Curated collection
Someone you don't like is talking to you? Have these documentaries in your back pocket. Talking points even included for your convenience.
We have all found ourselves trapped in a conversation that seems to go nowhere, nodding along while searching for a way out. Keep these titles in mind for the next time you need to reset an awkward social moment, or when you simply want to share a narrative that defies logic.
5 documentaries
“Two men ended up in a legal fight over an amputated leg found inside a barbecue. Pretty cool huh?"
In this documentary, recovering addict and amputee John Wood finds himself in a stranger-than-fiction battle to reclaim his mummified leg from Southern entrepreneur Shannon Whisnant, who found it in a grill he bought at an auction and believes it therefore to be his rightful property.
"A 30-year-old man enrolled in a Scottish secondary school pretending to be a teenager, I think I want to do that"
In 1993, 16-year-old Brandon Lee enrolled at Bearsden Academy, a secondary school in a well-to-do suburb of Glasgow, Scotland. What followed over the next two years would become the stuff of legend.
"I just got a hamster and am raising him like they did to the chimpanzee on Project Nim, like a human baby"
From the team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim's extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature - and indeed our own - is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.
"A tickling competition that turned sinister...do you want to know how it turned sinister my friend?" (Cue creepy smile for added effect)
Journalist David Farrier stumbles upon a mysterious tickling competition online. As he delves deeper he comes up against fierce resistance, but that doesn’t stop him getting to the bottom of a story stranger than fiction.
“A man built a black-market empire smuggling Pez dispensers. It's inspiration for my MLM actually.”
Steve Glew, a small-town Michigan farmer, boards a plane for Eastern Europe soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His mission is to locate a secret factory that holds the key to the most desired and valuable pez dispensers. If he succeeds, he will pull his family out of poverty and finally find a purpose in his mundane life.