Latest in For The Love Of Docs

The premiere of Kokomo City at the Sundance Film Festival last January heralded the arrival of a fresh new cinematic talent, D. Smith. Her directorial debut, a documentary about four Black trans women in New York and Atlanta, won two awards at Sundance and went on to earn prizes at the Berlinale, DocAviv…

At every stage of her career, from the fashion runway to the boardroom, Bethann Hardison has been a pioneer. Her remarkable journey through the highest echelons of the fashion world is explored in Invisible Beauty, directed by Hardison herself and Frédéric Tcheng. The award-winning film played as…

North Korea is an earthly paradise – at least, that's the fiction its people are fed from birth by their dictatorial government. The reality is far, far grimmer, almost unimaginably so.  Just how dreadful conditions are in the country becomes clear in the documentary Beyond Utopia, directed by…

Most Americans have heard of Breonna Taylor, the young African American woman killed in her home in Louisville, Kentucky in 2020 in a botched police raid. News of her tragic shooting helped spur the Black Lives Matter movement and a societal reckoning with institutionalized racism. But were it not for a…

The famed anthropologist Margaret Mead was once asked what she considered to be the earliest sign of the formation of human civilization. It wasn't evidence of toolmaking or farming, in her estimation, but the discovery of a human leg bone from many millennia ago – someone’s femur that had broken but…

In a guest essay for the New York Times earlier this year, Indian journalist Vidya Krishnan wrote, "[T]here is no escaping India's rape culture; sexual terrorism is treated as the norm." She cited a study that found more than three quarters of Indian women "who have experienced physical or sexual violence…

Christopher Nolan's smash hit Oppenheimer renewed public interest in the Manhattan Project and the development of the nation's nuclear weapons program. But there's much more to the story than just the architect of the program, the Trinity test and the Los Alamos research lab. About 1,200 miles to the…

In the 1990s, "Satanic Panic" swept North America and other parts of the world, a false belief that Devil worshipers were engaging in ritual abuse of children on a mass scale – drinking their blood, forcing them into prostitution and other lurid crimes. The hysteria, which saw numerous innocent…

Sex researcher Shere Hite became a media sensation in the mid-1970s with the publication of her groundbreaking study of female sexuality, The Hite Report. Then came the furious backlash.  Hite's extraordinary impact on American culture, and the price she paid for her work are explored in the…

Pop star Bobi Wine gave up a comfortable life as an entertainer to take on a nearly impossible task: rescue his country from the clutches of a ruthless dictator. The inspiring story of the singer-activist who ran for the highest office in Uganda is told in the National Geographic documentary Bobi Wine…

In March 2002, untold millions of Chinese viewers were watching state-controlled television when the program was suddenly interrupted, replaced by a video defending the Falun Gong spiritual movement from attack by the Chinese government. This remarkable "hijacking" of primetime TV, carried out by a…

More than 91,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2020, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a federal agency. Those staggering numbers loom over the documentary Our American Family, an intimate look at a Philadelphia family with a daughter, Nicole, in grave danger of…