Real life has served as inspiration for movies and television shows ever since the dawn of the cinematic art form. Depicted with varying degrees of accuracy, these stories are usually chosen for their absurd yet realistic situations. Whether it’s an important moment in history or an ordinary event, the true stories behind great productions are retold in a dramatized light that exposes its most relevant aspects for narrative purposes.

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33 The Dropout, 2022

TV series that chronicles Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes attempt to revolutionize the healthcare industry after dropping out of college and starting a technology company.

Theranos Inc. was an American privately held corporation that was touted as a breakthrough health technology company. Founded in 2003 by then 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists and private investors, resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak in 2013 and 2014. The company claimed that it had devised blood tests that required very small amounts of blood and that could be performed rapidly and accurately, all using compact automated devices that the company had developed. These claims were proven to be false.

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32 We Own This City, 2022

The Gun Trace Task Force is one of the Baltimore Police Department’s most celebrated units, with extraordinary arrest and seizure rates. However, beneath this glamorous exterior lies a web of corruption. The driving force behind is the unit’s larger-than-life leader, Sergeant Wayne Jenkins.

The story centers on Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, one of eight officers who were convicted on various corruption charges in 2018 and 2019.

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31 Five Days at Memorial, 2022

Doctors and nurses at the intensive care unit of a New Orleans hospital struggle with treating patients during Hurricane Katrina when the facility is without power for 5 days.

Hurricane Katrina was a devastating and deadly Category 5 Atlantic hurricane that caused 1,392 fatalities and damages estimated at $186.3 billion in late August 2005, particularly in the city of New Orleans and its surrounding area.

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30 Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, 2022-2024

The story of Jeffrey Dahmer, one of America’s most notorious serial killers, partly told from the point of view of his victims. The series dives into the police incompetence and apathy that allowed the Wisconsin native to go on a multiyear killing spree. It dramatizes multiple instances where Dahmer was almost apprehended, but ultimately let go. Dahmer was a cleancut guy, who was repeatedly given a free pass by cops, as well as by judges, who were lenient when he had been charged with crimes.

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender who killed and dismembered seventeen males between 1978 and 1991. Many of his later murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeleton.

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29 Baby Reindeer, 2024

The story follows writer and performer Richard Gadd’s warped relationship with a female stalker and the impact it has on him as he is ultimately forced to face a deep, dark buried trauma.

Based on a compelling true story, the hit 2019 Edinburgh Fringe one-man stage-play Baby Reindeer follows the writer and performer Donny Dunn’s warped relationship with his female stalker and the impact it has on him.

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28 Escape at Dannemora, 2018

A female prison employee in upstate New York becomes romantically involved with a pair of inmates and helps them escape.

The 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility escape was a jailbreak that took place on June 6, 2015, when two inmates, Richard Matt and David Sweat, were discovered missing during a 5:17 a.m. bed check at the maximum security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, United States. Matt was serving 25 years to life and Sweat was serving life without parole, both for murder. The two prisoners had escaped by cutting a hole in their cell walls gaining access to the utility areas behind and above their cells. Eventually they cut a hole in a steam pipe and used the pipe to escape from the prison into the city sewer, with tools obtained from two cooperating prison employees. Nearly three weeks after the escape, Matt was found in Malone, New York, where he was shot and killed; two days after that, Sweat was shot and taken into custody.

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27 Rogue Heroes (SAS Rogue Heroes), 2022

1941. British forces are on the retreat in North Africa and Rommel is heading for Egypt. Three British Lieutenants — David Stirling, Jock Lewes and Paddy Mayne — have an idea for a force that will operate behind enemy lines, attacking key installations — airfields, supply depots etc. Thanks to the work of Lt. Colonel Dudley Clarke, an intelligence officer, the ideal unit, the Special Air Service Brigade, already exists…on paper. Now it is up to Stirling, Lewes and Mayne to make it a reality.

The origins of the British Army Special Air Service (SAS) during the Western Desert Campaign of World War II.

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26 Manhunt, 2017-2020

FBI profiler James R Fitzgerald is brought onto the Unabom task force, a team investigating the bombings and murders perpetrated by an unidentified man know simply as the Unabomber. Many of the methods he will use to identify the perpetrator are new and untested.

An in-depth look at how an FBI profiler helped track down the terrorist Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

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25 Waco, 2018

The FBI and ATF seize religious leader David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas in the spring of 1993.

The Waco siege, also known as the Waco massacre, was the siege by U.S. federal government and Texas state law enforcement officials of a compound belonging to the religious cult known as the Branch Davidians between February 28 and April 19, 1993.

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24 The Spy, 2019

Israel, 1959. The Mossad are desperate to embed a spy in Syria and select Eli Cohen, an unassuming yet fervently patriotic accountant. After training he assumes the identity of a Syrian national living in Argentina and uses this as a means to gain entry into Syria.

Based on the life of Israeli spy Eli Cohen.

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23 Versailles, 2015-2018

In the wake of the Fronde in 1667, the French nobility had begun to defy and disobey the monarchy. Young King Louis XIV decides to move the court from the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris to his father’s former hunting lodge near the hamlet of Versailles as a means to force their submission. As Louis renovates and expands his new Palace of Versailles, the nobles—displaced from their usual surroundings, but compelled to accompany the king—become embroiled in increasingly dangerous intrigues.

In 1667, 28-year-old all-powerful king of France, Louis XIV, decides to build the greatest palace in the world — Versailles. But drained budget, affairs and political intrigues complicate things.

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