Season 2007 2007

NR

Documentary about Hugues de Montalembert, blinded in a random street mugging in 1978, but who defied expectation and continued to travel the world, alone. Using Montalembert's own voiceover to show how he dealt with the life-changing event, film-maker and composer Gary Tarn constructs a poetic meditation on an extraordinary life without vision.

Documentary looking at Shanghai Circus school, where the gruelling training regimes result in some of the best acrobats and circus performers in the world.

Children as young as eight have their unformed bodies stretched and tested to breaking point as they learn to master the most taxing feats of acrobatic grace and daring. Harsh demands are also made of teachers and parents as their proteges strive to be number one in the circus, the Chinese way.

Based on David Maraniss's book 'They Marched into Sunlight', a documentary telling the story of two seemingly unconnected events in October 1967 that changed the course of the Vietnam War.

Whilst a US battalion unwittingly marched into a Viet Cong ambush which killed 61 young men, half a world away angry students at the University of Wisconsin were protesting the presence of Dow Chemical recruiters on campus.

David Grubin's probing and perceptive biography reassesses the remarkable and tragic life of Bobby Kennedy, whose early life was spent in the shadow of his elder brother John. After JFK's assassination, he discovered his own identity in the forefront of American politics before his career was also tragically curtailed by an assassin's bullet.

Documentary which deconstructs the mythologies and controversy surrounding the JFK assassination. Featuring interviews with Norman Mailer, Gary Hart, Tom Hayden, Mark Lane and others, it probes the deep psychic wounds it made on American politics and culture, leading to a decade of governmental skullduggery, political paranoia, demagoguery and division on a huge scale. With the subsequent assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 and the revelation of President Nixon's constitutional subversion in the early 70s, the last hopes of American idealism were shattered.

Documentary in which Ivy Meeropol tells the story of how her family was torn apart in 1953 when her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed for 'conspiracy to commit espionage'.

Their names were seared into American history that day as both martyrs and 'atom spies', but the young Jewish couple left behind two orphaned boys - Ivy's dad Michael, and six-year-old Robert. The film sheds new light on a chapter in American history and provides a personal perspective on an iconic event.

Alexandra Pelosi's informal portrait of George W Bush, filmed over nearly a year as she followed the then president-to-be as part of the press corps travelling with him on planes and buses. She learns a lot about the man, and asks whether it is possible to spend so much time with someone without attaining any degree of intimacy.

What are the forces that shape and propel American militarism? This award-winning film provides an inside look at the anatomy of the American war machine.

Why We Fight is the provocative new documentary from acclaimed filmmaker Eugene Jarecki (The Trials of Henry Kissinger) and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

Named after the series of short films by legendary director Frank Capra that explored America’s reasons for entering World War II, Why We Fight surveys a half-century of military conflicts, asking how – and answering why – a nation of, by and for the people has become the savings-and-loan of a government system whose survival depends on an Orwellian state of constant war.

Documentary which examines the history of the Third Reich through the jokes told by and about the Nazis and the fate that befell some of the joke tellers.

In the early days of the Nazi era, jokes about Hitler were punishable as treason, and during the war they were even seen as unpatriotic, a crime punishable by death. Cabaret artiste, Werner Finck, was imprisoned in a concentration camp, but then released, while actor Fritz Muliar's anti-Hitler jokes landed him in a penal battalion in Russia.

Oscar-nominated documentary on the migratory patterns of birds, filmed over the course of three years on all seven continents. Stunning techniques help contribute to this bird's eye view of the world.

Mark Kidel's film looks at the unique licensed brothels of Paris which remained a central part of French life until their closure in 1946.

First of a four-part series which goes inside the closed world of Western corporate outsourcing in the Indian town of Chennai. It's based around ambitious Office Tiger employees such as Amita and Sunita, who eagerly soak up the language and style of their bosses while holding on to the aspects of their own culture that serve them best, and the Americans who strive to guide them, including Joe (co-CEO), a former Goldman Sachs banker who believes in pushing himself and his workers to the limit.

Documentary in which filmmaker Jamie Kastner goes on a personal journey to find out what it means to be Jewish in the modern world.

Along the way he meets anti-semitic politician Pat Buchanan, Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua, British anti-Israeli curmudgeon Richard Ingrams and Hasids in Brooklyn; he causes a near-riot in a Parisian suburb simply by asking what people think about Jews; and he meets the 'dominatrix' behind Berlin's largest memorial to dead Jews

Four-part series which goes inside the closed world of Western corporate outsourcing in the Indian town of Chennai. It's based around the ambitious Office Tiger employees such as Amita and Sunita, who eagerly soak up the language and style of their bosses while holding on to the aspects of their own culture that serve them best, and the Americans who strive to guide them, including Joe (co-CEO), a former Goldman Sachs banker who never sleeps and is always asking his workers for more effort.

Four-part series which goes inside the closed world of Western corporate outsourcing in the Indian town of Chennai. It's based around the ambitious Office Tiger employees such as Amita and Sunita, who eagerly soak up the language and style of their bosses while holding on to the aspects of their own culture that serve them best, and the Americans who strive to guide them, including Joe (co-CEO), a former Goldman Sachs banker who never sleeps and is always asking his workers for more effort.

The seventies in America were a time of growth and experimentation. Clothes became different, hairstyles exotic, and music was heading in strange new directions. With a wave of high-profile imports it was hoped soccer might become the next big thing. Players, coaches and journalists recall the The Cosmos, the high octane New York club whose all-star team were equally famed for their antics at Studio 54 as for their footballing skills.

Documentary about drug addiction. When he got a camera at the age of 14, Rick Kirkham began recording his life on tape. After his first break on TV he rose from local news to a job as correspondent for the daredevil magazine show Inside Edition. His girlfriend then got pregnant, and they married. Everything was golden... or was it?

As well as capturing the good times, his camera shockingly reveals the dark side of his life with candour and vigour. What unfolds is a riveting journey into the heart and mind of a drug addict, with Rick's fight for survival caught on tape in an unprecedented way. He tries to be the devoted father and husband his family need, but his work assignments tip him back into his hellish cycle of drugs and despair.

Directors Michael Cain and Matt Radecki have tackled the task of editing 3,000 hours of footage down to an intelligent and compassionate cautionary tale of a TV Junkie.

Documentary which follows five families as they deal day-to-day with the challenges of living with children suffering from cancer, a film in which a possibly daunting and depressing subject is made involving and life-enhancing. With a rare intimacy and closeness, the presence of the camera seems to fade away and the viewer is left with no sense of being a voyeur as the story unfolds.

In 1974, a teenage newspaper heiress and Berkeley undergrad was kidnapped at gunpoint from her apartment, setting off one of the most bizarre episodes in recent American history. The kidnappers, completely off the map before Patty Hearst disappeared into the San Francisco night, were a small band of young, ferociously militant political radicals, dedicated to the rights of prisoners and the working class. They called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. Over the course of about three years they robbed banks, senselessly killed two innocent people, instigated a firefight after attempting to shoplift a pair of socks, and, most famously, converted their hostage and victim. They also achieved an undeniable visionary manipulation of the media, inciting perhaps the first modern media frenzy.

Behind the scenes at FC Barcelona, during their turbulent 2003/04 season, as a new management team try to claw the club out of debt and towards glory.

Barca is a study of Barcelona Football Club from the inside, during one of its more traumatic years. This is a film about the business of football - you will see the players but ultimately you spend far more time with the people who do the contracts, figure out whether the club is going bust or not, and show up to every match with a sense of pride that is usually reserved for bright children at school.

Barca is a rarity among football clubs, in the sense that its members and fans are also its shareholders. It's run by an attractive oligarchy of forty-something Catalan businessmen. Watch the chorizo consumption in the film - see how the managerial class get fatter and fatter as the season goes on, and as Barca manages to rescue itself from disaster, becoming a first-rate club again. Wonderful.

A Storyville documentary first broadcast on 24 November 2003. Director Leslie Woodhead recalls his experiences as a 19-year-old National Serviceman in the late 1950s when he was recruited for secret Russian language training. Along with 5,000 other young conscripts he became a sleuth on the front line of the Cold War in Berlin, listening in on Soviet pilots, army units and naval exercises. Includes interviews with Alan Bennett and Michael Frayn, who were part of the same project.

First of a two-part documentary telling the story of Cuba's interventions in Africa from the 1960s onwards and the USA's response, which captures the superpower rivalry, revolutionary idealism and the events that sowed the seeds of later wars.

From Che Guevara's campaign in the Congo to the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola, Jihan El Tahri shows how Cuba tried to carve out an alternative path for Third World nations, with unique archive stills and footage of Che and Fidel Castro.

Second of a two-part documentary telling the story of Cuba's interventions in Africa from the 1960s onwards and the USA's response, which captures the superpower rivalry, revolutionary idealism and the events that sowed the seeds of later wars.

From Che Guevara's campaign in the Congo to the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola, Jihan El Tahri shows how Cuba tried to carve out an alternative path for Third World nations, with unique archive stills and footage of Che and Fidel Castro.

The remarkable story of a 13-year-old Japanese girl abducted by North Korean agents while on her way home from school. For twenty years, her parents remained unaware of her fate.

Weijun Chen's film takes us into the world of Chinese schoolchildren, learning about democracy for the first time as they try to vote for their class monitor.

Elections are uncommon in China, so when the children in a school in Wuhan, Central China are presented with the chance to choose their own class monitor they don't quite know what to make of it. It doesn't take them long to get into the swing of it and soon all sorts of dirty tricks are going on. Urged on by their parents, the candidates launch elaborate campaigns of bribery and coercion.

After tantrums and tears, it's finally time for the vote. Who will win - the sweet girl who woos her voters with her flute playing, the bully who beats his classmates or the boy who has the best sweets?

Documentary about the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system and its effect on American culture.

Implemented in 1968, the system, with its age based content classification using letter grades G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17, has become a cultural icon. But behind its simple facade is a censoring process kept entirely secret, and the film's director Kirby Dick tries to uncover the identities of the ratings board members themselves.

Documentary telling the story of legendary Brazilian footballers Pele and Garrincha, whose emergence following Brazil's defeat at home in the 1950 World Cup Final heralded the dawn of a golden age of football for the country. But while one man became known as the world's greatest footballer, the other died a broken alcoholic at the age of 49.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074mzf

The chicken, generally regarded as dinner, is offered a chance to proudly strut its stuff in this unusual documentary about the birds and the people who love them. Short stories ranging from the wildly hilarious to the deftly touching present chickens in a new light. Mark Lewis, who previously did the same for cane toads (CANE TOADS: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY) and rats (RAT) is well within his domain here, directing this eccentric, yet loving document of an unheralded species.

Documentary telling the real history of Communism through jokes told by ordinary people.

The story of the 1979 hostage crisis at the American Embassy in Iran, when 52 US diplomats were taken hostage and held for 444 days.

James Marsh spends six months with members of the American team for the inaugural Homeless World Cup in Austria.