Netflix Documentaries to Watch

I hope y’all are having a wonderful summer. Something that I’ve been meaning to do is to start a kind of Netflix Club for us here in my little corner. I love watching documentaries on Netflix. It’s how I fill my days in the background while I’m cleaning or folding laundry or editing photos. I’ve watched six really great documentaries and think that I should be he start of our watch list! They’re all fairly topical, but also hold a timelessness to them.

Disclosure

This was perhaps the most interesting documentary that I had watched in a while. I didn’t know much about transgender people, or how the portrayal of them in the media and in film has changed over time. I know a few transgender people, but the documentary states that 80% of people don’t, and that this is aimed at those people. It was serious, funny, and deeply educational.

Athlete A

This was a deep look into how the USA Olympic Gymnastics organization allowed thousands of victims to abused over the course of decades. It was extremely hard to watch at times, but showed all of the red flags that were consistently ignored by people in power. I thought it was an important watch as an educator, because it shows where the little red flags start to add up to big red flags. It also showed in extreme detail the hard reasons why many victims choose not to speak out.

13th

This is the documentary that I would suggest as the jumping off point for anyone looking to get more involved in the Black Lives Matters movement. It does a very good job explaining how slavery turned into the carceral (jail) system. It’s visually appealing and very engaging for the entire time. It doesn’t cover anything in much detail, but it provides a nice overview.

Lennox Hill

Lennox Hill felt very much like standing in the room with doctors through everything. It was interesting because Charles and I have both worked in hospitals, but it’s rare to get much of the full picture, including when doctors find out bad news, or good news, and have to make tough calls. It’s also extremely raw. The nurse telling a drug user he needs to lay off for a while, and him telling her they both know that won’t happen. The nice lady who came in nor a little pain and leaves with a severe cancer diagnosis. It shows the inner workings of what it means to work at this hospital, including all the good moments, but not shying away from the bad. As a former hospital employee, I’m shocked that anyone would agree to let his be filmed, but I’m glad it was.

Who Killed Malcolm X

This fits into the same kind of category as Disclosure. I know who Malcolm X is, and I know he was assassinated. That’s kind of it. This documentary series did a great job of filling on those blanks for me. I had heard in a long-ago history class that he was assassinated by the Nation of Islam. I learned how much more complicated of a situation it was than what I was taught. Something that it made clear to me was that “civil rights” is often portrayed as a monolith, but there were conflicting opinions then too, just like there is now.

Unsolved Mysteries

When I was a 6 or 7, I remember sitting on the carpet in my Grandma’s room and watching Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack on the floor with her. That might explain all the therapy I needed later, but wither way, it’s a phenomenal show, and I was so excited to see it get rebooted by Netflix. The stories are interesting…an alien abduction, a suspicious presumed suicide, a disappearance…there’s more. They’re all wonderfully reported, it’s just missing Robert Stack.

Okay, your turn. I need some new bingeable things. I still have a lot of summer left to do some learning!

Happy watching!