Documentaries
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50 free Documentaries trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Documentaries promise the real thing, and the best of them deliver stories no screenwriter would dare invent: wrongful convictions overturned by a film, festivals that collapsed on camera, athletes and musicians caught at the moment everything changed. They have also been bending the truth since the silent era, which is part of the fun. This quiz covers the films and series people actually watch and argue about: nature epics and their famous narrators, streaming true-crime sagas, Oscar-winning investigations, concert films, sports stories and a few landmarks from the early history of non-fiction cinema. The questions ask about subjects, directors, locations and the surprising stories behind the cameras. It is written for anyone whose watchlist is half documentaries, and for quiz hosts who want a film round with answers they can trust. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a miss still leaves you with something worth retelling.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Super Size Me follows Morgan Spurlock through 30 days of eating only food from which fast-food chain?
McDonald's
McDonald's dropped its Super Size portions six weeks after the film's debut, while insisting the decision had nothing to do with it.
Q 02Morgan Freeman narrated the English release of which French nature documentary that won a 2006 Oscar?
March of the Penguins
March of the Penguins had a very different French original, told in the first person as if the birds themselves were speaking. The English release swapped that for a single narrator.
Q 03Which Netflix documentary series follows Joe Exotic, an Oklahoma man jailed over a plot to kill a rival?
Tiger King
Tiger King was watched by 34.3 million people in its first ten days, helped by a release in the early weeks of the pandemic.
Q 04Which former US vice president's climate slide show became the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth?
Al Gore
Al Gore reckoned he had presented the slide show more than 1,000 times around the world. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize the year after the film came out.
Q 05The Last Dance follows Michael Jordan through 1997–98, his final championship season with which NBA team?
Chicago Bulls
Chicago Bulls players had a film crew with an all-access pass beside them that season, which produced more than 500 hours of footage for the ten-part series.
Q 06Which British broadcaster narrated the original BBC version of the nature series Planet Earth, first shown in 2006?
David Attenborough
David Attenborough was replaced by Sigourney Weaver for viewers in the United States, where her voice was thought to be more familiar.
Q 07Which sea creature does diver Craig Foster befriend in a kelp forest in an Oscar-winning 2020 Netflix documentary?
An octopus
An octopus let Foster follow her for nearly a year. After a shark attack cost her an arm, she hid in her den and regrew it over three months.
Q 08In the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, Alex Honnold climbs which Yosemite rock face without ropes?
El Capitan
El Capitan had never been climbed free solo before Honnold's ascent in June 2017. He took a route called Freerider that he had already completed several times with safety gear.
Q 09The 2013 documentary Blackfish centres on Tilikum, a captive orca held by which theme park company?
SeaWorld
SeaWorld announced in March 2016 that it would end its orca breeding programme and begin phasing out live shows with the animals.
Q 10Which children's television host is the subject of the 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?
Fred Rogers
Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister as well as a broadcaster. His programme Mister Rogers' Neighborhood ran from 1968 to 2001.
Q 11Which 2010 documentary about a fake online romance gave its name to luring people with false profiles?
Catfish
Catfish takes its title from a story told on camera about fishermen who shipped catfish in the same tanks as live cod to keep the cod active.
Q 12Despite its title, the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning records the ballroom scene of which city?
New York
New York's ball culture also gave the world voguing, a dance of frozen poses struck as if for a fashion-magazine cover.
Q 13Man on Wire recounts Philippe Petit's unauthorised 1974 high-wire walk between the towers of which landmark?
World Trade Center
World Trade Center crowds watched Petit make eight passes along the wire in 45 minutes, walking, dancing and even lying down on it.
Q 21Which HBO series caught real-estate heir Robert Durst talking to himself on a microphone he thought was off?
The Jinx
The Jinx made headlines when Durst was arrested on a murder charge the day before its finale aired in 2015.
Q 22Netflix and Hulu released rival 2019 documentaries about the disastrous Fyre Festival, staged in which country?
The Bahamas
The Bahamas site was a remote car park on an abandoned resort development, where guests promised villas and gourmet meals got tents and packaged sandwiches.
Q 23The Netflix series Wild Wild Country recounts the 1980s rise of guru Rajneesh's commune in which US state?
Oregon
Oregon diners were the victims in 1984, when commune members poisoned the salad bars of ten restaurants with salmonella, the largest bioterror attack in US history.
Q 14Which filmmaker, born in Flint, Michigan, made the documentaries Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine?
Michael Moore
Michael Moore paid for his first film partly with bingo games and a $58,000 settlement from a magazine that had dismissed him.
Q 15Laura Poitras filmed which NSA whistleblower in a Hong Kong hotel for the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour?
Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden first reached Poitras in January 2013 through encrypted emails signed with the alias that gave the film its title.
Q 16Which Netflix series follows Steven Avery, cleared after 18 years in prison and then charged with a killing?
Making a Murderer
Making a Murderer took its two directors 10 years to film, as they travelled back and forth to Wisconsin while the case unfolded.
Q 17Which street artist directed Exit Through the Gift Shop, a 2010 documentary that some viewers suspected was a hoax?
Banksy
Banksy built the film around Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in Los Angeles who spent years filming street artists at work but did nothing with the footage.
Q 18Which astronomer presented the 1980 PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, later seen in more than 60 countries?
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan's series was the most widely watched in the history of American public television until The Civil War overtook it in 1990.
Q 19Which American filmmaker's PBS series The Civil War lent his name to a slow pan-and-zoom across still photographs?
Ken Burns
Ken Burns built the nine-part series from some 16,000 period photographs and paintings. Editing software such as Apple's iMovie now labels the technique with his name.
Q 20Which 1969 music festival is the subject of an Oscar-winning 1970 documentary that Martin Scorsese helped to edit?
Woodstock
Woodstock also earned editor Thelma Schoonmaker an Oscar nomination for film editing, a rare distinction for a documentary.
Q 24Which 1988 Errol Morris documentary helped free Randall Dale Adams, wrongly convicted of killing a Dallas policeman?
The Thin Blue Line
The Thin Blue Line drew an admission of Adams's innocence from the original suspect, and Adams walked free in 1989 after a Texas court overturned his conviction.
Q 25The Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War is built around interviews with which former US defense secretary?
Robert McNamara
Robert McNamara was 85 when he sat for the interviews, which the film arranges into eleven lessons drawn from his life and from the Vietnam War.
Q 26Icarus began as an amateur cyclist's doping experiment and ended up exposing a state-run programme in which country?
Russia
Russia's anti-doping laboratory chief, Grigory Rodchenkov, had been advising the director on his experiment before he fled the country and became a whistleblower.
Q 27D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Dont Look Back follows which singer-songwriter on a 1965 tour of England?
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan opens the film dropping cue cards printed with words from one of his songs, a scene that was actually shot at the very end of filming.
Q 28Jonathan Demme's concert film Stop Making Sense features which group, whose singer wears an oversized suit?
Talking Heads
Talking Heads frontman David Byrne took part of the idea for the big suit from Japanese Noh theatre, and it became an emblem of the film.
Q 29Which New Zealand director cut 60 hours of 1969 film into the documentary series The Beatles: Get Back?
Peter Jackson
Peter Jackson also had more than 150 hours of audio to work through, and his finished series runs for nearly eight hours.
Q 30Asif Kapadia's Oscar-winning 2015 documentary uses unseen footage to tell the story of which British singer?
Amy Winehouse
Amy Winehouse's friends and family gave Kapadia more than 100 interviews for the film, which is titled simply Amy.