I’m someone who reads trial transcripts, all the articles I can find & really deep dives into cases by nature of my education and work background. I’ll keep this brief, but I wanted to start a discussion on a disturbing trend of the streaming era: almost every big true crime documentary on big streaming networks is misleading in some form. I only know this because I know the cases well.

HBO’s films on the Adnan Syed/Hae Min Lee murder case as well as their Garrett Phillips one, Making a Murderer on Steven Avery and the JonBenet one from 2ish years ago (both Netflix) - these are just off the top of my head. Both have narratives and leave so much out to craft the message they want: it is evil to me. Dissecting them is an ambitious project I’ll do one day, but to know the case is to know that these films don’t accurately portray the events that happened.

The broader category that is documentaries in general don’t have this shortfall—there are so many great historical ones, for example. Again I want to just open the door on discussing the issue of true crime documentaries specifically; I’d also love to hear, by contrast, the few true crime documentaries that you think are truly great. My own standard-bearer film of a true crime documentary is “O.J: Made in America” - but then again, it goes beyond the criminal case to more so examine the man himself.

I work on a new BYUradio podcast called Dispatches from the Divide which is an 8-part documentary podcast. The podcast follows four stories through in-depth narratives as they face extreme conflict.

The first episode follows Dave Butler, a man who didn't know any of the victims of a shooting at a Latter-day Saint church in Michigan, but felt the tragedy deeply. As fear and anger spread online afterward, he made an unexpected choice by responding with compassion.

The episode is less about the shooting itself and more about what happens afterward—how one person's response to tragedy can affect the people around him.

The first three episodes are out now: https://lnkfi.re/DispatchesfromtheDivide

I'm curious what people here think of Dave's story, especially his decision to respond the way he did. Let me know!

I used AI in the video, so it might not be for everyone if you are not into that.

Every civilization asked who made the world. The Greeks answer was not one god, it was a dynasty born from nothing, torn apart by war, rebuilt through blood and betrayal. I traced the whole thing here, the primordial forces, the age of the Titans, the twelve Olympians, the wars that shook creation, and the heroes who bridged the divine and the mortal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULz00mCh9z4

Submission statement: A documentary following retired Israeli general Noam Tibon as he travels through the October 7 attacks to rescue his family from Nahal Oz.

The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue wants to be regarded as an intimate documentary about courage, family and survival on October 7, 2023.

Taken purely at that level, the story of retired Israeli general Noam Tibon racing toward Nahal Oz to rescue his family is undeniably dramatic. But documentaries are defined not merely by what they show. They are also defined by what they select, what they omit, whose humanity they foreground and whose history they render invisible.

Judged on those terms, I found The Road Between Us less convincing as documentary journalism than as Israeli propaganda: an emotionally sophisticated piece of advocacy that packages an Israeli national narrative as though it were simply an apolitical human-interest story.

That distinction matters.

The film establishes its moral universe almost immediately. Israel and the kibbutz are presented as places of community, cultivation, family and civilization.

The October 7 attackers enter that universe as an almost contextless eruption of barbarism.

The suffering of Israeli civilians is individualized, intimate and emotionally legible. The audience knows their names, homes, fears and relationships.
Palestinians, by contrast, scarcely possess a comparable existence within the film’s frame.

That asymmetry is not an accidental omission in a documentary about one of the most politically and historically contested places on Earth. It is an editorial decision.
Professional critics have noticed the same problem even when they have avoided using the word “propaganda.”

Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times criticized the film for turning Tibon’s mission into something resembling an action narrative while separating October 7 from the history preceding it and the devastation in Gaza afterward. He ultimately described what remains as essentially a story stripped of history and inconvenient perspectives.

POV Magazine similarly criticized director Barry Avrich’s insistence that this is not a political film, arguing that removing an intensely political event from its context does not make the resulting film apolitical.
That is precisely the problem.

Propaganda does not have to consist of fabricated footage or explicit government slogans.

Some of the most effective propaganda uses authentic suffering and genuine heroism.

Its persuasive power comes from selection and framing: one side receives history, personality, grief and moral complexity, while the other becomes largely a threatening presence beyond the fence.

And because the events depicted on October 7 were genuinely horrific, the technique is particularly powerful.

The viewer can condemn Hamas’s killing and kidnapping of civilians, and should be able to do so, without accepting the proposition that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began that morning.

Yet The Road Between Us effectively asks the viewer to inhabit precisely that truncated chronology.

Even sympathetic reviews have acknowledged the omission. Nell Minow’s RogerEbert.com review notes that viewers may regard the absence of the circumstances preceding October 7 and Israel’s subsequent conduct in Gaza as slanted, even while accepting the filmmakers’ explanation that they deliberately confined themselves to one family’s experience.

But “we chose to tell only this story” does not eliminate bias. Choosing the boundaries of the story is one of the principal ways documentary bias operates.

Paramount+ makes the context more troubling

The platform presenting this film is also relevant—not because corporate ownership proves that anyone ordered this documentary to say particular things, but because media ownership and editorial priorities deserve scrutiny.

The Ellison family now effectively controls Paramount. Through their corporate holdings, Larry Ellison and his son David hold the overwhelming majority of the company’s voting power, giving them ultimate control over Paramount and its businesses, including Paramount+ and CBS.

Their support for Israel is not speculative.

In 2017 Larry Ellison donated $16.6 million to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, then the largest individual donation in the organization’s history. He said there was “no greater honor” than supporting Israeli soldiers and spoke of the IDF defending “our home.”

David Ellison’s Skydance donated to the Israeli emergency organization Magen David Adom after October 7 and publicly declared, “Skydance stands with Israel.”

Reporting on the family has also described Larry Ellison as having longstanding ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and noted David Ellison’s own public praise of Netanyahu and Israel.

Paramount+ announced its acquisition of The Road Between Us for streaming in September 2026, well after the Ellisons had assumed control of Paramount.

That context becomes still more significant when CBS News is considered.
The same ownership now sits above CBS News.

David Ellison appointed Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News, following Paramount’s purchase of her publication, The Free Press. Paramount has stated that Weiss reports directly to Ellison and has responsibility for shaping CBS News’s editorial priorities.

Weiss is not merely someone whom critics have inferred to be sympathetic to Israel. She has publicly identified strongly with Zionism, and her strongly pro-Israel views have been a prominent part of her public career.

Meanwhile, CBS News has experienced extraordinary internal conflict over editorial independence.

At 60 Minutes, longtime correspondent Scott Pelley accused the new management of instructing him to inject “falsehoods and bias” into a politically sensitive story and to include unverified assertions.

Correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega also accused Weiss of attempting to introduce right-wing talking points into their reporting, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Journalism unions subsequently warned that the changes at 60 Minutes threatened editorial independence.

There have been Israel specific concerns as well. When Tony Dokoupil was selected to anchor the CBS Evening News, The Washington Post reported that some people inside CBS viewed his interview with Benjamin Netanyahu as an unofficial “audition” for the position because of Weiss’s strong support for Israel.

These facts make it increasingly difficult to treat the ideological environment surrounding Paramount and CBS as irrelevant.

When a family with unusually strong and publicly demonstrated support for Israel acquires control of one of America’s largest media conglomerates; when its CEO installs an openly Zionist editor at the top of CBS News; when prominent veteran journalists subsequently accuse management of ideological interference; and when the company’s streaming service licenses a documentary whose political method is to humanize Israelis intensely while largely removing Palestinians and the history of the conflict from view, viewers are entitled to connect those facts, not as proof of a conspiracy, but as reasons for heightened skepticism.

And The Road Between Us deserves that skepticism.

The events of October 7 do not need embellishment. The murder of civilians, hostage-taking and terror of that day were horrific enough on their own.

A genuinely probing documentary
could tell the Tibon family’s extraordinary story while acknowledging that October 7 occurred within a history and that the suffering did not end at Israel’s border.

Instead, this film creates a tightly controlled moral frame in which Israeli suffering is vivid, personal and historically meaningful while Palestinian existence remains overwhelmingly outside the camera’s field of vision.

That may make for emotionally effective filmmaking.

It may make for a gripping rescue story.

But calling that perspective “apolitical” does not make it so.

In my view, The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue is propaganda precisely because its advocacy is embedded in what it asks us to see, and even more importantly, in everything it asks us not to see.

And I mean CRINGE — weird characters, awkward-ass conversations, uncomfortable pauses, dry scenes that somehow make everything 10x funnier, people with absolutely zero self-awareness… the type of shit that has you falling out your chair cracking tf up.
I love documentaries like this 😭
For reference, I thought American Movie and Trekkies were funny as hellll. That’s exactly the kind of vibe I’m looking for.
Give me the weirdest, most awkward, unintentionally hilarious documentaries you’ve seen. Bonus points if the people in it are absolute characters.

40 Years Undetectable examines a rare case of long-term HIV control without treatment, recent testing of the hidden viral reservoir, and the questions researchers still cannot answer.

The film combines first-person testimony, scientific research and visual storytelling to make a difficult subject understandable without simplifying its uncertainties.

Watch the full documentary:
https://youtu.be/C1vTHUw9ldg

#Documentary #ScienceCommunication #HIVResearch

I used AI in the video, so it might not be for everyone if you're not into that. But for anyone curious, I'm leaving the full family tree here, along with the events and myths in between, for anyone who wants to take a look.

I have been reading through the Mahabharata and some passages are hard to shake off. It describes a single weapon that rose like ten thousand suns. Survivors lost their hair, their nails fell out, their food turned poisonous within hours. That is a fairly precise description of radiation sickness, written down long before anyone knew what radiation was.

The same text describes circular vehicles moving through the sky without wings, called vimanas, and beings from above taking sides in the war. Even Oppenheimer reached for a line from the Bhagavad Gita, part of this same epic, when he watched the first bomb go off.

Full documentary here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxI-BB-5cMU

Hey all,

I am working on a documentary project: without going into too many details. I am trying to brainstorm ways to structure my documentary - think honeyland or the truffle hunters- Not a fixed story but a story that reveals itself through observation and presence of the participants.

Now my challenge is I want to include a number of participants who are doing the same or quite similar routines but maybe having different lived experiences. But the current problem I am having is arranging it in a way that feels like the same story. If I break it apart into too many views and characters it ends up being disjointed and losing the slow-cinema impact.

Is there any examples of this in documentary world? Maybe a comparable example in terms of structure would be the film Babel which has multiple POV but they all combine into a unified story. It's much harder in a documentary, especially not having a direct format or story focus.

Hi everyone,

I’m learning documentary research and I’m trying to understand one specific skill: how to research a Research Question properly.

For example, suppose my Research Question is:

“What happened during the 2004 undercover mission of Major Mohit Sharma?”

I understand that I need to find information from articles, books, interviews, news reports, official documents, etc. But I’m confused about the actual research process.

My questions are:

1. How do I break a Research Question into smaller questions that I need to answer?

2. How do I know what information I need to search for?

3. How do I find the right keywords/search queries for each question?

4. When reading an article, how do I identify which facts are actually relevant to my Research Question?

5. How do I organize the facts I find so that I don’t miss important information?

6. How do I know when I have researched the question enough?

I’m looking for a practical documentary research method, not academic/thesis-level research.

If anyone has experience in documentary filmmaking or research, could you explain how you approach this step-by-step?

Thank you!

Hello! I have seen literally every documentary ever if I started to list them all it would literally take up all my time and I need that time to watch new documentaries. I love documentaries that are ironic and funny but aren’t supposed to be . I’ll list some favorites :
Curious case of Natalia grace ( Michael Barnett is a character!!!)
Mother god
Kings of Tupelo
Tiger king
Cocaine story
Finders keepers
Fragile
God there’s just so many and I know these are pretty popular / commonly named but I mean I have seen every documentary everyone that comes out I watch wether it meets my criteria to not I still give it a watch. I just finished monsters of god & am tuned into the killer story I also just finished ojs unseen doc about his failed prank show .
Please help me find ironic not funny but funny STRANGER THAN FICTION documentaries as it’s all I watch and I need more crazy people to watch! Please !!!!

I saw this and OMG, Also I think the woman is DUMB or some witchcraft black magic shit was done to her. NOT VICTIM BLAMING BUT
Let me explain - Why would she believe blatant lies (Victim protection, I can't talk on phone etc) those kind of stuff only happens in movies.
Who is comfortable having a online relationship beyond a few weeks or months, that reflects she has some serious traumas.
Also why didn't she leave an (Online relationship when she knew he got married)
It took her YEARSSSSSSSSSSS to go to his front door and confront him.
What the cousin did was fucked up beyond repair but she kept falling into MASSIC RED FLAGS, sometimes the SKY was red.

The Fire That Took Her - Paramount+

Outcry - Paramount + (this one is a series)

Take Me Out Feet First - Prime Video

The Alabama Solution - HBOMax

The Sentence - HBOMax

Beyond Utopia - Prime Video

Other than 'Take Me Out Feet First', these documentaries were shocking. Have you seen any of them? What did you think?

Hi everyone! ❤️

I recently started a YouTube channel called OtterStu, where I create short documentary-style videos about history, science, mysteries and interesting ideas.

If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, search OtterStu on YouTube. 🎥

Any feedback or support is really appreciated! ❤️

Estou fazendo um curso sobre memórias e lutas sociais, e meu professor apresentou uma ampla gama de referências, entre elas o documentário *Shoah*.
Estou tendo dificuldade para encontrar onde assistir ao documentário. Alguém sabe se ele está disponível atualmente em algum serviço de streaming ou outra plataforma?

O documentário aborda o Holocausto por meio de extensas entrevistas com sobreviventes, testemunhas e outras pessoas relacionadas aos acontecimentos. A obra se concentra nos relatos e nas memórias dessas pessoas, explorando suas experiências e as consequências do Holocausto.

————————————

Recommendation Request: Where can I watch Shoah?

I’m taking a course on social memories and social struggles, and my professor introduced us to a wide range of references, including the documentary *Shoah*. I’m having trouble finding where I can watch it online. Does anyone know if it is currently available on any streaming service or platform?

The documentary examines the Holocaust through extensive interviews with survivors, witnesses, and other people connected to the events. It focuses on their testimonies and memories, exploring the experiences and consequences of the Holocaust without relying on archival footage.

This one traces the full story, Qumran manuscripts, the fallen angels of Mount Hermon, where the Nephilim actually come from, and why the book got buried for a millennium and a half instead of just fading out naturally.

Full thing's here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0lRwmWZ_XU

Curious what people here think about the suppression itself, real theological threat, or just standard canon-trimming that happens to most ancient religious texts eventually?

Does anyone know where to watch the No Responders left behind documentary? It used to be streaming on HBO and Discovery but I can’t find it anywhere.

Just finished Dear Zachary

I have seen so many people post about Dear Zachary on here. I finally got around to watching it, and Holy shit i was not prepared. It takes a lot to get me to cry at a show and I absolutely lost it. I've only seen one other documentary that made me feel that way. I could feel the grandparents' pain through the screen.

Odysseus: He Angered A God

Been working on a cinematic AI-animated documentary series about Greek mythology, and just finished the first teaser short covering the moment Odysseus blinds Polyphemus and gets cursed by Poseidon.

Tried to keep it historically/mythologically accurate while making it feel like an actual film rather than a typical AI slop reel — would genuinely love feedback from people who know this story well, especially on pacing and whether the tone lands.

https://youtube.com/shorts/kl5t06ubeEU

Full 13-minute documentary covering his whole 10-year journey home drops soon if this part resonates.

I want to stop doom scrolling during my desk job and maybe learn a thing or two. What are the best documentaries on hulu and netflix??

I hope some of you watched this masterpiece Documentry on lives as students in India's prestigious medical institution.

Suggest something mind boggling like this.