Best documentaries

Many of the most powerful documentaries tell stories about social issues and communal conflict. Here are five of the best from the past decade, all available to stream online.

The Overnighters

When a fracking boom drew jobseekers en masse to a small town in North Dakota during the last recession, a local pastor let the downand-out sleep in his church, sparking anger among locals. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2014, this is a powerful portrait of hard moral choices and communal strife.

Human Flow

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s account of life in the world’s refugee camps was released in 2017. Combining hand-held footage of camps from Italy to Bangladesh with interviews and scrolling news data, it is a beautiful but often devastating chronicle of human endurance and human suffering.

The Work

Shot in 2017, this is a simple account of four days of group therapy in Folsom Prison, a maximum security jail in California. The West Coast therapy-speak can be squirm-inducing, but as each inmate opens up about his past, it’s hard not to be moved and impressed.

Honeyland

Living with her mother in the mountains of North Macedonia, Hatidže Muratova harvests honey sustainably from wild hives. Released in 2019, this quietly beautiful film follows her for three years, during which her way of life is disrupted by the arrival of a family of itinerant cow herders.

How to Survive a Plague

This Oscar-nominated film charts the work of activists in the early days of the Aids crisis, as they struggled to win recognition for victims and funding for medical research from the US government. It’s a heartbreaking struggle that ends, thankfully, with an (inevitably qualified) victory.