The Powers of Congress (1947)

The Congress

For 200 years, the United States Congress has been one of the country's most important and least understood institutions. In this elegant, thoughtful and often touching portrait, Ken Burns explores the history and promise of this unique American institution. Using historical photographs and newsreels, evocative live footage and interviews with David Broder, Alistair Cooke, Cokie Roberts, Charles McDowell and others, the award-winning film chronicles the personalities, events and issues that have animated the first 200 years of Congress and, in turn, our country.

Broken Rainbow

Documentary chronicling the government relocation of 10,000 Navajo Indians in Arizona.

Knock Down the House

In 2018, a young bartender in the Bronx, a coal miner’s daughter in West Virginia, a grieving mother in Nevada and a registered nurse in Missouri join a movement of insurgent candidates challenging powerful incumbents in Congress. Without political experience or corporate money, these four women are attempting to do what many consider impossible.

Storming the Capitol: The Inside Story

Captures the incident of January 6, 2021, when scores of Trump supporters clashed with police, interrupting a constitutional process by Congress to affirm the victory of the then President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in the election.

The Aviator

A biopic depicting the life of filmmaker and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes from 1927 to 1947, during which time he became a successful film producer and an aviation magnate, while simultaneously growing more unstable due to severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Striptease

Bounced from her job, Erin Grant needs money if she's to have any chance of winning back custody of her child. But, eventually, she must confront the naked truth: to take on the system, she'll have to take it all off. Erin strips to conquer, but she faces unintended circumstances when a hound dog of a Congressman zeroes in on her and sharpens the shady tools at his fingertips, including blackmail and murder.

Idiocracy

To test its top-secret Human Hibernation Project, the Pentagon picks the most average Americans it can find - an Army private and a prostitute - and sends them to the year 2505 after a series of freak events. But when they arrive, they find a civilization so dumbed-down that they're the smartest people around.

State of Play

When a congressional aide is killed, a Washington, D.C. journalist starts investigating the case involving the Representative, his old college friend.

Davy Crockett Goes to Congress

The second of five programs about Davy Crockett involves him being bored with life, so he and Georgie plan to resettle their families and file their claims. In town, Davy wins a gunfight against the town bully, Big Foot Mason, and, as a result, he becomes the town lawman.

Washington Melodrama

An elderly businessman (Frank Morgan) plans what he thinks is an innocent night on the town while his wife is away. Instead, he finds himself involved in a showgirl's murder.

The Manchurian Candidate

Years after his squad was ambushed during the Gulf War, Major Ben Marco finds himself having terrible nightmares. He begins to doubt that his fellow squad-mate Sergeant Raymond Shaw, now a vice-presidential candidate, is the hero he remembers him being. As Marco's doubts deepen, Shaw's political power grows, and, when Marco finds a mysterious implant embedded in his back, the memory of what really happened begins to return.

LBJ

The story of U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson from his young days in West Texas to the White House.

Sans Soleil

A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco.

Daybreak Express

Set to a classic Duke Ellington recording "Daybreak Express", this is a five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Him

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

The Bridge

The Bridge is a controversial documentary that shows people jumping to their death from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco - the world's most popular suicide destination. Interviews with the victims' loved ones describe their lives and mental health.

March of the Penguins

Every year, thousands of Antarctica's emperor penguins make an astonishing journey to breed their young. They walk, marching day and night in single file 70 miles into the darkest, driest and coldest continent on Earth. This amazing, true-life tale is touched with humour and alive with thrills. Breathtaking photography captures the transcendent beauty and staggering drama of devoted parent penguins who, in the fierce polar winter, take turns guarding their egg and trekking to the ocean in search of food. Predators hunt them, storms lash them. But the safety of their adorable chicks makes it all worthwhile. So follow the leader... to adventure!!

A Year Full of Drama

A young woman takes on an audacious human experiment while testing the human limit of consuming culture and asking whether art has the power to change a life.

The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari

A close examination of the Whakaari / White Island volcanic eruption of 2019 in which 22 lives were lost, the film viscerally recounts a day when ordinary people were called upon to do extraordinary things, placing this tragic event within the larger context of nature, resilience, and the power of our shared humanity.

Capturing the Killer Nurse

Charlie Cullen was an experienced registered nurse, trusted and beloved by his colleagues at Somerset Medical Center in New Jersey. He was also one of history’s most prolific serial killers, with a body count potentially numbering in the hundreds across multiple medical facilities in the Northeast.

The Redeem Team

Using unprecedented Olympic footage and behind-the-scenes material, The Redeem Team tells the story of the US Olympic Men's Basketball Team’s quest for gold at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing following the previous team’s shocking performance four years earlier in Athens.

5 Seconds of Summer: The Feeling of Falling Upwards - Live from Royal Albert Hall

To commemorate the release of the band's 5th studio album, '5SOS5,' the band's unique and exclusive performance includes reimagined versions of songs from their 11-year catalog plus brand-new songs off the new album, accompanied by an orchestra and choir.

Chaplin: Spirit of the Tramp

A revealing exploration of Chaplin’s Romani heritage constructed from intimate interviews, film extracts, home movies and contributions from renowned contemporary Romani artists.

Parade

Plot unavailable

Four Faces of the Moon

Follow the animated journey of an Indigenous photographer as she travels through time. The oral and written history of her family reveals the story — we witness the impact and legacy of the railways, the slaughter of the buffalo and colonial land policies.

Kitchen Dialogue

A generational trauma through the lens of an Asian American teenager through food and poetry.

James Blunt: One Brit Wonder

Filmed on the road during his 2022 Greatest Hit Tour, director Chris Atkins followed James Blunt across Europe and delves into James Blunt's unique backstory. From witnessing the Kosovo War, recording the biggest selling album of the '00s, enduring the backlash that followed his success, and then tweeting his way back to becoming a national treasure, this is an intimate portrait of James Blunt as never seen before – a brutally honest story of a painfully self-aware, endlessly touring musician, for whom persistence eventually prevails.

Echo of You

People in their eighties and nineties, and even some centenarians, talk candidly and eloquently about love, loneliness, grief, life and death. A poetic, tender group portrait of a Danish generation slowly saying goodbye.

David Mirisch, the Man Behind the Golden Stars

The documentary about the life of legendary Hollywood P.R. man David Mirisch.

Teachers for Life

How can school education be designed differently? Four passionate teachers show how it can be done.

Years Are Here

From the Three Great Wars to the founding of New China, from starting from scratch, to China's entry into the world's second largest economy. Looking back over the past seventy years. Relying on 500,000 minutes of precious documentary images, the original sound, and the meticulous ingenuity to build a time-space corridor to the history

Vivere

War and love. tears and laughter, the worst and the best that can happen to someone - in brief, life, in Rome, ruled by the Nazis, in 1943. The man in question is called Vittorio, Vittorio De Sica. Easy to speak well of him now, but then he was just a 'comedian', an actor without future, protégé of no-one: someone who could count only on himself and his own imagination. And, one day, a German patrol turns up on the movie set where he is working. They are looking for him, find him and take him away, to their commander who wants a word with him. Goebbels in person has written to him, sending him a request which is an order. De Sica is trapped, but...

Meet the Hedgehogs

Steve Backshall visits a hedgehog rescue centre in Surrey founded by Brian May. He meets the dedicated staff and discovering the stories behind some of the animals being treated, helps to release a successfully treated hedgehog back into the wild, and offers advice on how to make a garden into a welcoming environment for the creatures.

One Day When We Were Young

After the outbreak of the war with Japan, all Beijing universities were closed or bombed. A group of young students, aged 18 or 19, set off in a hurry, moving south on foot, crossing Xiangqian and Yunnan, and eventually forming a temporary university on the Kunming plateau - the Southwest Union University, a joint venture between Tsinghua, Peking University and Nankai. They crossed a city to listen to the "best Chinese language class ever", to listen to Toselli's "Serenade", and to join the Flying Tigers. For these "post-90s" seniors, who are now in their nineties, SWU is not a dusty piece of history, but a memory of youth that is still as fresh as ever. Yang Zhenning, Xu Yuanchong, Pan Jiluan, Yang Coix, Wang Xiji and Ma Zhitu - 16 students of the University with an average age of over 96 years old are cast together to take you back to a time when war was raging and stars were shining.

Tapping the Wire

Long-time Wire fan Charlie Brooker takes a journey to the mean streets of Baltimore to meet the cast and crew of the series, and undertakes a mission to explain what makes The Wire the best cop show ever made.

Heavy Metal

For more then twenty years, tons and tons of metallic and electronic waste from all around the world has been transported to a Chinese town called Fengjang, in the south of Shanghai. Around 50,000 migrant workers have formed a real army to dismantle these metallic wastes. These "green soldiers" decompose, cut, split and recycle, with the most rudimentary means, almost 2 million tons of garbage every year. To remain and assume the minimum materials that is theirs, they work hard, bear an incredible precariousness and put in danger their own health due to the simply unacceptable working conditions. As the recognizable heaps of metal continue to pile up they provide a deeply moving image of a worldwide consumer society.

Along Came a Catdidate

When Sergio Chamorro and Daniel Cruz declared their cat Morris an eligible candidate in the municipal elections of Mexico's state of Veracruz, they thought of it as a joke. But the cat's surging popularity on social media made them reconsider. Now a leading candidate, Morris's political opponents are urging citizens not to vote for the feline.

Fighters

Restless teenager Mamo is heading for trouble with the wrong friends and difficulties at home when the somewhat older social worker Berat decides to help him avoid ending up in the same trouble he got into as a youngster. But some slates are hard to wipe clean, and Berat realises that even if his intentions are good, sometimes the past catches up with you. Everyone in ‘Fighters’ plays themselves in a hard-hitting story based on their own lives. It could have ended up as a well-meaning youth film for adults, but Jon Haukeland is an eminent character director who brings out a unique authenticity in his cast. ‘Fighters’ has been a massive success in Norwegian cinemas and shakes not only your notions of documentary and staging, but also any preconceptions you may have about young men like Mamo who, despite their obvious intelligence, risk ending up on the wrong side of the law. A celebration of friendship and adult role models.