Our film and documentary collection is comprised of bestsellers and recommendations from our library team. Many of these are only available on streaming services intermittently or not at all, our library collection is a particularly excellent place to search for experimental film, art documentaries and foreign language cinema.
In addition to each campus’s DVD collection, our video platform Clickview features thousands of films and documentaries.
Start with feature films, feature documentaries and explore our collection.
To reserve a title, or for more information please contact library@edinburghcollege.ac.uk
Films and Documentaries from our collection
Stories We Tell
2012
In this inspired, genre-twisting new film, Oscar®-nominated writer/director Sarah Polley discovers that the truth depends on who’s telling it. Polley is both filmmaker and detective as she investigates the secrets kept by a family of storytellers. She playfully interviews and interrogates a cast of characters of varying reliability, eliciting refreshingly candid, yet mostly contradictory, answers to the same questions. As each relates their version of the family mythology, present-day recollections shift into nostalgia-tinged glimpses of their mother, who departed too soon, leaving a trail of unanswered questions. Polley unravels the paradoxes to reveal the essence of family: always complicated, warmly messy and fiercely loving. Stories We Tell explores the elusive nature of truth and memory, but at its core is a deeply personal film about how our narratives shape and define us as individuals and families, all interconnecting to paint a profound, funny and poignant picture of the larger human story.
Moonlight
2017
Barry Jenkins writes and directs this drama starring Trevante Rhodes, André Holland and Janelle Monáe. The story is divided into three different timelines, each focusing on Chiron – played by Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Rhodes – at different stages in his life.
As a child, Chiron is nicknamed ‘Little’ because of his diminutive size and shy demeanour. He struggles with bullying at school and becomes involved with a drug dealer and his girlfriend who look after him when Chiron can no longer bear to be around his abusive mother Paula (Naomie Harris). As he also begins to explore his sexuality, Chiron grows into his teenage years and becomes a more resilient adult, but the travails of his upbringing and the experiences of his younger years may never truly leave him.
The film was nominated for four BAFTAs, six Golden Globe Awards, winning for Best Motion Picture – Drama, and eight Academy Awards, winning for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Jenkins).
Persepolis
2007
This delightful animation provides a potted history of modern Iran through one woman’s experience; from a precocious and outspoken nine-year-old as the Shah is deposed and the veil is forced on women, to a bold 14-year-old sent to school in Austria where she discovers music and men.
2018
Three Identical Strangers is a 2018 documentary film, directed by Tim Wardle, about the lives of Edward Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran, a set of identical-triplet brothers adopted as infants by separate families. Combining archival footage, re-enacted scenes, and present-day interviews, it recounts how the brothers discovered one another by chance in New York in 1980 at age 19, their public and private lives in the years that followed, and their eventual discovery that their adoption had been part of an undisclosed scientific “nature versus nurture” study of the development of genetically identical siblings raised in differing socioeconomic circumstances.
The Gleaners and I
2001
Named the best French film of 2000 by the French Union of Film Critics, The Gleaners and I observes present-day gleaners in urban and rural France – harvesters, scavengers, artists – while looking back at the traditional ‘glaneurs’, famously represented in Jean- François Millet’s classical French painting. A social documentary and study of those living on the margins of French society, Agnès Varda described her film as a ‘wandering road movie’. It’s that and more – a fascinating self-portrait of one the most influential filmmakers of the French New Wave.
All The President’s Men
1976
In the early 1970s, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the Watergate scandal – a conspiracy to cover up abuses of power leading all the way to the Oval Office and eventually to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.