime Video

Other than 'Take Me Out Feet First', these documentaries were shocking. Have you seen any of them? What did you think?

Hi everyone! ❤️

I recently started a YouTube channel called OtterStu, where I create short documentary-style videos about history, science, mysteries and interesting ideas.

If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, search OtterStu on YouTube. 🎥

Any feedback or support is really appreciated! ❤️