Blog Posts by Subject: Documentary films

Two new documentaries about the disastrous Fyre Festival were just released on Netflix and Hulu, and have shared revelations that are all over the news. If you watch a documentary that grabs your attention and won’t let go, what should you do next?

Chatham Square Library, located in the heart of Chinatown, celebrates the diverse stories and experiences of those with Chinese heritage with our new Chinese in America Film Series. This series has two distinct goals: to give a voice to emerging independent filmmakers, and to rediscover lesser known films (with the help of the Library for Performing Arts archive) that deal with the experience of being Chinese in America in a variety of unique situations.

Recent films that portray the American Immigrant Experience. From documentaries to wonderful works of fiction, they all provide some insight in what builds our diverse nation.

Here are some tunes to thrash around to, some books to read up on and some movies to feel inspired by.

This week's feature is provided by Shola Lynch, Curator of our Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division. Here she discusses the importance of archival video and audio materials to black history.

A few months ago, the NYPL Milstein Division of United States History, Local History & Genealogy put our collective local history obsessive minds together to bring you a list of our favorite NYC non-fiction books. Now we reveal our favorite New York documentaries. These documentary films best depict New York, either in moments or over lengths of time, providing a capsule of a New York experience.

In recognition of the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, The New York Public Library is partnering with Sandy Storyline to present an opportunity to hear and share first person stories of recovery and remembrance.

At our first Fall 2013 veterans' program at NYPL, veterans from several different generations and branches of services told their own stories, responding to the mainstream media depiction of veterans and military life. This panel was entitled Our Stories To Tell and is the first event in a series of events this Fall 2013 that are collaboratively produced by veterans around New York City as they tell their own stories to both veterans and civilians as a way to fill in the  

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a series of research workshops organized by the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC) held at Harvard. It was a great experience to learn about the latest digital tools, services and resources available for Japanese studies in the humanities and social sciences.

Throughout the conference, I met many East Asian Studies librarians, specialists and teaching faculty from

Did you know that Memorial Day goes as far back as the American Civil War in the 1860s?

Memorial Day, formerly known as Decoration Day, occurs ever year on the last Monday of the month of May and is the day of remembering the men and women who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.

For the past two centuries, the U.S. has been involved in many wars domestically and aboard. Many service men and women have put aside their jobs, families and lives to defend our country and principals of freedom during times of crisis. 

On Thursday, April 25th the Fort Washington Library held a special screening of the film Bully, a 2011 documentary about bullying in U.S. schools directed by Lee Hirsch, followed by a conversation about how to deal with this serious problem. Our discussion was lead by T. Burgess, an Information Assistant with an MA in School Counseling. To promote this event all the staff wore buttons, created and designed in house a few weeks before the program. These buttons were 

I'm sorry to shout. But we're showing Desperately Seeking Susan and DIRECTOR SUSAN SEIDELMAN WILL BE HERE. So if ever you were going to attend a Lower East Side Heritage '80s film, this is the one. Ms. Seidelman will be speaking about her work, and there will be a Q and A after the show. Moving on...

I was amazed at what I remembered and what I forgot about Desperately Seeking Susan, or remembered differently. I forgot all the cameos.

One can scarcely think of any park in NYC — or any city, really — without envisioning the ubiquitous pigeon there as well.

In the 1982 documentary, Return Engagement, Timothy Leary sits before a class of high school students and says, "I think that everyone in this room, in our lifetimes, can go through as many changes and metamorphosis and mutations, as the butterflies go from cocoons to caterpillars to beautiful high-flying creatures."

Leary's professional life was defined by a number of "metamorphosis and mutations." He was a clinical psychologist at the Kaiser Foundation in the 1950s,

Tonight at 9pm, HBO will premiere Jeffrey Schwarz's new documentary VITO: The Life of Gay Activist Vito Russo. Extensive research for the film was undertaken at the New York Public Library using Vito Russo's papers, as well as many other collections, such as the Gay Activists Alliance Records and ACT UP New York Records.

I was privileged to preview 

The 50 Documentaries to See Before You Die series on Current TV has generated a fair amount of controversy... nothing on the list predates 1988, and it's heavy on English-language films, for example. I have posted the list here with links to the NYPL BiblioCommons catalog so that you can read descriptions and put any of the DVDs on