Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
Streaming on HBO On Demand, HBO Now and HBO Go is John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls, from Emmy-winning director Peter Kunhardt. The film profiles the six-tern Arizona senator, an influential force in modern American politics, as he reflects on his life and career and reckons with his battle with brain cancer.
Airing May 29 on PBS' American Experience, and streaming on PBS.org, The Chinese Exclusion Act, directed by Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu and co-produced by the Center for Asian American Media, examines the origin, history and impact of the 1882 law that made it illegal for Chinese workers to come to America and for Chinese nationals already here ever to become US citizens. The first in a long line of acts targeting the Chinese for exclusion, it remained in force for more than 60 years.
Streaming on Mubi until May 31, Romain Goupil's 1982 film Half a Life combinines home movies, archival footage and interviews, as the filmmaker recounts his youth in the years leading up to May 1968 in Paris, and the decade following it, climaxing with the suicide of his friend Michel Recanati. Both bildungsroman and political essay, the film shows how after revolt came disillusionment.
Streaming on FilmStruck is Bill Morrison's The Miners’ Hymns, an homage to the coal-mining industry in northeast England. Morrison combines new aerial scenes with found footage of the mining communities of the region that he unearthed from the BFI National Archives and other local archives to pay homage to a bygone erea of working-class life.