Look Beyond the Headlines with These Compelling Documentaries
Documentaries have a unique ability to bring the stories making headlines into sharper focus. By looking beyond the news cycle, filmmakers offer a closer look at the people, communities, and events behind the stories dominating our conversations. From political upheaval and social justice to moments of tragedy and resilience, these films provide perspectives that can deepen our understanding of the world around us.
Newly added to Kino Film Collection, The Unmaking of a College offers a timely look at the forces shaping American life, examining the controversy surrounding a college and the larger questions it raises about education, identity, power, and the future of higher learning. It joins a collection of acclaimed documentaries that bring urgent real-world stories to the screen, exploring the events behind the headlines and the people whose lives are shaped by them. For another look at how documentary filmmaking can illuminate the experiences behind major social issues, explore our collection of films about immigration.
Discover these films and more, now streaming on Kino Film Collection.
The Unmaking of a College (2022)
In The Unmaking of a College, students at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts confront a new president's underhanded attempt to shut down their school and discover that a powerful institution is bullying an inexperienced administration into giving up the independence of one of the most experimenting colleges in the United States.
A riveting look behind a notorious scandal that rocked the nation. In the wake of the shootings at Columbine High School, a small town in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania elected a charismatic judge who was hell-bent on keeping kids in line. In this thrilling true crime documentary, director Robert May exposes the scandal behind the headlines.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, this powerful documentary is at once horrifying and exhilarating. Trouble the Water takes you inside Hurricane Katrina by weaving an insider’s view with a mix of verité and in-your-face filmmaking. It is a redemptive tale of self-described street hustlers who become heroes, survive the storm and then seize a chance for a new beginning.
Mr. Nobody Against Putin (2026)
2026 Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary Feature, this riveting first-person exposé of Russia's wartime student indoctrination program is told through the eyes of a small-town primary school teacher who dared to challenge the program and expose the truth.
In this provocative look at strange political bedfellows, Israeli filmmaker Maya Zinshtein investigates the political alliance between American evangelicals, Israel’s right wing, and their influence on the Trump administration’s foreign policy.
After the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 that killed 17 people and launched a nationwide student movement, filmmakers Emily Taguchi and Jake Lefferman embedded with students and families whose lives were forever transformed. Weaving together interviews and personal videos, this documentary creates a moving portrait of one community's crusade to turn tragedy into progress.
A gripping portrait of Sara Jane Moore, a suburban San Francisco single mother who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975. Fifty years later, her story feels eerily prescient, reflecting how ideology and isolation can warp the American Dream. Built around access to Moore, the film traces her shift from a patriotic volunteer to a revolutionary with a gun in her hand.
Immediate, raw, and direct, The War Tapes is the first film shot by the soldiers themselves, bypassing the embedded reporter filter and providing an intimate front-row look at how soldiers deployed to Iraq cope with life on the battlefield moment by moment, along with their emotional homecoming.
Winner of the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival The Force is a cinema vérité look inside the long-troubled Oakland Police Department as it struggles to confront federal demands for reform, a popular uprising following events in Ferguson, MO, and an explosive scandal.