These 10 Documentaries Will Change How You See America

Documentary films are known for sparking social change. (Case in point: Who wants to eat at McDonalds after seeing Super Size Me or Food, Inc.? What parent suggests visiting SeaWorld after seeing Blackfish?) Though 2014’s nonfiction films weren’t massive box office hits, they pointed out injustice and lifted our eyes to the doers making a difference. Here are the 10 must-see documentaries that inspired us to action.

10. The Great Invisible

BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 still darkens the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico in the form of altered ecosystems and ruined lives. Named best documentary at the SXSW Film Festival, Margaret Brown’s documentary dives deep beyond the news coverage you may remember into a tale of corporate greed and lasting environmental damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDw1budbZpQ

9. If You Build It

Two designers travel to the poorest county in rural North Carolina to teach a year-long class, culminating in building a structure for the community. In this heartwarming story, 10 students learn much more than construction skills.
http://vimeo.com/79902240

8. The Kill Team

An infantry soldier struggles with his wartime experience after alerting the military his Army platoon had killed civilians in Afghanistan. On the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ long list for best documentary, Dan Krauss’s challenging film shows how morality dissolves in the fog of war and terror of battle.

7. Starfish Throwers

Three people — a renowned cook, a preteen girl and a retired teacher — inspire an international movement to end hunger. Jesse Roesler’s film includes the story of Allan Law, the man who handed out 520,000 sandwiches during the course of a year in Minneapolis, which we featured on NationSwell.

6. Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story

A former Navy SEAL (formerly named Christopher, now Kristin) says that changing genders, not military service, was the biggest battle of her life. In retrospect, her SEAL experience takes on new importance as she comes to understand the true value of the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

5. The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

An online pioneer who developed Creative Commons with the academic and political activist Lawrence Lessig at age 15 and co-founded Reddit at 19, Swartz crusaded for a free and open internet. Another potential Oscar candidate, the film poignantly recounts how Swartz ended his own life at age 26 after aggressive prosecutors initiated a federal case against him.

4. True Son

A 22-year-old black man recently graduated from Stanford returns to his bankrupt hometown of Stockton, Calif., to run for city council. Michael Tubbs convinces his neighbors (and the movie’s audiences) you can have “a father in jail and a mother who had you as a teenager, and still have a seat at the table.”

3. The Hand That Feeds

After years of abuse from their bosses, a group of undocumented immigrants working for a New York City bakery unionize for fair wages and better working conditions. Led by a demure sandwich maker, the employees partner with young activists to fight their case against management and the food chain’s well-connected investors.

2. Rich Hill

Three boys confront impoverishment, learning disabilities and dysfunctional families in this human portrait of growing up in small-town America. The backdrop to the teenagers’ lives is their Missouri hometown of 1,396 residents, where one in five lives in poverty and where the fireworks still glow every Fourth of July.
 

1. The Overnighters

Our top film and a favorite for an Academy Award nomination details how an oil boom draws a city-sized influx of workers to a small town in North Dakota, where they scrape by on day labor and live in their cars. With the heft, detail and narrative twists of a Steinbeck novel, Jesse Moss profiles the Lutheran pastor Jay Reinke, who welcomes these desperate men into a shelter called “The Overnighters,” to his congregation’s dismay.
 

Are there any documentaries that should have made the cut? Let us know in the comments below.

Why Did This California Mayor Spend a Night in a Cardboard Box?

Up until about six months ago, Tim Barfield worked 60 hours a week at an asphalt company. But then the 49-year-old’s boss went bankrupt — leaving him penniless.

“Down to nothing. Now some of the people I used to know tell me I can’t come to their house,” Barfield continued. “They’re afraid I’m [going to] steal something.” he explained to FOX40.

Barfield is now among the 14,000 to 16,000 homeless in Stockton, California, living in an ad hoc community of clutter and makeshift shelters under the city’s I-5 freeway. Barfield remains unemployed and adding to his financial burden is the fact that his girlfriend, whom he is living with, is pregnant and expecting in just six months.

However, things may change for Barfield, who recently had the ear of an unlikely audience: Stockton’s mayor, Anthony Silva.

While spending a night among his city’s homeless, Mayor Silva listened to Barfield’s story.

What was the mayor doing spending the night outdoors? Trying to better understand the underserved residents of his city, he explained.

“It’s shocking and it’s absolutely awful,” Silva told the Record Net. “This is not a second- or third-world country. It’s Stockton, California, and it’s a shame that we, as a community, have let things get this bad.”

For his night outside, Silva constructed a cardboard shelter duct-taped together and tucked between a garbage can and a fence, where he spent the night with two pillows, a sleeping bag and a bottle of hand sanitizer.

Silva, who is teaming up with Christian organization Inner City Action to form the Homeless Commission, has unveiled a plan to create a resource center for homeless people to access computers and develop job training skills.

“I’m working with a couple developers who are interested in ponying up a little money, possibly buying a warehouse, and letting a nonprofit like Inner City Action slowly take it over so homeless folks can get job training skills,” Silva said. “If they have two arms and two legs and they’re capable of working and they want to work, we can get them those job training skills.”

MORE: Meet the Couple Who Dedicated Their Entire Life Fighting for the Homeless

The mayor also met with several other families about possibly forming a tent city.
“I’ve hit the bottom of the barrel and I didn’t know how I was [going to] climb out,” Silva said. “And that’s kind of how Stockton is right now with being bankrupt and not having enough jobs and a big homeless population.”

As for Barfield, his meeting with the mayor may yield a chance at another job. Silva told the Record Net he plans to help Barfield find work in construction.

While Stockton is certainly not the only city with a rising homeless population, recognizing it is an important step in finding a resolution and helping the unheard.

“We all need a chance,” said Barfield.