True Film 3.0: 200 Documentaries You Must See Before You Die, perfect with Netflix, by Kevin Kelly, is now available. Free download, pdf format.

This is the golden age of documentaries.

Inexpensive equipment, new methods of distribution, and a very eager audience have all launched a renaissance in non-fiction film making and viewing.

The very best of these non-fiction films are as entertaining as the best Hollywood blockbusters. Because they are true, their storylines seem fresh with authentic plot twists, real characters, and truth stranger than fiction. Most true films are solidly informative, and a few are genuinely useful like a tool.

The rise of documentaries and true cinema is felt not only in movie theaters, but on network TV and cable channels as well. Reality TV, non-fi ction stations like the History Channel or Discovery, and BBC imports have increased the choices in true films tremendously. There’s no time to watch them all, and little guidance to what’s great.

In this book I offer 200+ great true films.

I define true films as documentaries, educational films, instructional how-to’s, and what the British call factuals – a non-fiction visual account. These 200 are the best non-fiction films I’ve found for general interest. I’ve watched all these films more than once. Sometimes thrice. I haven’t had TV for 20 years, so I’ve concentrated my viewing time on documentaries and true fi lms. I run a little website (www.truefilms.com) where I solicit suggestions of great stuff.
What am I looking for in a great true film?

• It must be factual.
• It must surprise me, but not preach to me.
• If it introduces me to a world or subculture that I never thought about before, even better.
• There’s a plot – a transformation from beginning to the end.
• It’s easily available.

As dogged as I have been in tracking down great true fi lms, I have seen only a fraction of the more than 60,000 that have been made, and the thousands now being made each year. If you know of an amazing true fi lm that I’ve missed please recommend it to me: kk@kk.org.

Where to get the films:

I recommend only those great and worthwhile titles that are available on tape or DVD at consumer prices. I indicate whether a fi lm is rentable from Netfl ix, and if it is purchasable from Amazon. If neither of those options is available, I will then list an alternative source.

For too long true films have been hard to fi nd, appearing only fleetingly in theaters, or projected in school classrooms on expensive 16mm prints, or hidden on back shelves at video rental places. Now DVDs and websites are rapidly increasing the availability of true films; their prices continue to drop, and their distribution expands. [...]

– Kevin Kelly
Winter 2007

Download True Films 3.0 by Kevin Kelly

Free eBook, 4.4MB, 199PAGES.

It's in PDF format, but with a twist. To help offset the significant bandwidth costs of these downloads (I hope my server can take the wave), I have appended advertisements to the PDF book. Here is how the ads work:

If you choose to see the ads, they will appear in a gray sidebar on the right, adjacent to the pages of the book, just outside the frame of the page.

These ads are inserted into the PDF by Adobe (using the Yahoo ad network) when you open the file. Like Google Adsense ads, they are contextual. That is, Adobe/Yahoo tries to match the content of the ads with the content of text on the the pages, in my case, text about documentaries. The ads I see at this moment of writing are mostly about apartment rentals, but they change each time one opens the book.

Visit True Films' Web Site

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the very popular Cool Tools website. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling "New Rules for the New Economy," and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, "Out of Control."

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