Films you think while difficult are important to watch

[Baconyum]

In response to the thread on films some regret seeing I thought it would be interesting to start a thread on films we think people should watch, if only just once, because of the issues they address rather than just because they're 'good'.

I personally think films aren't just to entertain (though they can be individually), but to enlighten, educate, inform and challenge.

Mine are:
An imitation of life
Blackboard Jungle
A time to kill
Girl, interrupted
Magdalene sisters
In the name of the father
Butterbox babies
The boy in the striped pyjamas
An eye for an eye
Kathy come home
The color purple
Corrina Corrina
The impossible
Children of a lesser God
Flowers for Algernon
American history x
The elephant man
Death of a salesman
Glengarry glen Ross
JFK
Silkwood
My fellow Americans
Wag the dog
Kramer vs Kramer
Ma vie en rose
One flew over the cuckoo's nest
The jazz singer - either version
12 angry men
Boyz n the hood
Born on the fourth of July
Ghandi
Pay it forward
Cry freedom
The accused

Geez better stop as that's quite a lot.

Thoughts?

I'd agree about films being often a very individual and personal view of an event or a story, blown up to the point where they steamroller other interpretations.

JFK is a film I loved, it is an absolutely brilliant piece of film making, it is scripted, shot, soundtracked, edited, cast and acted with genius - EVEN Kevin Costner is good in it. But it is factually wrong in just about every scene. I would never say that anyone should see it.

Shoah. Come And See.

How is JFK completely factually incorrect? I've read and watched a lot on the assassination and disagree but will conceed not completely factual too.

I never said just watch film let alone only that film on that subject, but as pp have said film can stimulate emotion as well as thought.

I'm a lot grad and big reader of fact and fiction. I also look at documentary and news footage and historical documents when a subject takes my interest. But this thread is about film.

Well for example.... It is quite doable to have that number of bullets shot in that space of time by one person. The 'magic bullet' doesn't have to be magic if you look at where the people in the president's car were actually sitting(the back seat was actually higher than the front so the angles in the film were wrong). There was a car of journalists with a radio or Carphone can't remember which, travelling immediately behind the president's car, the first call reporting the shooting was made less than a minute after it happened which is why it spread round the world so fast. Stuff like that.

On the subject of films being important to watch, I absolutely agree that (a) there are other ways of achieving what a film can achieve for the viewer and (b) having those experiences in some form is essential for our collective humanity, and (c) fiction (drama/text/art) can, on occasion, convey much more 'truth' than a collection of facts in a history book.

Having got that out of the way, I will add that my mind has gone quite blank :)

Milk
Boys Don't Cry
Shadowlands
Something like 'Impossible' about the tsunami. With Naomi Watts.
Several episodes of 'Enlightened' (I know it's not strictly film), an axed series starring Laura Dern. Never seen loneliness portrayed so well.
Thelma and Louise

harold and kumar get the munchies

Turtles can Fly

If anyone wants to understand the true impact of war on refugee children, watch this. it's an amazing film, but harrowing.

Is shoah really 9 hours long?

Schindlers list
12 years a slave
Crash
The accused
The stoning of Sorora (sp?)
Inglorious Basterds

Requiem for a dream - bit dated now but still harrowing.
Irreversible.

Schindlers list

Stoning of Soraya

I think films and TV can provide a good starting point for some people. I knew very little about the Guilford four until I watched in the name of the father and it really moved me. On the back of that film I went out and read up on it and learned more about it because of that film.

I also think they can show us this in a way reading can't. Im very interested in WW2 and like lots of people have read and seen lots of things regarding the Holocaust, however it wasn't until I watched the episode of band of brothers where they find the concentration camp that it really hit home that these atrocities that are a matter of public knowledge now we're very much hidden for a large part of the war. That episode helped me to understand what it may have been like to find something like that... It haunted me for weeks.

Really like this thread, always looking to add to my films to see one day, thanks
Adding to the list 'once we were warriors' not seen, heard it's quite harrowing.

Shooting Dogs.... even more harrowing than Hotel Rwanda, I sobbed until I think I was completely empty. And to those saying it's not a film's role to educate, I've read fiction and non fiction about the Rwandan genocide but the visual impact of those people's fear as their former friends and neighbours bore down on them with machetes is guttural.

The Flowers of War
Grave of the Fireflies

Battleship Potemkin
The Triumph of the Will