American Documentary Movies

An intimate and kaleidoscopic voyage behind the closed doors of the Chinese birth tourism industry in the U.S.

In 1999, filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson turned the camera on themselves and began filming their five-year-old son, Idris, and...

Set in the Hasidic enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn, "93Queen" follows a group of tenacious Hasidic women who are smashing the patriarchy in their...

Rafe Esquith, 1992 American Teacher of the Year and National Medal of Arts recipient, teaches 5th-grade children whose parents don't speak English at...

The planet’s busiest maternity hospital is located in one of its poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. There, poor women face...

The story of a defiant movement of women of color transforming American politics from the ground up. Filmed during the historic 2018 midterm...

Journalist Assia Boundaoui sets out to investigate long-brewing rumors that her quiet, predominantly Arab-American neighborhood was being monitored...

Hla and Nyo Nyo live in a country torn by conflict. Hla is a Buddhist and the owner of a makeshift medical clinic in western Myanmar, where the...

When one’s sole focus is to provide for their children, the stakes are extremely high. The need for multiple jobs to make ends meet has become...

For the past two years, Ryan and Amy Green have been working on That Dragon, Cancer, a videogame about their son Joel's fight against that disease....

Filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown following the death of his infant niece and the subsequent arrest of his...

The film explores and celebrates the lesser-known life of a Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist and one of the Civil Rights...

At America's elite MIT, a Ghanaian alum follows four African students as they strive to graduate and become agents of change for their home countries...

A documentary about a survivor of Hurricane Katrina.

Beautifully layered and expressionistic, After Sherman is a story about inheritance and the tension that defines our collective American history,...

When a thriving, top-ranked African American elementary school is threatened to be replaced by a new high school favoring the community’s...

Filmmaker Nadine Natour turns her lens on her parents and her hometown, Appomattox, VA, to capture the story of her parents' emigration from...