The Imperial Lullaby

Amateur film of the passage to India - complete with guest appearance by Gandhi.

Unseen footage from the British Deaf Association archives is used to tell the story of the Deaf community's fight for civil rights.

Julia Pesce tenderly films her family's intimate moments - nine women sharing a summer idyll in Argentina.

War is a compelling stimulus to the imagination, creating some of our richest and most powerful artistic inspiration. Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne takes an intensely emotional journey, visiting artists’ studios, museums and travelling to battlefield locations to shine a powerful light into the abyss of warfare, where War Artists have left a unique legacy.

This documentary interweaves celluloid and voice recordings by Maya Deren, and colleagues who knew her firsthand: Jean Rouch, Jonas Mekas, Alexander Hammid, Cecile Starr etc. Maya Deren (1917-1961) was an experimental filmmaker. In the 1940s and 1950s she made several influential avant-garde films, such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Images from this and her other work are used in this documentary. You can also hear her voice, as well as accounts by contemporaries such as Jean Rouch and Jonas Mekas.

Tales of Two Who Dreamt is set in a housing block in Toronto and pivots on representation and self-representation. Here, a Roma family rehearses the stories of their past for the upcoming hearing on their residency status.

Armoured elephants, sacred monkeys and a camel carriage from Rajasthan.

Jakub, The Old Believers, and Piemule are three documentaries about forgotten people by director Jana Sevciková. All three are distributed on the same DVD under the name Old Believers. Piemule offers a close look at the descendants of Czech immigrants in Romania.

Pescenica is an old industrial suburb of Zagreb. As a satirical depiction of Croatia's recent politics, it has been declared independent republic. What's it like there today? Over a year, the film crew was combing streets, avenues, parks and backyards, focusing on the lives of four Pescenica inhabitants: its self-proclaimed president, a teacher in a Roma school, a cleaning lady in a film distribution company and a young stage director. All that in order to portray Pescenopolis, the film's protagonist that floats between mud and clouds.

Six life stories of German, Austrian and Russian Jews which intersect in exile in Shanghai. Out of narratives, photographs, documents and new images of the biggest and most contradictory metropolis of the Far East an entity develops in which the historic exile takes and turns on a completely current power and appeal.

Every year they gather from tiny subsistence villages on Alaska’s Bering Sea Coast, traveling hundreds of miles on bush planes to compete on the biggest stage they will ever know — the All-Native District Basketball Tournament. The hope of Toksook Bay is Byron Nicholai, a 16-year-old Yup’ik eskimo who is determined to lead his village to the championship. Byron’s father abandoned him when he was 14 and never taught him how to hunt in the traditional Yupik way. For Byron, this tournament isn’t just about basketball—it’s a way to bring pride to his family and community.

Last Harvest follows the journey of an elderly Chinese farming couple as they are being relocated by the government's mammoth and controversial South-to-North Water Diversion Project.

Italy, 1970. An increasing legion of harmless warriors begins a peaceful struggle for sexual freedom through pornography, shaking and shocking religious authorities and conservative political institutions. They are ironic, happy, crazy. They are dreamers, defenders of definitive communion between body and soul. But they were censored and humiliated. They were mistreated and arrested for demanding loud a new cultural renaissance.

Amateur film showing daily life in Bundi, India.

Evocative observational scenes of Simla and Lahore, including the gorgeous Shalimar Gardens and Anarkali Bazar.

Amateur footage of Delhi and Jaipur, from a military review to an atmospheric torchlit procession - and some armour-plated elephants.

The central song and dance ensemble of the Soviet military stationed in East Germany goes on a tour of the country. The dancers and musicians talk about their experiences in East Germany and their admiration for German classical music, which includes not only Richard Wagner, but also newer talents such as Arthur Honegger and Paul Hindemith.

It’s not uncommon for a film to have a moving love story at its core. Yet this particular set-up is unusual. The lovers here are Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, both important representatives of post-war German-language poetry. The story of the relationship between the Austrian and the Jew from Czernowitz is told through their nearly 20-year correspondence (1948–1967). Or, more precisely, by a young woman and a young man reading from their letters in a studio in Vienna’s venerable Funkhaus.

When President Abdoulaye Wade wanted to run for office yet again in 2011, a resistance movement formed on the streets. Shortly afterwards, a group of school friends, including rappers Thiat and Kilifeu, set up "Y'en a marre" ("We Are Fed Up"), with filmmaker Rama Thiaw soon coming on board to start documenting events – meetings, campaigns, arrests, concerts, states of exhaustion, trips – from an "insider" perspective. Over several years, a stirring portrait emerged of a youth protest movement to whom independent observers were not the only ones to ascribe the role of "kingmaker" in the last elections. Rama Thiaw shows the rappers and their environment with an intimacy whose cinematographic finesse provides space and context for the thorny conflicts between music and politics, street and state.

In 1990, seven young male dancers joined Madonna on her most controversial world tour. Their journey was captured in Truth or Dare. As a self-proclaimed 'mother' to her six gay dancers plus straight Oliver, Madonna used the film to make a stand on gay rights and freedom of expression. The dancers became paragons of pride, inspiring people all over the world to dare to be who you are. 25 years later, the dancers share their own stories about life during and after the tour. What does it really take to express yourself?