I'm kinda spiralling after witnessing the hardship experienced by these hardworking families. Also kind of triggered because one of the dads reminded me of my own (busting his ass labouring into his 60s), but at least he owned his own home by the end of it all. Goddam. Please suggest something uplifting at least by the end of the film.

The People and the Olive follows a group of American ultramarathon runners attempting to cover 129 miles across the occupied West Bank in five days. Rather than simply documenting the run, director Aaron Dennis uses the journey to introduce the Palestinian farmers, families and communities whose lives remain closely connected to the land and particularly to the olive tree.

As the runners travel from community to community, they learn about farming, fair trade and the economic importance of olive cultivation while participating in efforts to replace uprooted trees. The result is as much a travel and human-interest documentary as a political one, presenting Palestine through landscapes, conversations, meals, farming and ordinary encounters rather than principally through conflict.

At its centre is the olive tree itself: livelihood, inheritance, cultural marker and something planted with the expectation that somebody will still be there decades later to harvest it.

Documentary on America's bullying crisis. Follows five kids and families over the course of a school year.

This 1973 BBC documentary describes life on the last manned British lighthouse: The Bishop Rock.

Just came across Yanuni and found it incredibly powerful. It takes you deep into the fight to protect the Amazon rainforest and the Indigenous communities whose lives and land are at the center of it.

A powerful documentary produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, exploring the fight to protect the Amazon rainforest and Indigenous communities.

Two centuries of oil concessions, coups and covert programs, from the Qajar dynasty to today's crisis.

Submission Statement:
Behind the locked doors of a forensic psychiatric hospital, people who have committed violent crimes while suffering from severe mental illness struggle for a second chance. With unprecedented access to the Brockville Mental Health Centre, this documentary follows patients undergoing treatment in an institution rarely seen by the public. Over 18 months, both patients and staff reveal the realities of life inside—where recovery, responsibility, and risk are constantly weighed.

Directed by Lebanese filmmaker Christian Ghazi, Resistance, Why? was filmed in 1970 following an initiative by Soraya Antonius and the Fifth of June Society. Ghazi and Noureddine Chatti travelled to meet Palestinian and Arab political figures living in Lebanon, recording extended discussions with Ghassan Kanafani, philosopher Sadiq Jalal El-Azm, Nabil Shaath and others.

Rather than documenting a particular battle or military campaign, the film concentrates on the historical and political arguments surrounding Palestinian resistance. Its participants trace Palestinian political mobilisation through the early twentieth century, including popular protests and strikes, the period of British rule, the events surrounding the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the development of organised Palestinian resistance during the following decades.

The result is also a primary-source record of how prominent Palestinian and Arab intellectuals were describing the conflict in 1970. Kanafani in particular discusses dispossession, political organisation, Zionism, the role of armed and non-armed resistance, and the idea of a future democratic Palestine. Whatever conclusions a viewer draws from those arguments, the documentary preserves them largely in the words of the people making them at the time.

The film subsequently became part of efforts to recover and preserve endangered Palestinian and Lebanese film history. Resistance, Why? was restored by Nadi Lekol Nas and Arsenal-Berlin, bringing a work made more than half a century ago back into circulation for contemporary audiences.

Directed and produced by Julia Bacha and Rebekah Wingert-Jabi for Just Vision, My Neighbourhood was filmed over two years in East Jerusalem and follows Mohammed El-Kurd as a Palestinian boy growing up in Sheikh Jarrah. Wingert-Jabi began filming in the neighbourhood in 2008, and the finished documentary was made by a wider production team that included Palestinian, Israeli and international filmmakers.

After Mohammed’s family is forced to surrender part of their home to Israeli settlers, he, his relatives and their neighbours become part of a campaign resisting further displacement. Rather than beginning with politicians or the wider geopolitical argument, Bacha and Wingert-Jabi stay largely at street and household level. Mohammed is still a child trying to understand why strangers are living in part of his family home while demonstrations, police and activists increasingly become part of everyday life.

The film also documents Israeli activists joining the Palestinian residents in their protests, creating relationships that complicate the usual division of the story into two opposing populations. Its wider production team included executive producer Ronit Avni, with Jessica Devaney, Irene Nasser, Rula Salameh and Vicky Wingert as co-producers. Released in 2012, My Neighbourhood went on to win a Peabody Award and remains an unusually intimate record of Sheikh Jarrah years before the neighbourhood became an international news story.

You can find out more about the production here:

https://justvision.org/myneighbourhood

Directed by Palestinian actor and filmmaker Mohammad Bakri, Jenin, Jenin was filmed in the aftermath of the Israeli military operation in Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. Rather than offering a conventional narrated account, Bakri centres the film almost entirely on the testimony of Palestinian residents, allowing survivors to describe what they witnessed and experienced during and after the fighting.

The documentary became almost as notable for what happened after its release as for the film itself. It was initially banned from commercial screening in Israel, beginning years of court cases and public controversy over censorship, testimony and competing accounts of what happened in Jenin. Those disputes followed Bakri and the film for nearly two decades.

Whatever position a viewer takes on those controversies, Jenin, Jenin remains an important work of Palestinian documentary cinema. It records how the events of 2002 were remembered by people living inside the camp and provides a valuable example of Palestinian filmmakers documenting their own history while that history was still unfolding.

Directed, written and narrated by Abby Martin, and produced and co-written by Mike Prysner, Gaza Fights for Freedom examines life in the Gaza Strip through the events surrounding the Great March of Return, the mass demonstrations that began along the Gaza-Israel boundary in
2018. Produced through The Empire Files, the documentary combines reporting, interviews and extensive footage filmed inside Gaza to present the demonstrations from the perspective of Palestinians taking part in them.

Much of the film centres on the people behind the casualty figures: protesters, journalists, medics, families and organisers living under blockade and participating in the demonstrations.

It documents the conditions inside Gaza, the history invoked by the demand for a right of return, and the response of Israeli forces positioned along the boundary. The filmmakers also examine the shooting of demonstrators, medical personnel and members of the press, placing individual accounts alongside footage recorded during the protests themselves.

The documentary is openly critical of Israeli policy and makes no attempt to disguise its political perspective. That is part of what makes it worth viewing as a documentary rather than simply treating it as neutral news reporting.

Martin and Prysner are making an argument, but they build that argument around extensive material filmed on the ground and the testimony of people whose experiences were often reduced internationally to statistics or short news reports.

Released in 2019, the film has since become one of the more widely viewed English-language documentaries dealing specifically with Gaza and the Great March of Return.

Content warning: contains graphic footage of shootings, serious injuries, death and the aftermath of violence.

The Wanted 18 is a Palestinian-Canadian documentary directed by Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan, set during the First Intifada in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour. The film follows a group of residents who bought 18 cows in an attempt to produce their own milk and reduce their dependence on Israeli suppliers.

What began as a modest experiment in local self-sufficiency soon became something much larger. As the boycott movement gathered momentum, the herd was declared a security threat and the cows were forced into hiding.

Combining interviews, archive material, animation and re-enactment, The Wanted 18 tells the story with an unusually playful tone, using absurdity and humour to explore occupation, civil resistance and everyday life during the uprising.

Beneath the surreal premise is a remarkably human account of how ordinary people tried to create a small measure of independence in extraordinary circumstances.

When 36-year-old Deborah L. Frazier made a frantic 911 call claiming masked intruders had broken into her Zanesville, Ohio home and shot her in the leg, police rushed to the scene. Inside, they found her boyfriend, 66-year-old Thomas Waddell, dead in the back room, his body wrapped in trash bags, blankets, and duct tape.

Frazier claimed to be a victim of a violent home invasion, but as investigators dug into the crime scene, her story quickly began to fall apart. From missing neighborhood surveillance footage to incriminating Google search histories and a single gun shot twice, once to kill Thomas and once to wound herself. Detectives uncovered a cold, calculated plan for financial gain.