Eclipse Series 24: The Actuality Dramas of Allan King - The Criterion Collection

Canadian director Allan King is one of cinema’s best-kept secrets. Over
the course of fifty years, he shuttled between features and shorts,
big-screen cinema and episodic television, comedy and drama, fiction and
nonfiction. It was with his cinema-verité-style documentaries,
though—his “actuality dramas,” as he called them—that King left his
greatest mark on film history. These startlingly intimate studies of
people whose lives are in flux—damaged children, warring spouses, the
terminally ill— always done without narration or interviews, are
riveting and at times emotionally overwhelming. Humane, cathartic, and
important, Allan King’s spontaneous portraits of the everyday demand to
be seen...