Essays on Documentary

The documentary “How Hollywood Vilifies Arabs” is an example of ideological criticism that had a great deal of impact on me. It was a comprehensive and critical of the Arab representation in Hollywood; furthermore, the video also led me to think about how Arab people...

It is no surprise that a topic like unclaimed estates has produced a popular terrestrial daytime television programme. This legal peculiarity contains all of the key elements of any good drama; a life story with twists and intrigue and an unexpected financial reward at the...

Recently, I have watched a documentary about whether polygamy can be a solution for single parenthood, and singles in general, or not. So, it caught my attention and made me curious to know more. For me, one thing was certain: in all societies, polygamy is...

Wild Child was a documentary focused on a girl that went by the name of Genie who was isolated by her parents. Her father assumed she had a mental disability and thought it would be best to keep her socially isolated from the world. For...

The documentary video “The New Asylum” (Frontline, 2005) focuses on the fact that prisons have been getting filled up with more and more mentally ill inmates ever since America’s psychiatric hospitals shut down. They have nowhere else to put them, so they put them in...

British Broadcast Company (BBC) is known for its string of documentaries on various phenomena, and its documentary on South Korea “South Korea: The Silent Cultural Superpower” quietly becoming a cultural superpower is one that has informed and enthralled its viewers as much as any other....

In the beginning of the documentary “The War You Don’t See” we are shown a clip from a shooting attack on innocent people by American soldiers. I am unsure what the motive behind this attack was. Did the American soldiers believe they were shooting at...

Racial inequalities have plagued social culture and has shaped United State history since its creation. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines race as a “category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits”. In other words, race is not innate, it is a non-biological concept based...

The development narrative in the documentary, Second Nature (1996), can be seen as story with a beginning, middle and end as defined by Roe (1994). Narratives frame the dynamics of a system and then discuss how they evolve to produce a set of outcomes (Leach,...

The documentary, “13th” by Ava Duvernay presented an incredible documentary in which she went in-depth displaying the prison house scheme in the United States and how it played a big part in racial inequality. Duvernay uses various sociological theoretical perspectives, particularly structural functionalism. The communities...