Storyville - Season 26 / Year 2022

A portrait of the last living generation of everyday people to participate in the Third Reich. Men and women ranging from former SS officers to children who grew up in Hitler's Germany speak for the first time about their memories and perceptions of some of the greatest crimes in human history.

The dramatic tale of a woman whose Holocaust memoir took the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher – who turned detective – revealed an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth. In the early 1990s, Misha Defonseca began to tell friends in the Jewish community of Massachusetts of her terrible experiences as a young girl during the Holocaust. Stripped of her identity, and ‘hidden' in the house of a Catholic family, she decided to run away, walking east across Europe, eating earthworms and insects, befriending wolves, evading the Nazis and living by her wits in search her deported parents.

On hearing this incredible account, local publisher Jane Daniel persuaded Misha to write her story as a memoir. Before the book was even written, the buzz began. The press picked up the story, and film and translation rights were being sold around the world. By the time the book was finished, Oprah's Book Club came calling, and their involvement guaranteed an international bestseller.

Then something strange happened. Misha grew uncooperative and refused to go on the live TV show. Thus began a three-year feud between Misha and her publisher that ended in court, accused of stealing the copyright and withholding royalties. The publisher was ordered to pay damages of USD22 million. In an effort to rebuild her reputation, Jane Daniel delved deeper into Misha's story. A cinematic documentary about truth and lies, about history and imagination and how and why we believe the stories we're told.

When Robert Mugabe was ousted by his own party, Zimbabwe's new leaders promised a democratic presidential election – the first since the start of Mugabe's rule almost 40 years earlier. Against a backdrop of economic crisis, food shortages and political violence, the stakes could not be higher.

Working to defeat the ruling party, which has controlled Zimbabwe since independence, is the young and charismatic Nelson Chamisa, who has been compared to a young Nelson Mandela. The campaign will set the course for the future of the country. After decades of corrupt elites using any means necessary to retain power, can a free, fair and transparent election truly be possible?

With this sequel to her widely acclaimed 2014 documentary Democrats, which followed the political battle to establish Zimbabwe's first democratic constitution, Camilla Nielsson brings viewers into the heart of an epic struggle for power.

The American college application process can be stressful at the best of times. For the super-smart, mostly Asian-American students at San Francisco's Lowell High School, it's emotionally draining. At Lowell, it's cool to be a nerd – everyone is talented.

This Storyville documentary follows a group of students as they make their university applications, all of them under pressure to get a prized spot at one of the country's most elite institutions. Try Harder! is a portrait of young adults in the most diverse American generation ever, navigating their way through a quintessential rite of passage.

The world could not keep its eyes off two athletes at the 1994 Winter Games – Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. Just weeks before the Olympics in 1994, at the US Figure Skating Championships, Kerrigan was injured by an unknown assailant. Harding's ex-husband had plotted the attack with his misfit friends to eliminate Kerrigan from the competition.

The Price of Gold takes a fresh look at the scandal that elevated the popularity of professional figure skating, with Harding still facing questions over what she knew and when she knew it.

A Storyville documentary. A Russian radio producer sets up a TV station and finds herself in the vanguard of the struggle to protect independent journalism in her country.

A Storyville documentary that follows a group of women as they set up India's only newpaper run by women. They are expected to fail, but instead they stir a revolution.

Ten-year-old Oleg lives with his grandma in eastern Ukraine, close to the front line of the war between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces. His village, Hnutove, is just a mile from the war zone. Whilst friends and family have been able to flee, Oleg has no other place to go.

This Storyville documentary follows him over the course of a year, from 2016 to 2017, examining what it is like to grow up in the midst of armed conflict.

Single mother Anna and her four children are living under siege in Ukraine in 2019. Eldest daughter Mira dreams of becoming a film-maker and so, as bombs descend on neighbouring homes, she and her siblings construct, act in, and edit a film about their lives in the war zone.

The Earth Is Blue as an Orange observes the family as they cope with war by using their cameras to create meaning out of a meaningless conflict.

Deep in the forests of Piedmont, Italy, a handful of elderly men hunt for the rare and expensive white Alba truffle. This award-winning film follows these truffle hunters, who live and work alongside their cherished dogs in an eccentric world, guided by a secret culture and a training passed down through the generations.

A compelling coming-of-age story of four friends, sharing important turning points in their lives as they transition to a new gender.

Nic, Leo, Raff and Andrea meet in Bologna, where each of them is going through their gender transition. Their discussions gently revolve around their personal experiences, providing a unique insider's look at hormones, surgery, the longing for facial hair and the legal hurdles faced by transgender people.

Documentary that tells the little-known story of sports legend Arthur Ashe off the tennis court. Known to most on account of his stellar sports career – he became the first black man to win Wimbledon in 1975 – the film uncovers Ashe's work as a social activist, a role that embraced not only the civil rights movement in the US and African Americans but all oppressed peoples throughout the world.

On 13 January 2018, Hawaiians were suddenly confronted by an urgent nuclear threat. This was the text message they received from their country's emergency management agency:

Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.

This documentary captures the voices of the people who experienced the events of that day, viscerally recreating what happened during the 38 minutes they had to react and make impossible decisions in the face of a possible nuclear catastrophe.

Mikhail Gorbachev helped to shape the 20th century. As the architect of Glasnost and Perestroika, his actions brought down the Berlin Wall, giving countries of the former Soviet Union a chance to break away and be free. But while to many in the west he remains a hero, in his own country Gorbachev is condemned for destroying the Soviet Empire.

This film is an intimate portrait of the man, now 91 years old and living alone in an empty house outside Moscow, carrying the burdens of his past.

A snapshot of one day in a country under siege. Filmed on 14 March 2022, the 2,944th day of the Russian-Ukrainian war, by a collective of Ukrainian film-makers who wanted to document life in Kyiv for ordinary civilians, citizens-turned-activists and groups of territorial defence soldiers. Written and directed by Volodymyr Tykhyy and the Babylon 13 Collective.

Controversial Afghan pop star and activist Aryana Sayeed mentors young hopefuls as they prepare to appear on their country's hit TV show Afghan Star. With two young women on the verge of being named the show's first ever female winners, the Taliban take over and their lifelong dreams of becoming pop stars are suddenly under threat.

Hla and Nyo Nyo live in a country torn by conflict. Hla is a Buddhist and the owner of an under-resourced medical clinic in western Myanmar, where the Rohingya (a Muslim minority community) are persecuted and denied basic rights. Nyo Nyo is a Rohingya and an apprentice midwife who acts as assistant and translator at the clinic.

Despite living in the area for generations, Nyo Nyo and her family are still considered intruders. Risking her own safety daily by helping Muslim patients, she is determined to become a steady healthcare provider and resource for the families who desperately need her.

Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing's remarkable feature debut won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Made over the course of five turbulent years in Myanmar, it shines a spotlight on these courageous women, who unite to bring forth life, despite the risks and challenges of their own, and offers a rare insight into the complex reality of Myanmar and its people.

In 2014, following a tip-off, a group of journalists exposed a troubled history for indigenous Sámi women, men and children in Norway. It revealed generations of negligence, abuse and suffering, supported by a mass of evidence and previously unseen archival footage.

As the case goes to court, the community remains defiant against a judicial system whose attitudes highlight fissures in the purported equal treatment of all citizens. The community's battle aims to break a vicious cycle of racism and to achieve meaningful, lasting change for future generations.

On 3 June 1991 at 3.18pm, a pyroclastic flow erupted from Mount Unzen in Japan. A cloud of superheated gases and particles descended at more than 100mph from the peak of the volcano, consuming everything in its path.

It instantly killed Katia and Maurice Krafft, volcanologists and film-makers from the Alsace region in France. They were too close. They were almost always too close. On the day before they died, Maurice said in an interview, 'I am never afraid, because I've seen so many eruptions in 25 years that, even if I die tomorrow, I don't care.'

The Fire Within pays homage to the Kraffts, who left an archive of more than 200 hours of footage of their final journey, unprecedented in its spectacular and hypnotic beauty.

In her role as environmental officer, Annina Van Neel learns that Saint Helena's planned airport sits on top of a mass burial site for 325 African slaves. As part of the development, their remains were exhumed and moved into storage, with no clear plan or timeline as to what would happen to them next.

Haunted by this and her memories of growing up in Namibia under apartheid, and in spite of the opposition of local people who consider her an outsider, Annina fights for a proper memorial for these forgotten victims.

Tears turn to soap bubbles, and hugs turn to fights, in this award-winning film about an orphanage in eastern Ukraine, filmed before Russia's invasion in February 2022.

In a large ramshackle house near the front line in war-torn eastern Ukraine, a group of Ukrainian women run an orphanage. Children whose homes have been shattered by poverty, violence and alcohol can safely stay there for up to nine months until a decision is made on whether to return them home, foster them or move them to another orphanage.

When one child checks out of the orphanage, a new one always checks in, missing their parents. Children like Kolya, who smokes cigarettes on the sly, steals, and draws tattoos on his arms, but who also looks after his younger siblings before collapsing, crying, into his drunk mother's arms.

A bunch of amateur film-makers, with nothing left to lose, tackle one of Hollywood's greatest musicals in order to save their beloved Bradford Film Club.

As its members grow old amid flickering memories and hardships, a handful of die hard members desperately cling to their dreams, and to each other, in this warm and funny look at shared artistic folly that speaks to the delusional dreamer in us all.