Movies: Historical documentary

Using original footage and interviews, this documentary tells the nail-biting story of Apollo 13 and the struggle to bring its astronauts safely home....

Cologne Cathedral: a landmark, a World Heritage Site, a building of superlatives - and not just because it took over 600 years to complete. It has captivated people since the Middle Ages, and today it is Germany's biggest tourist magnet. Gothic archi...

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

This documentary delves into the mysteries surrounding the Neanderthals and what their fossil record tells us about their lives and disappearance....

Using archival footage, cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the 85-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts his life, from working as a WWII whiz-kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to managing ...

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

...

On June 6, 1944, the Allied Forces executed Operation Overlord, the largest seaborne invasion in history, storming the beaches of Normandy. This pivotal event, known as D-Day, liberated France and Western Europe. A new documentary features interviews...

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 United States....

...

Thirty years after the release of his film JFK (1991), filmmaker Oliver Stone reviews recently declassified evidence related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which took place in Dallas on November 22, 1963....

A keen chronicle of the unlikely rise to power of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and a dissection of the Third Reich (1933-1945), but also an analysis of mass psychology and how the desperate crowd can be deceived and shepherded to the slaughterhouse....

The first transatlantic communications cable, traversing the ocean floor from Valentia Island, County Kerry, to Newfoundland, Canada, 165 years ago was an 8 year endeavor that helped lay the foundation of the modern technology industry and explains t...

A film made of archives mostly unknown, on the last day of the Second World War in Europe and on the events which preceded it. This film also shows the growing tension between the Allies and the Soviets at the time: May 8, 1945 is also the first day ...

...

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystander...

Thanks to new excavations in Mauritius and Madagascar, as well as archival and museum research in France, Spain, England and Canada, a group of international scholars paint a new portrait of the world of piracy in the Indian Ocean....

...

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

An examination of the intimate life of America's most consequential president, Abraham Lincoln. As told by preeminent Lincoln scholars and never before seen photographs and letters, Lincoln's romantic relationships with men is detailed. The lens is w...