3 Documentaries So Traumatizing You’ll Wish They Were Made Up

1. Ken Burns – ‘The Dust Bowl’ (2012)

In the 1930s, the American and Canadian Plains experience an ecological disaster of epic proportions. Native grasslands are over-plowed in the service of avarice, federal subsidies, and an unstable grain economy, leaving the topsoil to be stripped by whipping winds and the resulting choking dust storms that move over thousands of square miles. It is the recollections of those who lived through it by survivors like Caroline Boa Henderson and Harry Forester of lost homes, breathing dust filled air until they became black and the accompanying collapse of communities as grain and cattle economies disintegrated that is so heart rending. Burns also profiles the federal government’s efforts at soil conservation and New Deal programs. Burns also points out similar problems today, such as the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. The sight is haunting to watch, not the documentary per se but the witnessing of human disregard for the environment.

2. Edet Belzberg – ‘Children Underground’ (2001)

A gut-punch of a documentary set among the subways of post-Communist Bucharest, Belzberg’s film follows five Romanian street kids who sniff industrial glue to endure beatings, self-mutilation, and near-starvation. Taken together, the shockingly intimate vérité footage constitutes a kind of narrative as miraculous for its very existence as for the unspeakable acts it records. With the carefree childhoods we expect of fiction characters these kids have been forced to eke out a collective existence of begging, fighting, and otherwise surviving by any means necessary. Belzberg avoids sentimental manipulation but creates viewer sympathy through her unflinching depiction of the children’s suffering and abuse while showcasing their resilience against systemic failure that has abandoned 20,000 children.

3. Louie Psihoyos – ‘The Cove’ (2009)

The Cove unfolds like an undercover spy thriller, but hits you like a punch to the conscience. Filmed over three years on the sly, it documents the efforts of activist and former Flipper dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry to lead a covert team into the small Japanese town of Taiji. Every autumn, Taiji herds and kills hundreds of dolphins in a secluded bay on its southern coast. The team plants hidden cameras and uses military-grade surveillance equipment to get inside the “cove.” They ultimately film only 90 seconds of actual killing, but it’s the stuff of nightmare: frantic dolphins snared in nets struggling as their bodies are hauled out of the bloodied sea, and fishermen smoking silently as the tide retreats from a floor slick with gore. The beating heart of the film is O’Barry himself. Once an architect of the dolphin’s pop-culture phenomenon with Flipper, he became haunted after a captive dolphin under his care stopped breathing in what he saw as a suicide. His anguish is palpable in every frame. The Cove has been criticized for exaggerating mercury levels in dolphin meat, but the thrust of its narrative is indelibly real… this killing is happening, and it’s not over.