Believe It or Not (Second Series) #8

East German short film

An ex mobster reflects on love and loss after spending 32 years in prison.

Tania and Cocteau, a cat that comes from the not too distant future, tell the story of the passage of animals through the world and their relationship with humans.

Lively holiday in Blackpool, with jazz accompaniment.

An insight into the creative process of photographer Brigitte Lacombe, exploring her obsession with taking pictures and how her lens defines her relationship with her subjects and the world.

Two men and one woman addicted to videogames are interviewed to tell their stories. In this documentary, they are animated characters resembling the ones on computer games.

As daylight breaks between the border cities of El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, undocumented migrants and their relatives, divided by a wall, prepare to participate in an activist event. For three minutes, they’ll embrace in no man’s land for the briefest and sweetest of reunions.

An animated film about the British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who spearheaded numerous engineering marvels of the early 19th century - including the Thames Tunnel, the Great Western Railway, and the Great Eastern steamship (for 40 years the world's largest steamship). Various styles of animation are used to depict events in his colorful life.

A documentary that captures some moments on set of filming of Luc Besson's "Nikita".

The original 54-minute documentary, as broadcast by Channel Four on 20 June 1984, after which the animated links by the Quay Brothers were recompiled as a separate short.

An account of the journey that King Alfonso XIII of Spain made to the impoverished shire of Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in the region of Extremadura, in 1922.

The lion dance in traditional Japanese theatre.

Images and numbers illustrate the domestic political measures taken after the Nazis came to power to eliminate unemployment.

In the darkroom, 50 unexposed film strips were laid across a surface, upon which a frame of "La sortie des ouvrier de l'usine Lumière" was projected. The stringing together of the individual developed sections make up the new film, which reads the original frame like a page from a musical score: within the strips from top to bottom and sequentially from left to right.

The life and times of the mexican pianist Julieta García Rello, as told by her granddaughter.

Between the French La Nouvelle Vague and the Italian Neorealismo, Europe had been undergoing a continuous cinema transformation since the 1950s, while the ailing American studio system groaned under its own weight and inertia. New Hollywood had arrived with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, and already by 1968 it was changing how Hollywood thought and acted. The student film scene was getting ready to explode, and it knew it.

German writer Uwe Johnson lived for several years in the 1960s on Manhattan’s Upper Westside where he got to know his neighborhood very well, observing the goings-on in the streets, cafeterias, and parks. In 1968 German Television agreed to co-produce a film for broadcast featuring interviews with various neighborhood characters.

Gavin built a giant volcano sculpture that's now in his dad's shed. Gavin seeks his dad's understanding but he's uninterested in modern art and refuses to participate in the documentary.

The film uses a collection of post-World War II black & white photographs to portray the dockworkers of Marseilles, many of whom were of African descent. Set in and around a 1947 strike protesting weapons shipments to the French in Indochina, the images evoke the life and work of Senegalese filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène, a former dockworker, and one of the founding figures of the New African Cinema of the 1960s.

This short film profiles the benevolent Mike Sullivan, who has been in the process of shooting a stop-motion robot sex film in his New York City apartment for the last ten years. Obsessed with the meticulous construction of the miniature robot porn stars, his apartment now overflows with thousands, leaving him only tiny paths to navigate and no place to film his epic.