Popular Documentary-War Documentaries

Through ground breaking computer restoration technology, filmmaker Peter Jackson's team creates a moving real-to-life depiction of the WWI, as never seen before in restored, vivid colorizing & retiming of the film frames, in order to honor those who fought and more accurately depict this historical moment in world history.

FOR SAMA is both an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab's life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice - whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter's life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much. The film is the first feature documentary by Emmy award-winning filmmakers Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts.

This documentary by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's is about the Nazi party's 1934 rally in Nuremberg, Germany. Told without narration, it documents all six days of activities from Adolf Hitler's arrival to his departure. It includes speeches by all of the major participants as well as the various activities of the thousands upon thousands who attended. In hindsight, it's a chilling film that shows the power of propaganda.

One night at a bar, an old friend tells director Ari about a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Every night, the same number of beasts. The two men conclude that there's a connection to their Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early eighties. Ari is surprised that he can't remember a thing anymore about that period of his life. Intrigued by this riddle, he decides to meet and interview old friends and comrades around the world. He needs to discover the truth about that time and about himself. As Ari delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, his memory begins to creep up in surreal images.

Following up on 'Bowling for Columbine', film-maker Michael Moore provides deep and though-provoking insights on the American security system, the paranoia level, fear, uncertainty, false values, and patriotism, which all combined to set the stage for George W. Bush to launch a war on Iraq instead of focusing on getting the real culprit(s) behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This documentary also focuses on how some Saudis were safely and secretly flown out of America while planes were ostensibly grounded after the attacks. Archived film footage, candid interviews with politicians, and an overall waste of public funds for a war that was initiated on false pretension to wit: a weapon of mass distraction--to take the focus away from the real enemy and get Americans glued to their TV sets to watch innocent Iraqis and Afghans getting killed. And a war that would eventually alienate the U.S. and its citizens from almost every country on Earth.

Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's year dug in with the Second Platoon in one of Afghanistan's most strategically crucial valleys reveals extraordinary insight into the surreal combination of back breaking labor, deadly firefights, and camaraderie as the soldiers painfully push back the Taliban.

Claude Lanzmann directed this 9 1/2 hour documentary of the Holocaust without using a single frame of archive footage. He interviews survivors, witnesses, and ex-Nazis (whom he had to film secretly since they only agreed to be interviewed by audio). His style of interviewing by asking for the most minute details is effective at adding up these details to give a horrifying portrait of the events of Nazi genocide. He also shows, or rather lets some of his subjects themselves show, that the anti-Semitism that caused 6 million Jews to die in the Holocaust is still alive and well in many people who still live in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere.

Director Feras Fayyad returns to his native war-torn Syria to follow a dedicated team of female doctors who tirelessly treat casualties in an underground hospital while battling systemic sexism. Shot from 2016 to 2018, The Cave belongs to the top rank of war films. Syrian director Feras Fayyad takes us to a subterranean landscape that feels akin to the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max (1979). With life too dangerous above ground, survivors create a network of secret tunnels under the city of Ghouta, near Damascus, for an underground hospital maintained by women doctors. In contrast to the many Syrian documentaries made from cellphone footage or shaky cameras, Feras Fayyad takes great care to visualize the landscape and its memorable occupants with artful cinematography. For anyone who feels jaded by Syria coverage, this work stands apart. The heart of the film is Dr. Amani, a young Syrian woman operating in unimaginable conditions with great humor and fortitude. When not tending to patients - many of whom are small children - she's forced to justify her work to chauvinistic men who insist that a woman should be at home fulfilling domestic duties, not running a hospital. The claustrophobia of Amani's workplace is mitigated by the high spirits of her crew, while occasional forays above ground temper relief from close quarters with harrowing scenes of a city reduced to rubble.

One of the most vivid depictions of the horrors of Nazi Concentration Camps. Filmed in 1955 at several concentration camps in Poland, the film combines new color and black and white footage with black and white newsreels, footage shot by the victorious allies, and stills, to tell the story not only of the camps, but to portray the horror of man's brutal inhumanity.

Bill Maher interviews some of religion's oddest adherents. Muslims, Jews and Christians of many kinds pass before his jaundiced eye. Maher goes to a Creationist Museum in Kentucky, which shows that dinosaurs and people lived at the same time 5000 years ago. He talks to truckers at a Truckers' Chapel. (Sign outside: "Jesus love you.") He goes to a theme park called Holy Land in Florida. He speaks to a rabbi in league with Holocaust deniers. He talks to a Muslim musician who preaches hatred of Jews. Maher finds the unlikeliest of believers and, in a certain Vatican priest, he even finds an unlikely skeptic.

Former corporate whiz kid Robert McNamara was the controversial Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, during the height of the Vietnam War. This Academy Award-winning documentary, augmented by archival footage, gives the conflicted McNamara a platform on which he attempts to confront his and the U.S. government's actions in Southeast Asia in light of the horrors of modern warfare, the end of ideology and the punitive judgment of history.

Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood movie star who was hailed as the most beautiful and glamorous in the world. However, that was only the surface that tragically obscured her astounding true talents. Foremost of them was her inventive genius that a world blinded by her beauty could not recognize as far back as her youth in Austria with her homemade gadgets. This film explores Lamarr's life which included escaping a loveless marriage on the eve of Nazi Germany's conquest of her nation to a new career in Hollywood. However, her intellectual contributions were denied their due even when she offered them in the service of her new home during World War II. Only after years of career and personal decline in her troubled life would Lamarr learn that her staggering aptitude created brilliant engineering concepts that revolutionized telecommunications, which forced the world to realize the hidden abilities of a woman it had so unfairly underestimated.

Career Journalist Mike Boettcher takes his son to the war zone in Afghanistan, covering U.S. Combat Troops on the front lines. What starts out as an effort to reconnect with his son, becomes a remarkable true story and fight for survival for all.

In the forested depths of eastern Congo lies Virunga National Park, one of the most bio-diverse places in the world and home to the last of the mountain gorillas. In this wild, but enchanted environment, a small and embattled team of park rangers - including an ex-child soldier turned ranger, a carer of orphan gorillas and a Belgian conservationist - protect this UNESCO world heritage site from armed militia, poachers and the dark forces struggling to control Congo's rich natural resources. When the newly formed M23 rebel group declares war in May 2012, a new conflict threatens the lives and stability of everyone and everything they've worked so hard to protect.

A documentary that follows the efforts of "Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently," a handful of anonymous activists who banded together after their homeland was taken over by ISIS in 2014. With deeply personal access, this is the story of a brave group of citizen journalists as they face the realities of life undercover, on the run, and in exile, risking their lives to stand up against one of the greatest evils in the world today.