Early documentaries, sometimes known as “actuality films,” were one minute or less long. Documentaries have developed over time, lengthening and adding new genres. Education, observation, and docufiction are a few examples. Documentaries are excellent resources for teaching a variety of concepts in schools since they are so informative. Documentary filmmakers have an obligation to accurately portray their worldview without purposefully distorting a subject. For those of you interested in the documentary format, here is a list of the best documentaries on YouTube!
Also Read: 15 Best Crime Documentaries That Will Send Chills Down Your Spine
1. 13th
Ava DuVernay, a filmmaker, examines the history of racial inequity in the US while highlighting the disproportionate number of African-American inmates.
2. The White Helmets
Volunteer rescuers risked their lives in the thick of the chaos and violence in Turkey and Syria to save civilians.
3. Requiem for the American Dream
Noam Chomsky, a well-known scholar and author, explains 10 principles of wealth and power concentration that have resulted in historic inequality and the demise of the American middle class.
4. Fed Up
Investigative journalists Katie Couric and filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig look into if there may be more illnesses than previously thought due to the American food sector centre class.
5. Living on One Dollar
In a remote part of Guatemala, four friends test out an eight-week experiment in surviving on just $1 per day while battling the disease, parasites, and hunger.
6. The September Issue
The film by R. J. Cutler follows famed ‘Vogue’ editor Anna Wintour as she prepares the September 2007 edition. It is also the magazine’s most significant issue, weighing in at a record 840 pages and introducing the fall trends. Wintour, who oversees each page, presents herself as a successful woman who understands exactly what the reader wants thanks to her signature bob and ubiquitous dark spectacles.
7. Citizenfour
Laura Poitras and reporter Glenn Greenwald travelled to Hong Kong to see the sender, who turned out to be Edward Snowden, after Poitras received encrypted emails from someone with knowledge of the government’s extensive covert surveillance operations. This is one of the best documentaries on YouTube.
8. With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story
Stan Lee, the co-creator of more than 500 characters, including Spider-Man, the Hulk, and X-Men, is discussed by Sean Astin, Tobey Maguire, Roger Corman, Frank Miller, and others.
9. Our Planet
This ambitious film with a grand perspective explores the natural beauty of the earth while looking at how climate change affects all living things.
10. A Certain Kind of Death
This documentary investigates what happens to the bodies of people who have no family or friends to arrange a funeral or cremation. It does this through interviews with various Los Angeles County morgue staff members who kindly confront death every day as well as actual scenes of corpses being worked on. The film exposes what happens to a person’s possessions later and how corpses are incinerated, and it unflinchingly and graphically depicts how bodies are discovered and processed at the coroner’s office.
11. Madness in the Fast Lane
This documentary chronicles the complete and even more terrible tale of the following 72 hours, which occurred two years after BBC cameras captured two sisters hurling themselves into oncoming vehicles on the highway. Two Swedish sisters were caught on camera in 2008 swerving towards oncoming traffic on the M6.
12. Capturing the Friedmans
Filmmaker Andrew Jarecki discovered while researching a documentary about children’s birthday party performers that one of his subjects, professional clown David Friedman, was the brother and son of two men who had been found guilty of child sex abuse in a well-known court case from the 1980s. Jarecki examines the contrasting accounts of the accused, the alleged victims, and the investigators using home movies shot by the Friedman family before and during the trial as well as fresh interviews.
13. Wisconsin Death Trip
The village of Black River Falls encounters a wave of unsettling, macabre, and genuinely bizarre events in the late 19th century. The plague of murder, fire, insanity, disease, suicide and other ills the cursed citizens face may be brought on by the town’s financial difficulties or the harsh Wisconsin climate. This film, which is an equal parts dramatisation and archival inquiry, revives the ghosts of Black River Falls through gloomy images and recreations of the town’s scandalous news stories.
14. This is the Zodiac Speaking
That’s The dark, fact-based single-player FPP adventure thriller Zodiac Speaking is based on the true story of Zodiac, one of the most notorious never-caught serial killers. It combines stealth & detective tactics in a stylised world of California in the 1970s.
15. The Family that Walks on All Fours
Their skeletons may provide important hints about the origin of man, according to American paleoanthropologists, and a Turkish neurophysiologist thinks they are completely genetic throwbacks.
This was our list of the best documentaries on YouTube. Which one is your favourite? Let us know in the comments!