Launched recently, in June 2010, CriticalPast offers a fundamentally new approach to obtaining historical footage, with a fully digitized, viewable collection of over 57,000 archival clips from over 4000 locations worldwide.

"Uniquely, we offer immediate downloads of screeners and full resolution clips in a variety of HD and SD codecs."

BBC MOTION GALLERY is the commercial archive of the BBC.

BBC Motion Gallery offers creative professionals access to the most comprehensive collection of superb, unique motion imagery in the world.
Here you will find a wealth of content covering natural history, wildlife, news, locations, art, music, celebrities, culture, performing arts and more, including acclaimed programming produced in conjunction with Discovery and PBS.

BBC Motion Gallery provides the creative community of the world with a unique breed of content. Hand-picked from programming, films, documentaries and other unique sources, this is footage that not only has a distinct look and feel, but has production values that go far beyond typical stock footage. Moreover, BBC Motion Gallery content makes it easy to piece together the footage you need tell a complete story. A story that can take your production to a whole new level, at a fraction of the cost of shooting it yourself.

Documentary film suggestions The website about.com published a list of 10 must-see documentaries about great women - mothers, teachers and entertainers - who have nurtured, inspired and enriched the lives of others.

As a new service on its website, the German Short Film Association offers interested industry professionals the possibility to view short films from the annual "German Short Films" catalogues online (if the copyright holder has given his or her permission for an online preview).
The streaming technology allows a real-time access on audio, video and multimedia contents via internet. As opposed to usual downloading processes, the films can be played immediately without longer waiting periods.

To apply for access to the preview database, users have to fill out an online form.

Detailed information on the streaming technology, system requirements and optimal playing conditions can be found here.

The British film magazine Total Film presents a list of 18 documentary films, that according to editor Mark Powell everybody should have seen (including YouTube clips and short summaries).

Documentary is here! How do we get up to such a presumptuous slogan? ..Most of all it is certainly the desire of enabling an encounter between films and spectators who want documentary to be an autonomous art form with numerous ways of expression. A kind of film that remains independant from formats, topical trends and stylistic restrictions.

Documentary means more than being successful in cinema or corresponding to television standards.

Our aim is to give a platform to the fascinating periphery of exceptional, unconventional, sometimes irritating films - films of authors who love the genre and want to enlarge it.

We also want to create space for discussions about what makes a certain documentary so special, about the possibilities of documentary. In doing so we hope to increase the dialogue about form instead of narrowing films down to their topics. The joy in telling stories, in experiments, in observing, in open forms and most of all in watching and reflecting on our own is what counts.

This kind of documentary has to be brought to an interested international audience and to be accessible beyond a few public tv stations and beyond the specialised festival business. This is why the filmmakers Jörg Adolph, Gereon Wetzel and the producer Ingo Fliess have come together in spring 2008. Starting with our own works, DocCollection will grow: more authors, more spectators, more good films.

On DocCollection you can order entertaining, award-winning feature length documentaries on DVD. Every year we publish up to four films in a consecutively numbered edition. These are films with a distinct point of view and strong originality.

Of course you can order single DVDs, but the best way to become a customer of the DocCollection is certainly becoming a subscriber. You receive every new film right away, you save money and last not least help cultivate ambitious documentaries.

One of the best funding guides out there.

Networking site for European cinema professionals.

Yet another innovative NFB initiative. Check out this interactive story set. Produced by Garry Flahive, a reelisor member.

Very good resource of American folk footage with distribution information.

Folkstreams.net has two goals. One is to build a national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures. The other is to give them renewed life by streaming them on the internet. The films were produced by independent filmmakers in a golden age that began in the 1960s and was made possible by the development first of portable cameras and then capacity for synch sound. Their films focus on the culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed Americans from many different regions and communities.

The filmmakers were driven more by sheer engagement with the people and their traditions than by commercial hopes. Their films have unusual subjects, odd lengths, and talkers who do not speak "broadcast English." Although they won prizes at film festivals, were used in college classes, and occasionally were shown on PBS, they found few outlets in venues like theaters, video shops or commercial television. But they have permanent value. They come from the same intellectual movement that gave rise to American studies, regional and ethnic studies, the "new history," "performance theory," and investigation of tenacious cultural styles in phenomena like song, dance, storytelling, visual designs, and ceremonies.They also respond to the intense political and social ferment of the period.

The filmmakers and the researchers they collaborated with explored performances situated in a community's customary work, worship, and play. Beneath their colorful surfaces often lie serious issues of physical, psychic, and social survival under duress. For understanding what they saw the filmmakers relied more heavily on observant and knowledgeable community members than on outside "experts." They conveyed understanding through action and symbol as often as by "talking heads." See Selected Films.

Many of the films, however, are linked to significant published research. Folkstreams draws on this material to accompany and illuminate both the subjects and the filmmaking. And the films themselves add powerful dimensions to print scholarship. They offer a direct experience of unfamiliar worlds. Many of these are now receding into the historical past, but we hope the example of these films may stimulate alternative filmmaking with subjects and approaches still ignored by mainstream corporate media.

Online distribution via torrents for donation.

Reviews and descriptions by AJ Schnack. Very nice if you are trying to figure out where to shop your film.