Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
Carole Roussopoulos was the first woman in France to purchase a lightweight Sony Portapak camera. As a result, she and her feminist comrades were able to film the feminist agitation that took over the country post-May 1968. Along with colleagues like the French actor Delphine Seyrig, Roussopoulos made films that criticized the mainstream and called out the general patriarchal society. Catch a curation of some of these films on MUBI, as a part of their new special program: Sex, Truth, and Videotape: French Feminist Activism.
Another feminist hero, tennis superstar Naomi Osaka, makes her way to our home screens this week, as the protagonist of Garrett Bradley’s Naomi Osaka, an intimate three-part series premiering July 16 on Netflix. The work spotlights Osaka’s "unapologetic honesty and vulnerability as she navigates her multifaceted identity as a young athlete and leader on the rise."
Through July 12-23, the PBS Short Film Festival returns to celebrate 10 years since its inception. Broadly divided into themes like Family, Culture, Identity, Humanity, Race and Society, the films in the program include a selection of work that can be viewed on any VR device. A jury of a who’s who of the television and documentary worlds helped program this special anniversary edition, which features 25 short-form independent films.
Following its Tribeca Festival run, Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is being released theatrically this week through Focus Features. Roadrunner tells the story of the late celebrity chef, through clips from his series, personal footage and reflections from family members and friends. If you’d rather stay home and celebrate Bourdain’s legacy, you can watch his first TV show, A Cook’s Tour on Documentary+. You can take off, with Bourdain, and explore the culinary delights from places near and far—from Tokyo to Portugal, from Napa Valley to Mexico, and beyond.
And to end your weekly viewing with a portrait of another inspiring artist, head over to Kino Marquee and watch Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz’s Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters. The documentary celebrates the dancer as well as his 1989 ballet D-Man in the Waters, which gave "physical manifestation to the fear, anger, grief, and hope for salvation" during the AIDS pandemic.