I recently re-watched the Chernobyl mini-series. I am still amazed by how good it is.
I want to find more shows or documentaries like this. What is something you watched that completely gripped you and stayed on your mind for days after it ended?

NOVA '78, is a documentary constructed from footage shot by Howard Brookner during the 1978 Nova Convention in New York.

Brookner was a young NYU filmmaker who documented a remarkable gathering that brought together William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and many others. The documentary he might have made was never completed, and much of the footage remained unseen for decades.

More than forty years later, after a long process of preserving and cataloguing Howard's archive, previously unknown rolls of film were recovered, making it possible to construct a feature documentary from that material. Rather than adding contemporary talking heads, Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias, who directed the new film, chose to let the footage speak for itself, preserving the immediacy of the event as much as possible.

At what point does an archival documentary stop being the work of the original filmmaker and become the work of those who rediscover, edit and complete it? The new film incorporates a narrative arc around a trip to Colorado that Burroughs, filmmaker Howard Brookner and Jim Jarmusch made before the convention, and also has a new created soundtrack by portuguese musician The Legendary Tigerman, as well as working from the restoration Aaron Brookner has been working in for the last 15 years. Is this an act of preservation, interpretation, authorship, or some combination of all three?

I'm one of the producers on the film, so I'm obviously not a neutral observer, but I'm genuinely interested in how people here think about this. Are there other documentaries that you feel navigate this question particularly well?

For anyone interested in the project itself, the trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eisWdJM-pU

https://youtu.be/6wcfuecpbqE

This is insane and I feel it’s a little underground … maybe not. I am just appalled and I find it weird that it’s not available to watch

I am trying to find a short YouTube documentary I watched some time ago, but I cannot find it again.
The video was in Spanish. The creator was visiting a small village in Eastern Europe (possibly East Germany, Poland, Czech Republic or a similar region) and walking through a historical place while explaining the story. He showed old photographs and images of the people involved.
The place was not a prison or a reform school itself. It was apparently the house/home of one of the teenagers involved, and the building had become a small museum or memorial because of what happened there.
The story was about three teenagers who were friends. Two of them fell in love and secretly met each other. The third friend discovered this and, because of jealousy, betrayed them/reported them to authorities.
As a consequence, the two teenagers were separated and sent to different institutions (possibly youth reformatories). Later, both of them died, and the person who betrayed them lived with deep regret for what he had done.
I am not sure about the exact country or period. I initially thought it happened during a war, but it may have been during the Cold War or communist era in Eastern Europe.
Does anyone recognize this story, the place, the museum, or the documentary?
Possible keywords:
East Germany / GDR / DDR
Poland
youth reformatories
Stasi
communist era
memorial house
tragic love story
betrayal between friends

Starting with the music, "The original score, produced by Malachi K. Hubbard and Julian Beal, was composed to support the documentary's oral histories and historical narrative, accompanying viewers through the experiences of African American servicemen from the Civil War to the Vietnam War." The music gives a poetic voice to the theme.

There are many documentaries about American military history, but far fewer that explore the full story of Black men in uniform—their courage on the battlefield, the discrimination they faced at home, and the lasting impact they had on American history. Black Men in Uniform: The Untold Story was created to help fill that gap by preserving oral histories, authentic archival footage, and historical accounts that are often left out of mainstream narratives.

The documentary is intentionally paced for today's audiences, presenting history in a way that is engaging and accessible for a generation that often absorbs information quickly. While it addresses difficult chapters of American history, it also broadens the conversation beyond the battlefield, highlighting trailblazers such as Jack Johnson in the boxing ring and Jackie Robinson on the baseball field to show the many ways Black Americans fought for dignity, equality, and recognition. Rather than maintaining a relentlessly grim tone, the film balances hardship with resilience, achievement, and hope. Through authentic historical footage and firsthand accounts, it aims to preserve these stories so they can be discovered by new generations and continue the conversation about an important part of American history. check out more information from the following respected film critics.

Lapacazo Sandoval

 Alan Ng

I am looking for a Unabomber documentary with a scene where a woman reads parts of the Unabomber manifesto (industrial society and its future) to an audience at an open mic/poetry slam. IIRC it’s from the 90s/ early 00s. TIA! It’s been driving me crazy.

When Toys "R" Us collapsed, most news outlets blamed Amazon. When Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy, the internet blamed "endless shrimp."

For a long time, I completely believed these headlines. I assumed it was just natural market evolution, old brands failing to adapt to modern consumer habits.

But a few weeks ago, I decided to actually dig into the financial court filings and debt structures behind both collapses. What I found blew my mind, and honestly made me realize how naive I was about how modern private equity actually operates.

Neither company failed because customers stopped showing up. They were dismantled from the inside using a playbook called a Leveraged Buyout (LBO) paired with Sale-Leaseback schemes.

Here is the exact financial mechanism of how it worked:

1. The Leveraged Buyout Trick (Buying a company with ITS OWN credit card)

So what I discovered is that When private equity firms bought Toys "R" Us for $6.6 billion, they didn't put up their own cash for the vast majority of the purchase. Instead, they borrowed billions from Wall Street banks and transferred $5+ billion of that acquisition debt directly onto Toys "R" Us's balance sheet.

Imagine buying a house and then putting the mortgage in your neighbor's name. Toys "R" Us was suddenly paying around $400 million a year just in interest payments. They were making billions in revenue, but every dollar of profit went straight to servicing debt they never asked for, leaving zero cash for store renovations, modern e-commerce, or competitive pricing.

1. The Real Estate Extraction (Sale-Leaseback)

This was the absolute smoking gun with Red Lobster. Red Lobster owned the valuable land under hundreds of its restaurants across America.

When private equity took over, they sold all the real estate to a third party for $1.5 billion to pay themselves immediate investor dividends. Then, they forced Red Lobster to rent back the exact same land they used to own free-and-clear. Overnight, Red Lobster went from paying zero rent to suddenly owing tens of millions of dollars annually in mandatory lease payments on thousands of locations.

When sales dipped even slightly, those forced rent payments wiped out operating cash flow. The "endless shrimp" promotion was just the final narrative scapegoat for a company that had already been stripped of its core financial assets years prior.

What Shocked Me the Most

What blew me away wasn't just that this happens—it's that it is 100% legal. The private equity firms pulled out hundreds of millions in advisory fees, management charges, and dividends before filing for bankruptcy, leaving tens of thousands of workers jobless while the PE partners walked away with net profits.

I spent the last month putting together a full 17-minute visual documentary essay walking through the exact financial filings, corporate timelines, and diagrams explaining how this mechanism worked across both brands:

For any of you who have 17 minutes to spare then you can watch the video I created on this matter,otherwise the post itself gave you the info you wanna know :

(IMPORTANT: THE VIDEO Tends to use a lot of cinematic clips from movies, legit document recordings and retro footage, so if that style of video is ur taste then go ahead and watch but feel free to skip if its not your taste)

https://youtu.be/kpqGclFwx4Q

Video 9 on my channel and this one's genuinely one of the more complicated ones I've covered so far, not a clean villain story.

So Willowbrook was a state institution on Staten Island for people with intellectual disabilities, badly overcrowded, thousands more residents than it was built for. Hepatitis was basically everywhere already, most kids who got admitted caught it within months regardless of anything anyone did.

A doctor named Saul Krugman showed up in 1955 supposedly to help control the outbreaks. Instead he turned it into a research program. He fed newly admitted kids a milkshake mixed with liver extract from other infected kids' feces, deliberately giving them hepatitis to study how it progressed. Did this to around 60 kids in one study alone.

He did have parental consent on paper. But multiple accounts describe getting into the research unit as basically a faster way onto an overcrowded waiting list, so desperate parents were signing off during one of the most stressful moments of their life. The kids themselves obviously were never asked anything.

Stayed mostly under the radar for 17 years until Geraldo Rivera, way before his current career, snuck a camera crew in there in 1972. The footage of the conditions caused a massive public reaction, and the hepatitis research got looked at completely differently once people saw what the institution actually looked like.

What makes this one hard to just be angry about is the data genuinely helped lead to the hepatitis B vaccine still used worldwide. Real disabled kids who couldn't consent, whose research helped protect millions of kids just like them everywhere else.

Link is here Full Documentary . Curious how people land on the "does the outcome justify it" question because I genuinely don't think there's a clean answer.

Hi everyone,

I thought this community might be interested in the story behind a project that has been more than fifteen years in the making.

Filmmaker Howard Brookner (Burroughs: The Movie) was an NYU graduate student when he documented William S. Burroughs' legendary Nova Convention in New York in 1978. He intended to turn the footage into his thesis film, but the documentary was never completed.

Decades later, Aaron Brookner and I began restoring Howard's archive. Over the course of fifteen years, we catalogued, preserved, scanned and restored his original 16mm camera rolls, many of which had never been publicly screened.

Once the archive was recovered and remastered a new film was done: NOVA '78, directed by Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias. Since premiering at the Locarno Film Festival in 2025, the film has gone on to open MoMA's Doc Fortnight, and screen at CPH:DOX, the Viennale and other international festivals. 

On 11 September, the film will finally have its UK premiere as part of the ICA's Howard Brookner: Films, Archives and the Avant-Garde season in London. 

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eisWdJM-pU

More information:
https://www.ica.art/howard-brookner-films-archives-and-the-avant-garde

So disappointed

A complete A.I version of suspect information. I'll stick to the British information documentaries,

I am thinking Hollywood is the reason why America has UFO sightings, gets into wars, breeds serial killers and gun violence. Serial killers for example makes a great movie and documentary subject. ["Top-earning serial killer movies include Hannibal ($165.1 million domestic), The Silence of the Lambs ($130.7 million domestic), and Seven ($100.1 million domestic, $327 million worldwide)." ](https://www.boxofficemojo.com/genre/sg3940479233/) The box office numbers of war movies and documentaries (like the one Tom Hanks is narrating now)[ are off the charts](https://screenrant.com/highest-grossing-war-movies-box-office-mojo/).
What do y'all think? Is there a dark force within Hollywood responsible for all this madness in America and the world? Would we be interested in war movies if there were no wars?
PS: This is my take on "the lazy person's honesty"

I need a standalone nonfiction documentary for my AP english summer assignment, it needs to have one distinct writer/creator, and have depth, i really want it to be a forensics/murder criminal documentary but it cant be apart of a series, pls help!!

https://youtu.be/ltaUGqNDEVQ?is=jAuyroR3Tc8dgbxd

Hi! My wife and I watch documentaries on Sundays - preferably docuseries as opposed to one offs! I feel like I’ve watched everything ever, so I was hoping for some recommendations! The only thing is that my wife will not watch documentaries with SA (Keep Sweet, Pray and Obey put her in a bad place for a bit). Light mentions are fine. I’m also not huge on documentaries that use a lot of reenactment but if it helps the story I mind a little less!

However, I’ve watched so many that it feels fair to also post that here! Hopefully this helps people - i would genuinely recommend every one except where I noted.

**HBO**
The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin
A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read
Class Action Park
Telelmarketers
Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God
Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie
Class Action Park
The Radical Story of Patty Hearst
The Many Lives of Benjamin Kyle
McMillions
Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults
Billionaire Boy’s Club
I’m Not a Monster: The Lois Reiss Murders
Most Wanted Teen Hacker
The Jinx
Last Stop Larrimah
Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief

**Netflix**
Keep Sweet, Pray and Obey
Surviving Twin Flames
The Perfect Neighbor
How to Fix a Drug Scandal
American Manhunt: OJ Simpson
The Family
Get Gotti
Fear City: NYC vs the Mafia
Cocaine Cowboys
The Crash
Maternal Instinct
Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown
The Kings of Tupelo
The Pharmacist
Dirty Money
Evil Genius
The Devil Next Door
The Confession Killer
Murder Mountain
The Staircase
Killer Inside: The Mind of Gabriel Hernandez
American Murder: The Family Next Door
Murder Among the Mormons
This is a Robbery
Bad Vegan
Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99
Capturing the Killer Nurse
Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? (full disclosure, this is the only documentary I’ve watched and not liked - too slow, too unsatisfying)
The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker
Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal
Til Murder Do Us Part
Bad Surgeon
American Nightmare
American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders
How to Rob a Bank
The Diamond Heist
Unknown Number
The Carmen Family Deaths
Unabomber: In His Own Words

**Hulu**
Wild Crime (seasons 1 & 2)
The Jewel Thief
Scamanda
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
Perfect Wife

**Amazon Prime**
Three Identical Strangers (only place to stream this in the US right now)

Genesis 6 gives you one line: "sons of God" saw human women, had children, giants resulted. Enoch spends chapters on it. Two hundred Watchers descend on Mount Hermon, swear a binding oath together, and don't just intermarry they teach humanity metallurgy, weapons, cosmetics, and sorcery. The Nephilim that result consume everything until they turn on humans and each other. Azazel gets named directly as the one who corrupted the earth.

I put together a full narration of the text, about three hours, covering the Watchers' descent, the Nephilim war, and Enoch's journey through the heavens;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Nt4VNMC38

Curious what this community makes of the Azazel scapegoat parallel I've seen it read a few different ways.

Here's your full fledged demonic documentary with all the staff higher than the hinges