PickVidsBest Documentaries & storytelling Videos
The 202 Documentaries & storytelling videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 4 introductory, 0 intermediate, 198 for a general viewer, and 0 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are a documentary. What they share is that the people and the sequence of events are put back before anyone argues. Channels you will keep seeing include Tom Scott, Mark Rober, BobbyBroccoli.
How the US Postal Service reads terrible handwriting
Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read.
50 Years Ago, This Was a Wasteland. He Changed Everything | Short Film Showcase
An 8-minute National Geographic short film about David Bamberger, who bought 5,500 overgrazed acres in the Texas Hill Country and restored the land and its aquifers over about 50 years.
POLYBIUS - The Video Game That Doesn't Exist
A 69-minute documentary on the Polybius arcade-game legend.
Pandora's Box, E1: The Engineers' Plot
The first episode of Adam Curtis's 1992 BBC series Pandora's Box, on the engineers' plot, examining communism in the Soviet Union and the rise and limits of technocratic central planning.
Princes of the Yen | The Hidden Power of Central Banks
Michael Oswald's documentary, based on Richard Werner's book, argues that Japan's 1990s crash was engineered by the central bank and powerful interests.
Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent
A nine-minute excerpt from the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent in which Noam Chomsky summarizes how corporate media shapes public discourse.
Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project
Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison travels with the UN World Food Programme to Niger to see land recovery within the Great Green Wall, where rainwater harvesting is boosting food security and restoring the ecosystem.
Modern Times Streetwise - part 1/4 - 1996 BBC Documentary how become a London cabbie.
Part one of a 1996 BBC Modern Times documentary on the training to become a London black cab driver.
The Greatest Shot In Television
A one-minute clip from James Burke's 1978 BBC series Connections in which he walks past a Saturn V rocket and a timed take-off happens behind him in a single shot, with no green screen.
“I’m Not a Robot” (2025 Academy Award Winner) | The New Yorker Screening Room
Victoria Warmerdam's Oscar-winning Dutch short film in which a woman fails a series of Captcha tests and is plunged into a strange new reality.
The Cannonball Run Countach: Supercar Legend | Full Documentary
A Hagerty documentary on a 1979 Lamborghini Countach LP400 S and how it ended the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash.
Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability - Part 1
Part one of Sandia National Labs' first-person documentary on the use control, detonation safety and survivability of US nuclear weapons.
Brian Springer - Spin
Brian Springer's documentary Spin, built entirely from unauthorized satellite feeds of politicians and newscasters before they went on air during the 1992 US presidential election.
Feynman: Take the world from another point of view (1/4)
Part one of a four-part upload of a BBC Horizon documentary featuring Richard Feynman, in which he talks about physics and looking at the world from another point of view.
Secret Life Of Machines 104 The Washing Machine
An episode of Tim Hunkin's The Secret Life of Machines that explains how a washing machine works, using models, cut-aways and animations.
The Fantastic Case of the Missing Tesla
The final chapter of Rich Rebuilds' saga about buying a used Tesla Model X that went missing, with cameo appearances and the end of the dispute.
Riot On Documentary (2002)
A documentary about Riot Entertainment, a Finnish dot-com-era startup that raised millions in funding and then collapsed.
I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird
Benn Jordan's video about storing a PNG image in a living bird, a starling that learns to reproduce encoded sounds.
David Carr vs. Some Guys from VICE
A clip from the documentary Page One in which New York Times reporter David Carr interviews and confronts the founders of Vice magazine over their media deal.
Into Eternity - Official trailer
Official trailer for the documentary Into Eternity, about Finland's Onkalo repository, built to store high-level nuclear waste safely for 100,000 years.
The People's Republic of The Future
Bloomberg's Hello World episode in which Ashlee Vance visits Shenzhen, a hub of electronics manufacturing and cloning.
Everything is a Remix Part 3 (Original Series, 2011)
Part 3 of Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix series, using Apple and the iPhone to show how invention builds on copying and combining prior ideas.
URBEX | Abandoned Soviet Space Shuttles (Buran) in Baikonur
Urban explorers break into the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to film the abandoned Soviet Buran space shuttles.
Well There's Your Problem | Episode 28: Goiânia Incident
An episode of the Well There's Your Problem podcast on the 1987 Goiania radiological accident in Brazil, based largely on the IAEA report.