What makes a documentary “important”? What makes it worth referencing, or remembering, or even watching in the first place? Why, in this time of seemingly perpetual sociopolitical strife, would we veer away from the vaunted, glorious escapism of big feature films and go see something small and rooted in the real, instead?

Documentaries can be a hard sell, but it’s one that’s getting easier all the time. Once viewed as something stiff and obligatory, documentary film has, in recent years, risen to the top of the heap—thanks in no small part to some of the earth-shaking, needle-pushing, and ultimately world-changing films that are listed here, which find their focus in war, love, sex, death, and everything in between. And as for this list—its only qualifier is that these are the critically acclaimed, historically important, and pivotal films that a person who cares about film (and in doing so, often cares about humanity, in general) should really get to know.

Below, in alphabetical order, the 61 best documentaries of all time.

A Poem Is a Naked Person (2015)

Les Blank’s documentary about the legendary rock musician Leon Russell was filmed more than 40 years before it was released. The film about Russell, an enigmatic artist who played with the Beach Boys, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, and many, many more in his recording studio in northeast Oklahoma, was stalled due, in part, to a delay in securing all the music rights. (The director’s son finally secured a theatrical release for the film in 2015.) Filled with priceless footage of Russell and his contemporaries performing, A Poem Is a Naked Person serves as an artifact of the most iconic years in rock ’n’ roll history and unfolds like what The New York Times called a “jam session.”

The Act of Killing (2012)

Joshua Oppenheimer’s quixotic, vaguely psychedelic film is markedly unlike any other documentary you’re ever likely to see about a genocide. Oppenheimer explores the mid-1960s massacre of communists and ethnic Chinese people in Indonesia (in which nearly half a million people died) by inviting some of the surviving (and proud) executioners to make their own movie about the events, and to tell the story through their own dramatic re-enactments. (They portray not only themselves, but also people they interrogated, tortured, and killed.) “The gusto with which [the documentary’s central figure Anwar] Congo and his compatriots take to the project is jarring; this is grisly history as told by the victors,” Jonah Weiner wrote in The New Yorker.