Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. For those of us who spent our summers poring over the comic strip Peanuts, the new documentary Who Are You, Charlie Brown? (director: Michael Bonfiglio; producer: Marcella Steingart) promises to be a trip down memory lane. Narrated by actor Lupita Nyong’o, the documentary makes for perfect multi-generational viewing and releases on Apple TV+ on June 25—just in time for summer vacations. In celebration of Pride Month, watch Ronald Chase's Cathedral (1971) and Parade (1972)
Screen Time
Your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
![A protestor holds up a banner with Nasrin Sotoudeh’s photo. It says “Free Nasrin.” From 'Nasrin' (Director: Jeff Kaufman). Courtesy of David Magdael & Associates](/sites/default/files/images/articles/unnamed_1.jpg)
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. When filmmaker Sean Wang wasn’t sure of the whole adulting thing, he decided to call his middle-school friends. The result is an extremely well-edited collage of voices, animation, yearbook photos, and a lot of laughter. The New York Times Op-Docs' H.A.G.S. (Have a Good Summer) will make you laugh, cry, and feel nostalgic about what we thought were the best years of our lives. Or not. If you haven’t had a chance to watch Frederic Wiseman’s City Hall yet, head over to MUBI
![A drag performer in a golden dress, wearing a wig, smoking a cigarette. From Frank Simon's 'The Queen' Courtesy of Kino Lorber.](/sites/default/files/images/articles/documentary_magazine_thequeen.jpg)
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Frederick Bernas and Ana González’s The New Yorker documentary Flamenco Queer introduces us to Manuel Liñán, a flamenco dancer and choreographer who disrupts the gendered binaries that codify the dance form. As we witness Liñán break convention, we realize the immense debt we owe to queer artists for making our worlds both beautiful and equitable. A perfect homage for Pride month. In PBS’ Ballerina Boys (Directed and Produced by Chana Gazit and Martie Barylick), the all-male
![A Black man, wearing a blue polar fleece, leads a protest calling for reparations for victims of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.](/sites/default/files/images/articles/tulsa3.jpg)
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Tulsa Massacre is one the most horrific episodes of racial violence in American history, and it continues to be overlooked by most textbooks and history syllabi in the country. This year marks a century since 35 blocks of thriving Black businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood District were burned to the ground by white supremacists, resulting in a massive loss of lives and Black-owned businesses. To commemorate the tragedy, and to honor the longstanding history of Black
![Mixed-media sculptural and painted representation of nature in the night](/sites/default/files/images/articles/the-fourfold_film-still-3.png)
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Korean-American artist Nam June Paik once said, “What matters today is what I would call the Archaeology of the present, and video is its privileged instrument.” Erik Nelson’s Apocalypse ‘45 combines filmmaker John Ford’s graphic World War II footage, archival material, and narratives of 12 men who witnessed the Pacific War. Premiering May 27 on discovery+, the film, as Paik would say, “digs ruin after ruin to try to understand the past as if one understood the present.”
![Three Black women in long skirts singing, one Black man playing the guitar. They are on stage. There are three microphones.](/sites/default/files/images/articles/staplessingers.jpg)
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. When the pandemic put a halt to our travel plans, little did we imagine that we’d find an unlikely travel guide in Orson Welles. Six extant episodes of the 25-part Around the World with Orson Welles are streaming on metrograph.com through June 20. Contrary to what the name suggests, this series takes us only around Europe, as Welles takes a break from the rigidity of his filmmaking form and presents us a more laid-back look at the cultures and people of the Basque country
![Actor Chadwick Boseman, a Black man wearing a striped shirt, patterned tie, grey vest and pants, sits at a piano, his back to the keyboard](/sites/default/files/images/articles/chadwickboseman2.jpg)
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Although he did not capture the Best Actor Oscar for his final role, in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Chadwick Boseman made his mark in his short, incandescent life as one of the finest actors of his generation. Chadwick Boseman: Portrait of an Artist, streaming on Netflix through May 17, captures scenes from his meteoric career, as well as testimonials from some of the artists who worked with him: Viola Davis, Denzel Washington, Spike Lee, George C. Wolfe, Branford Marsalis
![A still from 'Do Not Split', nominated for Best Documentary Short at the 93rd Academy Awards. The frame shows three young protestors in Hong Kong running down an empty street with a shopping cart.](/sites/default/files/images/articles/200707-5-1100.jpeg)
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The 93rd Academy Award Nominations are out, and with it are the five incredible mini-narratives in the running for Best Documentary Short Subject. This year's nominees' topics range from the 2019-2020 Hong Kong Protests to the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising—the films are sharp, succinct and powerful explorations of these deeply political incidents and histories. Take a look at the contenders and find out where to stream them before the ceremony on April 25, 2021. Do Not Split
![2 far-right extremists, dressed in flannel shirts, bullet-proof vests and baseball caps, outside the US Capitol on January 6.](/sites/default/files/images/articles/frontline2.jpg)
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering April 13 on PBS’ FRONTLINE, American Insurrection, a collaboration with ProPublica and University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, investigates the rise of far-right extremism in America—from the deadly Charlottesville rally in 2017, to a neo-Nazi group that has actively recruited inside the US military, to the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Correspondent A.C. Thompson, director Rick Rowley and producers Karim Hajj and Jacquie
![An activist, holding a microphone and wearing a black blazer over a blue shirt, addresses a protest in Brooklyn, New York.](/sites/default/files/images/articles/downdarkstairwell2.jpg)
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering April 12 on Independent Lens, Ursula Liang’s Down a Dark Stairwell tells the story of the tragic shooting in Brooklyn of Akai Gurley, an innocent Black man, and the trial of a Chinese American police officer, Peter Liang, who pulled the trigger. The documentary illuminates the experiences of two marginalized communities and their struggles against the racial imbalances of the criminal justice system. The final episode of Otherly, the Instagram series from POV and