Grey Gardens

Grey Gardens (1976) is a landmark American documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Albert and David Maysles spent months at a crumbling Long Island estate where Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter — aunt and cousin to Jackie Kennedy Onassis — had sealed themselves away from the world.

The Beales were once high society. By the time the cameras arrived, cats roamed the bedrooms and raccoons lived in the attic. What unfolds is less a portrait of decline than a strange intimacy: two women orbiting each other, rehashing old arguments, singing, performing, dressing up for nobody. The film never explains them, never pities them — and that restraint is what makes it impossible to look away.

Considered a cornerstone of American direct cinema, Grey Gardens shaped a generation of documentary filmmakers and later inspired both a Broadway musical and an HBO film. Stream Grey Gardens (1976) online on iFILM.