Melissa: Mom and Me

Russian avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and German playwright Bertolt Brecht recount the brief portions of their lives they spent in Hollywood trying to make art that was both radical and popular.

An exploration of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's notes and drawings for a science fiction movie that he pitched to Paramount in 1930 about the residents of a skyscraper with walls and floors of clear glass.

The saga of a movie treatment written by German playwright Bertolt Brecht during his unhappy stint in Hollywood based on a Life Magazine article about a farm family who win a week's stay in a model home at the Ohio State Fair, with the catch that they will be on display to the public.

Set deep in the traditional territory of Tahltan First Nation, Northern British Columbia’s Red Chris gold and copper mine is the backdrop to a lyrical tapestry of landscapes and diverse personal stories from the land. Language preservation initiatives and mining opposition evoke emotional tones as the story swells with ravishing images of wilderness as a rough and untamed beauty. A thoughtful shift from Wild’s traditional narrative style of radical point of view documentary, "KONELĪNE" is a meditation on nature, culture, and economy as experienced by those who live and work on the land.

Each one of the 15 lighthouses around the island of Puerto Rico tells the story of the lighthouse keepers, wives or daughters that lived in them. Additional testimonies by architects, historians, biologists and fishermen take us on a trip of beauty, hope, perseverance around them, as we witness the magnificence of its structures and its magical surroundings. Some lighthouses are active, some have been restored, others have been abandoned but all have a unique story to tell.

Road's End is the story of Daina who lives in Latgale in Eastern Latvia, close by the Russian border. She lives two miles from the nearest road, with no electricity or running water. The roof has collapsed. She is completely dependent upon herself in order to cope with her everyday life. Daina’s children have both emigrated, her son to Norway and her daughter to Italy. When she feels lonely, she goes to her husband's grave and sits there talking with him as if he were still alive. Road’s end is a both poetic and existential film about choices we make in life, about obstinacy, love and betrayal.

In the crystal clear waters off the coast of Borneo, a unique way of life threatens to disappear forever. For generations, the Badjao were oceanic nomads, living in harmony with the sea as fishermen and free divers. Nowadays, however, only a few Badjao remain, like Alexan, who still remembers the old ways. He hopes to pass his knowledge along to his ten-year-old nephew Sari, but time and opportunities are running out. Sari loves the sea, but it can only offer a hard life of subsistence fishing, while the nearby tourist resort sings a siren song of easy money.

A document of the momentous culmination of a series of world tribunals held in 30 cities around the world, providing testimonials of the war crimes committed by the US and it’s allies in the war in Iraq. This culminating session was held in Istanbul in 2006.

Singapore GaGa is a 55-minute paean to the quirkiness of the Singaporean aural landscape. It reveals Singapore's past and present with a delight and humour that makes it a necessary film for all Singaporeans. We hear buskers, street vendors, school cheerleaders sing hymns to themselves and to their communities. From these vocabularies (including Arabic, Latin, Hainanese), a sense of what it might mean to be a modern Singaporean emerges. This is Singapore's first documentary to have a cinema release. With English and Chinese subtitles.

The story of the Northern Ireland Troubles through the unflinching testimony of two men who played key roles on opposite sides of that bloody conflict. Nearly ten years ago the two paramilitary leaders told their stories on condition that they could never be revealed while they were still alive. The stories told by the Irish Republican Army's Brendan Hughes and Ulster Volunteer Force's David Ervine tell us of the motivations of the participants, the planning of campaigns of violence, the misery of a hunger strike, the tracking and killing of informers and the duplicity that ended a conflict that had lasted too long. It is also a narrative of the fate of combatants when their wars are over.

Music performed by The New York Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Pierre Boulez. Schwartz manipulates by computer, in real-time the images of the Maestro to realize a unity between his music and the picture.