10 Movies & Documentaries on my Kanopy Watchlist
I love keeping lists. I keep them in notebooks, in my Notes app, and in Obsidian, but I recently realized I could also keep them in my ultimate journal: this blog.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a fan of the chronological organization of information on blogs and have been digging into the world of digital gardening. In the meantime, though, I’ll make sure to use proper tags so I (and you) can navigate through my world and my brain using the Topics menu and the search field at the top of the page. (You can search for keywords like “movies,” “podcasts,” or “media.”)
I’m leaving soon for a three-week trip and am downloading books, podcasts, and all sorts of media to keep me entertained on long flights and travel days. For some reason, I mostly watch shows and YouTube vlogs at home, but I watch an insane amount of movies on flights.
To help tackle my ever-growing watchlist, I thought I’d make a selection and share it here with you.
Not to sound like a broken record, but I’m lucky to have free access to Kanopy through my local library. Take a look at the services offered by your local branch—you might be surprised.
So, here’s what I’m hoping to watch during my European summer:
- The Watermelon Woman (1996)
The wry, incisive debut feature by Cheryl Dunye gave cinema something bracingly new and groundbreaking: a vibrant representation of Black lesbian identity by a Black lesbian filmmaker. Dunye stars as Cheryl, a video-store clerk and aspiring director whose interest in forgotten Black actresses leads her to investigate an obscure 1930s performer known as the Watermelon Woman, whose story proves to have surprising resonances with Cheryl’s own life as she navigates a new relationship.
- The Juniper Tree (1990)
This stark, stunning debut feature is loosely based on a Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same name, and stars Björk in her first on-screen performance.
Set in medieval Iceland, THE JUNIPER TREE follows Margit (Björk) and her older sister Katla as they flee for safety after their mother is burned to death for witchcraft. Finding shelter and protection with Johan, and his resentful young son, Jonas, the sisters help form an impromptu family unit that’s soon strained by Katla’s burgeoning sorcery.
Told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, and ground-breaking photography, this epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin's personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.
- Saint Omer (2022)
In this powerful courtroom drama, Rama (Kayije Kagame), a pregnant writer, attends the trial of Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), a young Senegalese woman accused of killing her infant daughter. As the trial unfolds, Rama is drawn into Laurence’s story, triggering a quiet reckoning with her own fears about motherhood, identity, and inheritance.
Inspired by a real-life case, SAINT OMER marks the narrative debut of acclaimed documentarian Alice Diop and blends emotional intimacy with stark procedural detail. The film was France’s official submission for Best International Feature at the 95th Academy Awards and won both the Grand Jury Prize and Best First Film at the Venice Film Festival.
- Dykes, Camera, Action! (2018)
Through Stonewall, the feminist movement, and the experimental cinema of the 1970s, lesbian filmmakers built visibility and transformed the social imagination. Filmmakers Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Rose Troche, Cheryl Dunye, Yoruba Richen, Desiree Akhavan, Vicky Du, film critic B. Ruby Rich, Jenni Olson, and others share moving and often hilarious stories from their lives and discuss how they've expressed queer identity through film.
- Mapplethorpe Director's Cut (2020)
Robert Mapplethorpe was among the most consequential and controversial artists of the 20th Century This Director's Cut offers previously unseen footage, exploring his childhood love of photography and embattled relationship with his father and the Catholic church, as well as an originally composed score and all new soundtrack. The film tracks Robert's important love affair with Patti Smith and pivotal romance with powerhouse art collector, Sam Wagstaff. Through never-before-seen footage we see Mapplethorpe's development of a precise, erotically charged photographic style – as well as his struggle to attain mainstream recognition up to picturing his untimely death from AIDS. MAPPLETHORPE DIRECTOR'S CUT, offers a nuanced portrait of an artist at the height of his craft, along with the self-destructive impulses that threatened to undermine it all.
There was before BREATHLESS, and there was after BREATHLESS. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du Cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, BREATHLESS helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same.
Though culminating with the farewell concert the band played to thousands of adoring fans in their hometown of Sheffield, England, PULP is by no means a traditional concert film or rock doc.
As much a testament to the band as it is to the city and inhabitants of Sheffield, PULP weaves exclusive concert footage with man-on-the-street interviews and dreamy staged sequences to paint a picture much larger, funnier, moving, and life-affirming than any music film of recent memory.
Faced with a sense of powerlessness in the face of growing evidence of a coming mass human extinction, Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds) and activist Cyril Dion travel to ten countries where grassroots pioneers are reinventing their economies and democracies. From Detroit, where urban farms have transformed a dying city, to Copenhagen, where nearly 70% of the energy is renewable, to Kuttambakkan in India, where participative democracy allows different castes to work together, and to other communities around the world,
TOMORROW engages the audience to consider what can and must be done to save our future.
- Man on Wire (2008)
An Oscar-winning documentary about French high-wire artist Philippe Petit’s 1974 walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, Man on Wire reconstructs what Petit called the “artistic crime of the century” through archival footage, photographs, and dramatic reenactments. Directed by James Marsh, the film details the planning and execution of the covert operation, including how Petit and his collaborators disguised themselves, evaded security, and rigged a wire 1,350 feet above the ground.
If you could recommend one film or documentary, what would it be?
