Historical Documentary Movies

What happened after Einstein fled Nazi Germany? Using archival footage and his own words, this docudrama dives into the mind of a tortured genius.

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single...

Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the...

Egyptian archeologists dig into history, discovering tombs and artifacts over 4,000 years old as they search for a buried pyramid in this documentary.

Debunking the mythology surrounding the 16th century French prophet, Nostradamus.

Archival footage, animation and music are used to look back at the eight anti-war protesters who were put on trial following the 1968 Democratic...

Five times, Earth has faced apocalyptic events that swept nearly all life from the face of the planet. What did these prehistoric creatures look...

The last sovereign Zulu King, a female British missionary, an ambitious colonial official and a young Welshman are all voiced by actors to make...

A documentary examining what the Tyrannosaurus Rex was really like - both appearance and behaviour - using the recent palaeontological and zoological...

The sinking of the RMS Titanic remains one of the most enduring and mysterious tragedies of the 20th century. For decades, investigators and amateurs...

A biographical film about cinematic illusionist Georges Méliès featuring Méliès’s widow, Jeanne d’Alcy, as...

The sinking of the Titanic sent shockwaves around the world and started debates that continue to this day. But new, explosive evidence from the most...

The story of one of the great environmental disasters to befall the United States, and the terrible movie that help bring the catastrophe to light.

The director’s mother, Mirka Mora, avoided Auschwitz by one day. On his father’s side many perished in the Holocaust. These facts...

Leni Riefenstahl's flamboyant Nazi aesthetics shaped the public image of the 1936 Olympics. Never before had sports and politics been mixed. Through...

On 16 July 1212, a Crusader army made up of Castilians, Aragonese and Navarrese (but also French, English and Germans) confronted the army of the...

The story of the Londoners recruited to be freedom fighters during the South African apartheid during the 1960s.

The French female pioneer of immersion journalism, Maryse Choisy, who infiltrated in 1928 the prostitution underworld of Paris. Posing as a...