The best Tilda Swinton’s documentary movies
Katherine Mathilda "Tilda" Swinton (born 5 November 1960) is a British actress known for both arthouse and mainstream films. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Michael Clayton.
Deep Water
7.8/10
DEEP WATER is the stunning true story of the fateful voyage of Donald Crowhurst, an amateur yachtsman who enters the most daring nautical challenge ever – the very first solo, non-stop, round-the-world boat race.
Cannes: All Access
6.1/10
From its simple beginnings in 1939 in a sleepy beach town in the south of France, the prestigious Cannes Film Festival has become the must-attend red carpet event of the year. Filmmaker Richard Schickel's fascinating documentary captures the glitz and glamour of the festival's incredible 60-year run with archival footage and unforgettable moments. Hollywood's biggest names including Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Sharon Stone and Harvey Weinstein talk about the politics, madness, and thrills of competing for one of the industry's highest honors - the coveted Palme d'Or - and what it's like to be at the most fabulous festival by the sea.
B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin
7.8/10
Music, art and chaos in the wild West-Berlin of the 1980s. The walled-in city became the creative melting pot for sub- and pop-culture. Before the iron curtain fell, everything and anything seemed possible. B-Movie is a fast-paced collage of mostly unreleased film and TV footage from a frenzied but creative decade, starting with punk and ending with the Love Parade, in a city where the days are short and the nights are endless. Where it was not about long-term success, but about living for the moment - the here and now.
The Storms of Jeremy Thomas
6.3/10
Joining Oscar-winning producer Jeremy Thomas on his annual pilgrimage to the Cannes Film Festival, filmmaker Mark Cousins gives an intimate glimpse into the life of the legendary icon behind some of the most controversial and acclaimed films of all time.
Dreams Rewired
5.8/10
Tracing anxieties about technology back to the 1880s, DREAMS REWIRED combines clips from nearly 200 films and newsreels with an insightful commentary by Tilda Swinton on our eternal love/hate relationship with a hyper-mediated world.
The Somme
7.3/10
Drama-documentary recounting the events of the 1st July 1916 and the Battle of the Somme on the Western Front during the First World War. Told through the letters and journals of soldiers who were there.
Glitterbug
6.5/10
A collage of Derek Jarman's super 8 footage spanning over 20 years.
Derek
7.2/10
Derek, in chronological order, records the work and life that stands at the foot of Derek Jarman's humour and spirit of being an artist. The filmmaker and actress, Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton respectively, have produced and narrated a film on his life whereby the use of language is perpetuated to give some type of palpable meaning to British audiences alone, and to their own personal relationship with him.
When Björk Met Attenborough
7.5/10
Award-winning musician Björk and legendary broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough have admired each other's work for years but this is the first time they have discussed their mutual love of music and the natural world on screen. In this remarkable documentary, Björk explores our unique relationship with music and discovers how technology might transform the way we engage with it in the future.
Schlingensief – A Voice That Shook the Silence
7.2/10
Using unpublished and newly digitalised archive footage and film material, Bettina Böhler has brilliantly assembled this film about the life and work of the exceptional artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010.
The Invisible Frame
6.4/10
In 1988 Cynthia Beatt and the young Tilda Swinton embarked on a filmic journey along the Berlin Wall into little-known territory. The film CYCLING THE FRAME is now an unusual document. 21 years later, in June 2009, Beatt & Swinton re-traced the line of the Wall that once isolated West Berlin. THE INVISIBLE FRAME depicts this poetic passage through varied landscapes, this time on both sides of the former Wall.
Letters from Baghdad
6.9/10
Gertrude Bell, the most powerful woman in the British Empire in her day, shaped the destiny of Iraq after WWI in ways that still reverberate today.
Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema
7.7/10
As told through clips from 183 female directors, this epic history of the cinema focuses on women’s integral role in the development of film art. Using almost a thousand film extracts from thirteen decades and five continents, Mark Cousins asks how films are made, shot and edited; how stories are shaped and how movies depict life, love, politics, humour and death, all through the compelling lens of some of the world’s greatest filmmakers – all of them women.
Here's Looking at You, Boy
6.6/10
Documentary on the history of gay and lesbian film.
The Open Universe
6.8/10
The whole world in one film: Robert, a young Dane, is shanghaied in Marseille, and via Acapulco he is abducted into the South Pacific. There he kills his father and seduces his mother. Then he explores the changing world. The end finds him in a Polynesian village, where the chief bestows him with a girl of his age-class. A novel of adventure, a novel of love, also an oratory of some sort.
Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory
5.7/10
At the Hotel Majestic in Cannes, Tilda Swinton talks to director Luca Guadagnino about cinema, loneliness and love.
Faceless
4.8/10
In an eerily familiar city, a calendar reform has dispensed with the past and the future, leaving citizens faceless, without memory or anticipation. Unimaginable happiness abounds - until a woman recovers her face...
The Battle of the Somme
The Battle Somme - 1st July 1916 - the bloodiest day in the history of warfare. Told through drama the film draws on the personal accounts of individuals caught up in what became a devastating and catastrophic loss of life.
Derek Jarman: A Portrait
A BBC Arena profile of the Director from the time of the release of his film, The Garden, featuring interviews with Jarman, his collaborators and friends.
The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
6.7/10
The Ways of Seeing writer is celebrated by Tilda Swinton and her fellow admirers in an unorthodox four-part documentary that visits him at his Alpine home
