Best movies like Raising Bertie

Produced by Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine for MTV and Dickhouse Productions, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia is a documentary about the renowned West Virginia outlaw Jesco White and his eccentric backwoods family. In addition to getting in trouble with the law, the Whites, who live deep within Appalachia, uphold a time-honored dancing style, even as they contend with poverty, drugs and other issues. Alternately humorous and sad, the movie is an unflinching look at life on the criminal margins of rural mountain culture.

Based on the book by anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, this Academy Award-winning short documentary offers a tender portrait of a community of elderly yet resilient Jews living, loving, and at times struggling, in Venice, California. From everyday trials to traditional celebrations, this compassionate portrayal of Eastern European survivors cuts straight to the heart of every viewer and reminds us of the joys and realities of long life.

A Road-Movie on rails, Ocean offers both a journey between Montreal and Halifax, as well as a sensory evocation of the intimate experience of travelling.

For over a decade, this portrait of a North Philadelphia family and the creative sanctuary offered by their home music studio was filmed with vérité intimacy. The family's 10-year journey is an illumination of race and class in America, and it's a testament to love, healing and hope.

Grab a backstage pass to the Jonas Brothers' motion picture debut! Kevin, Joe and Nick are "Burning Up" the stage and inviting you inside their personal world for the adventure of a lifetime. This colossal movie event launches the world's hottest band straight into your living room – and includes guest appearances by chart-topping artists Demi Lovato and Taylor Swift! Secure your VIP pass to a once-in-a-lifetime experience with the Jonas Brothers. Get ready to hang out with this multitalented trio, and take an intimate look at what their lives are like offstage and behind the scenes. It's the music-filled movie event perfect for the whole family!

Inspired by Steven Blush's book "American Hardcore: A tribal history" Paul Rachman's feature documentary debut is a chronicle of the underground hardcore punk years from 1979 to 1986. Interviews and rare live footage from artists such as Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, SS Decontrol and the Dead Kennedys.

BROTHERS AT WAR is an intimate portrait of an American family during a turbulent time.  Jake Rademacher sets out to understand the experience, sacrifice, and motivation of his two brothers serving in Iraq. The film follows Jake’s exploits as he risks everything—including his life—to tell his brothers’ story.

"A Cambodian Spring" is an intimate and unique portrait of three people caught up in the chaotic and often violent development that is shaping modern-day Cambodia. Shot over six years, the film charts the growing wave of land-rights protests that led to the 'Cambodian spring' and the tragic events that followed. This film is about the complexities - both political and personal, of fighting for what you believe in.

When 15-year-old Matt Freeman gets his girlfriend, Francesca, pregnant, her family decides to put the unborn baby up for adoption. Matt agrees to the decision, but begins to rethink it. This movie is taken from the father's point of view.

A young, white school teacher is assigned to Yamacraw Island, an isolated fishing community off the coast of South Carolina, populated mostly by poor black families. He finds that the basically illiterate, neglected children there know so little of the world outside their island.

Margot, a documentary filmmaker, heads to a secluded Amish community in the hopes of learning about her long-lost mother and extended family. Following a string of strange occurrences and discoveries, she comes to realize this community may not be what it seems.

A gritty, provocative true-life story of three friends from the 'hood, Rameck Hunt, Sampson Davis, and George Jenkins, who made a pact in high school to find a way to go to college and then medical school. They not only accomplished this, but they're now spreading the word to inspire other inner-city kids to stay off of drugs, out of gangs and to take the educational route to a better life. THE PACT captures the pathos of the men's individual journeys, the integrity of their voices and the power of their rare friendship. Their stories affirm the values that ultimately sustained and drove them: courage, tenacity, and faith. And they give tribute to the life of the mind and its power to turn dreams into reality.

Through a series of twenty six short stories, a girl describes the childhood events that shaped her ideas about fatherhood, family relations, work and play. As the stories unfold, a dual portrait emerges: that of a father who cared more for his career than for his family, and of a daughter who was deeply affected by his behavior. Working in counterpoint to the forceful text are sensual black and white images that depict both the extraordinary and ordinary events of daily life. Together, they create a formally complex and emotionally intense film.

After being denied a promotion at the university where she teaches, Doctor Lily Penleric, a brilliant musicologist, impulsively visits her sister, who runs a struggling rural school in Appalachia. There she stumbles upon the discovery of her life - a treasure trove of ancient Scots-Irish ballads, songs that have been handed down from generation to generation, preserved intact by the seclusion of the mountains. With the goal of securing her promotion, Lily ventures into the most isolated areas of the mountains to collect the songs and finds herself increasingly enchanted.

This complex portrait of modern-day life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation explores the bond between a brother and his younger sister, who find themselves on separate paths to rediscovering the meaning of home.

Fox Rich, indomitable matriarch and modern-day abolitionist, strives to keep her family together while fighting for the release of her incarcerated husband. An intimate, epic, and unconventional love story, filmed over two decades.

Twelve years ago, a plague swept through, wiping out most of the population; in San Francisco, only 186 people remain. Two of them use jury-rigged batteries to power a camera and make a documentary. We see a variety of approaches to survival, from the artist and engineer who trade for their needs, to the surfers and woodsmen who fish and hunt, to the scavengers, and a communal farm. We also see how the community deals with those who threaten it, and how the youth are growing up with different values from those who knew our world.

In a rapidly changing America where mass inequality and dwindling opportunity have devastated the black working class, three Detroit men must fight to build something lasting for themselves and future generations.

In order to secure the position of Head of Pediatrics at a top Chicago hospital, a young, highly accomplished, pediatrician agrees to spend a summer setting up a clinic in a small town in the North Carolina mountains. Clashing against the ways of the small community he is forced to deal with the recent loss of his wife while reconnecting with his 9 year old son, and learning a different pace of life.

Composed of intimate and unencumbered moments of people in a community, this film is constructed in a form that allows the viewer an emotive impression of the Historic South - trumpeting the beauty of life and consequences of the social construction of race, while simultaneously a testament to dreaming.

American Hollow is a 1999 American documentary film directed and produced by Rory Kennedy. The film follows the extended Bowling family, residents of an eastern Kentucky valley, for a year in Perry County, Kentucky. The music for the film was composed by Bill Frisell. Iree Bowling died at the age of 81 in December 2010.

Shot over a three-year period with unparalleled intimacy and access, ALL THIS PANIC is a feature length documentary that takes an intimate look at the interior lives of a group of teenage girls as they come of age in Brooklyn. A potent mix of vivid portraiture and vérité, we follow the girls as they navigate the ephemeral and fleeting transition between childhood and adulthood.

Mixes documentary interviews of memories of lesbian adolescence with the story of the 12-year-old girl Lou discovering her sexuality in 1960s America.

Pedro returns home to a small mountain village in Guerrero, Mexico after years of working in the US. He finds his daughters older, and more distant than he imagined. His wife still has the same smile. Having saved some earnings from two trips to the US, he hopes to now finally make a better life with his family, and even to pursue his dreams on the side by starting a band: Copa Kings. He cherishes the everyday moments with his family. The villagers think this year's crop will be bountiful. There is also good work in a growing city an hour away. But the locals are wise to a life of insecurity, and their thoughts are often of family members or opportunities far away, north of the border. While working in the fields, Pedro meets and begins to mentor a teenager who dreams of the US. That place somehow always feels very present, practically knocking at the door. "Aquí y Allá" is a story about hope, and the memories and loss of what we leave behind.

After a ten year absence, acclaimed filmmaker Molly Dineen is back with a new feature documentary: Being Blacker; an intimate portrait of Jamaican-born reggae producer, businessman, father, son and prominent community figure, Blacker Dread. 40 years after featuring in Dineen’s first film, Blacker and his family, friends and community in South London face the combined challenges of rapid social change, gentrification, inequality, poverty, crime and racism as they seek to secure their futures. Made with intimacy and warmth, the film takes us deep into Blacker’s world as he buries his mother, closes his business and faces prison for the first time. Being Blacker offers a rarely-heard perspective on life in Britain today.

Interracial love story set in Detroit.

If you ever find yourself traveling down Interstate 49 through Missouri, try not to blink—you may miss Rich Hill, population 1,396. Rich Hill is easy to overlook, but its inhabitants are as woven into the fabric of America as those living in any small town in the country. This movie intimately chronicles the turbulent lives of three boys living in said Midwestern town and the fragile family bonds that sustain them.

An intimate portrait of Matthew Shepard, the gay young man murdered in one of the most notorious hate crimes in U.S. history. Framed through a personal lens, it's the story of loss, love, and courage in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

A film about longstanding relationships, family, and the deep consequences of falling in love. While exploring themes of love in music, poetry and art, the filmmaker reflects on his life and the journeys on which love has taken him. Now, a new journey will test him again, an intercontinental exodus to keep his family together. A real and intimate portrait about the complexity of love.

A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.

This documentary film tells the dramatic story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple living in Virginia in the 1950s, and their landmark Supreme Court Case, Loving v. Virginia, that changed history.

WELFARE shows the nature and complexity of the welfare system in sequences illustrating the staggering diversity of problems that constitute welfare: housing, unemployment, divorce, medical and psychiatric problems, abandoned and abused children, and the elderly. These issues are presented in a context where welfare workers as well as clients struggle to cope with and interpret the laws and regulations that govern their work and life.

Nine filmmakers each profile a young girl from a different part of the world to weave a global tapestry of youth in the 21st century.

Biosludged reveals how the EPA is committing science fraud to allow the ongoing poisoning of our world with toxic sewage sludge that's being spread on food crops. Features former top government scientist and EPA whistleblower Dr. David Lewis.

A pair of city boys get in trouble with a backwoods North Carolina family, when the boys try to stop the abuse of the family's step daughter. A pair of locals decide to step up to help the boys and the girl.

When former Russian spy Max Stein is murdered, private investigator McGill inherits a key to a safe deposit box in a Lisbon bank – a box that contains secret intelligence documents and a cool million dollars! With both the CIA and rogue elements within the Russian intelligence community in hot pursuit, McGill puts his life on the line in a race to the fortune! Featuring a powerful performance from Richard Bradford as McGill, a discredited ex-CIA agent reduced to working as a private investigator, To Chase a Million is the exceptionally rare, feature-length version of the Man in a Suitcase two-parter Variation on a Million Bucks.

This unaired pilot for a series Fuller pitched to CBS about a U.S. infantry troop fighting its way through Nazi-held North Africa offers a fascinating new angle on Fuller’s relationship with the average foot soldier and moral complexity of war.

Most of us know Billy Graham as the self-assured and charismatic preacher who became one of the most important figures of 20th Century Christianity. Now, with the release of Billy: The Early Years, we meet Billy as the earnest and promising young man at the crossroads of faith and doubt, ultimately facing the moment of decision that launched one of history’s most powerful evangelistic careers.

Documentary following the story of teenager Jamie Campbell, who wants to be a drag queen. Growing up in an ex-mining village in County Durham, Jamie has already faced his fair share of difficulties after coming out as gay at 14. However, with the majority of his family and friends being supportive, he has decided that he is ready to share his passion with the world. He plans to embrace who he really is by attending his end of school prom in drag, but he doesn't get the reaction he'd hoped for from both his school and his own father. Jamie has to make some difficult decisions. Jamie spends time with an established drag artist and battles his demons, performing as his alter ego, Fifi La True, for the very first time in front of a large audience. As Jamie has some frank and intimate family moments, and finds out just how strong he really is, the film explores his hopes and fears for the future. Will he get the acceptance he craves from his peers and the confidence to be who he really is?

A Final Goodbye is an intimate look into the life and times of Amy Winehouse. This in-depth program chronicles her rise to pop superstardom and also offers a sensitive portrayal of a transformative star and the inner demons that inspired her work and eventually caused her untimely death. Her battle with addiction and her courtship with self destruction were well documented through the press. Even her troubled relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil was played out in front of British Media. But despite this backdrop, Amy Winehouse will be remembered for her unique song writing style fusing R & B, soul and jazz influences sang through a deep contralto vocal. The 'Back to Black' album symbolised her huge success at this time which led to an astonishing 5 Grammy awards- 'the most wins by a female artist in a single night'. This insightful programme is a definitive testimonial to an incredible music icon covering the start of her career up until her death.

Correspondent Lisa Ling manages to penetrate its border by travelling undercover, pretending to work with a Nepalese eye surgeon on a humanitarian mission. Lisa’s time in North Korea offers a rare glimpse of everyday life in the country and some of the issues its people face.

Set in a pawnshop, this cinéma vérité masterpiece tells the story of the unlikely friendship between a cynic pawnbroker and his sweet but psychopathic assistant. "Broke" is a complex, powerful cinéma vérité account of day-to-day life in a pawnshop. The documentary gives us an intimate glimpse into a world most of us luckily do not have to know. Although often as funny and surprising as a sitcom, it bluntly points to the hardships and desperation of the marginalized. As the pawnbroker states: "You don't see it in your rarefied living conditions, you don't see how the poor people live, unless you come here. Tragic, some of it."

While gun violence was on the decline in most major US cities, why did it continue to increase in Chicago's segregated communities? What is known about the systems that created the problem, the laws that isolated it, and the policies that abandoned it? Using dramatic footage, including interviews with residents on the front lines over the last 15 years, this documentary opens a rare historical window into the systematic creation of poverty stricken communities plagued by gun violence. 

In 1966, Iowa native Jim Hamlyn was drafted into the U.S. Army where he served a year-long tour of duty during the heart of the Vietnam War. Using an 8mm camera, Hamlyn - a recipient of the Bronze Star for valor in combat with the U.S. Army 196th Light Infantry Brigade - documented his war experiences. Now, for the first time in television history, Hamlyn's war footage is being released for public broadcast. A Bad Deal - My Vietnam War Story highlights this never-before-seen footage, along with a rare interview with Hamlyn, to offer a revealing glimpse into the story of one American war veteran, as seen through the lens of his film camera. Featuring a haunting, original score by Joe Maddock, A Bad Deal takes you back in time to relive one of America's most divisive conflicts.

In a mountain town, where corn and poppies grow, the girls wear boyish haircuts and have hiding places underground to escape the threat of being stolen. Ana and her two best friends grow up together, affirming the bonds of their friendship and discovering what it means to be women in a rural town marked by violence. Their mothers train them to flee death, to escape those who turn them into slaves or ghosts. They create their own impenetrable universe, but one day one of the girls doesn’t make it to her hiding place in time.

Two young boys, best friends Malik and Eric, discover the joys and hardships of growing up in the sprawling Cabrini-Green public housing complex in 1992 Chicago.

Modern dance is an evocative narrative tool in Georgia Parris' debut, which investigates a young woman's identity and the complex relationship she has with her mother and sister.

Join multi-platinum band Fall Out Boy as they travel back to their hometown of Chicago for a mind-blowing audio-visual extravaganza. Featuring their newest hits Centuries, Irresistible, and Uma Thurman, this 17 song concert also includes the band's best loved songs from across their whole career. This special performance is one of the most memorable Fall Out Boy concerts ever, filmed during the Boys of Zummer tour that hit 39 North American cities throughout 2015. Great musicianship, powerful songs and stunning visuals all make for an exceptional concert experience!

The feature documentary follows women of all walks of life, all ages and ethnic backgrounds, as they shed trauma, body image shame, sexual abuse and other issues locked in their bodies, and embark on a journey to reclaim themselves. The film also gives a rare window into the world of Pole artistry and expression.

Filmed entirely inside the world of virtual reality (VR), this immersive and revealing documentary roots itself in several unique communities within VR Chat, a burgeoning virtual reality platform. Through observational scenes captured in real-time, in true documentary style, the film reveals the growing power and intimacy of several relationships formed in the virtual world, many of which began during the COVID-19 lockdown, while so many in the physical world were facing intense isolation.