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The weird, wonderful and affecting true stories from around the world are collected in MIFF’s regular Documentaries program. From stories happening on your doorstep to tales being played out half a world away, take a look at just how fascinating the world can be.

	ARMADILLO (Denmark, 101 min) "Moving, complex and brutal... an outstanding film about men at war." - Empire In forward operating base Armadillo, a posting of young Danish soldiers are on campaign against the Taliban. Gaining incredible access, director Janus Metz chronicles six months of their everyday lives in Afghanistan, creating a confronting, uncompromised and close-up view of modern warfare. More >
	BEING ELMO (USA, 75 min) "There are Piggy people in the world, and Kermit people, and Grover people, but Elmo people are everywhere." - Variety Red, furry and with an infectious laugh that teaches children to hug, Elmo is one of Sesame Street's smallest and most loved puppets. But behind the cuddly monster is Kevin Clash, a gentle giant of a man who brought Elmo to life. More >
	THE BENGALI DETECTIVE (UK/India/USA, 90 min) In the mega-city of Kolkata, India, where police corruption is rife and 70% of murders go unsolved, a new breed of crime fighter has emerged. When justice is required, the only authority wronged Kolkata citizens can rely upon are men like Rajesh Ji. A freelance private detective, Ji stands ready to pursue anyone from adulterers and petty thieves to murderers and corporate criminals. More >
	BROTHER NUMBER ONE (New Zealand, 97 min) In 1978, New Zealander Kerry Hamill and two friends aboard the yacht Foxy Lady took shelter from a storm, accidentally straying into in Cambodian waters. One man was shot dead when the boat was boarded by the Khmer Rouge. Hamill was held for months at the notorious S-21 Prison, and then executed after being tortured into signing confessions claiming CIA affiliations. More >
	BUCK (PG) (USA, 90 min) "Your horse is a mirror to your soul. Sometimes you might not like what you see." - Buck Brannaman Fresh from a rapturous reception at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received the 2011 Audience Award, Buck is the story of colt breaker Buck Brannaman. The inspiration for The Horse Whisperer, Brannaman is a new breed of horse trainer whose ability to communicate with horses would seem supernatural if it weren't for his cogent explanations of horse psychology. More >
	CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (Canada/USA/France/Germany/UK, 90 min) Cinematic legend Werner Herzog presents an astonishing glimpse of our prehistoric forebears. Kudos to Herzog (Encounters at the End of the World, MIFF 2008; Grizzly Man) for achieving the impossible - gaining access to the French Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, a place that only a handful of scientists had previously set eyes on. An astounding discovery, the cave contains 32,000-year-old artwork so fragile it could disintegrate from accumulated human breath. More >
	CLIENT 9: THE RISE AND FALL OF ELIOT SP… (USA, 115 min) Sex, power, high ideals and cut-throat enemies collide in this engaging untangling of a very American scandal. As New York State Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer prosecuted the crimes of America's largest and wealthiest financial institutions. He swiftly ascended the rungs of power, and was elected to governor of New York in 2007 - but just over a year later, revelations that he frequented prostitutes saw him swiftly fall from grace. Or was he pushed? More >
	EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS (Germany, 108 min) A mouthwatering taste of the preparation that went into one of the most imaginative menus in the world. Each year over two million people tried to book a table at El Bulli – only a select few ever got one. The coastal Spanish restaurant was a Mecca to food buffs; one which closed every year for seven months while chef Ferran Adrià and his team worked diligently to create an entirely new menu. More >
	EXPORTING RAYMOND (USA/Russia, 86 min) An attempt to export the hit US TV show Everybody Loves Raymond to Russia makes for a front row seat to a comedic culture-clash. Everybody loves Raymond, but can the love extend to far Eastern Europe? Writer-director Phil Rosenthal, who created the hugely successful American sitcom, explores the hazards of translation as he tries to get the Russian version of the show off the ground. More >
	GIVE UP TOMORROW (USA/UK, 95 min) "A perfect storm of cronyism, tabloid journalism, public prejudice and corruption." - Variety A murder mystery, a courtroom drama and an exposé of endemic corruption in the Philippines, Give Up Tomorrow takes in Cebu's 'Trial of the Century' - the case of Paco Larranaga, who was sentenced to death for the kidnap, rape and murder of two sisters, despite being able to provide photographic evidence, official records and nearly 40 eyewitness testimonies that he was on the other side of the country at the time of the crime. More >
	THE HOLLYWOOD COMPLEX (USA, 86 min) The average response to a Hollywood casting call: 3000. The number of people who get the part: just one. Every spring, pilot season brings thousands of aspiring child actors and their families to Hollywood. Setting up camp at Oakwood, a temporary housing complex that caters to the wannabe showbiz families, they each attend hundreds of auditions with armies of agents and TV producers. More >
	HOW TO DIE IN OREGON (USA, 107 min) "A beautifully intimate look at terminally ill patients who choose to end their lives painlessly and legally." - Variety How to Die in Oregon is a remarkable and deeply moving documentary that examines the fraught issue of physician-assisted suicide. More >
	IT MAY BE THAT BEAUTY HAS STRENGTHENED … (France, 73 min) This tribute to radical Japanese writer-director Masao Adachi is the first in a series of retrospectives from filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux (A Lake, MIFF 2009). Grandrieux's incendiary series is dedicated to filmmakers informed by a sense of deep political agitation - a criteria that far-left cinematic insurrectionist Masao Adachi (Gushing Prayer, MIFF 2009) qualifies for handily. More >
	JEONJU DIGITAL PROJECT 2011 (France/South Korea/Spain, 110 min) Each year, the Jeonju International Film Festival commissions three filmmakers to create low budget digital shorts to premiere for its annual highlight - the Jeonju Digital Project. With An Heir, Jean-Marie Straub interprets texts by Alsatian writer Maurice Barrès to investigate his conflicted relationship with the region, the place of his birth. More >
	JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI (Japan, 81 min) "A paean to perfectionism and a crafty bit of food porn." - Hollywood Reporter Jiro Ono is the oldest chef in the world to be awarded three Michelin stars, and at 85 remains monomaniacally devoted to his craft. With his tiny 10-seater Tokyo sushi restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, receiving notice from culinary connoisseurs around the world, his unyielding dedication to quality, consistency and perfection continues to produce some of the world's most exquisite (and expensive!) sushi. More >
	KHODORKOVSKY (Germany, 111 min) "For me, as for anybody, it is hard to live in prison, and I do not want to die here. But if I have to, I will have no hesitation. What I believe in is worth dying for." - Mikhail Khodorkovsky Once one of the richest men in the world, Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky suffered a fall of Shakespearean proportions when he took on Vladimir Putin and lost. Now serving a jail term of 14 years, his is the story of a post-Soviet Russia that all too often seems trapped in the orthodoxies of its Communist forebears. More >
	MAGIC TRIP: KEN KESEY'S SEARCH FOR A KO… (USA, 107 min) "You're either on the bus or off the bus." - Ken Kesey In 1964, author Ken Kesey hired a bus, bought an insane amount of LSD, collected a bunch of likeminded individuals whom he dubbed the 'Merry Pranksters', and proceeded to drive across the United States while filming the entire thing - a bus trip (pun intended) that became one of the most culturally significant journeys in America's history. More >
	OPERATION 8 (New Zealand, 110 min) How did the search for Osama bin Laden become a global witch-hunt for political dissenters - reaching even to the South Pacific? In 2007, the excesses of the post-9/11 War on Terror hit home in New Zealand, when the government staged a coordinated series of raids on activists across the country. In addition to environmental activists and peaceful anarchists, the indigenous Tuhoe independence movement made a particular target, with a massive raid carried out against what was alleged to be a terrorist training camp deep within the Urewera ranges. More >
	PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES (USA, 88 min) A fascinating look at the inner-workings of one of the world's most respected newspapers. At a time when the print industry is suffering a massive decline, filmmaker Andrew Rossi was granted unprecedented access to the nerve-centre of The New York Times's operations over a 12-month period, during which he captures vibrant cross-cubicle debates and collaborations, tenacious jockeying for on-record quotes and skillful page-one pitching. More >
	PINK SARIS (UK/India, 96 min) "I am the messiah of women! I am more powerful than the police!" - Sampat Pal Meet the Gulabi Gang, a group of women dressed in defiantly pink saris, railing against India's patriarchal caste system. They are led by Sampat Pal, a former child bride who now fights the subjugation and institutionalised beating of women. A divisive figure, she is at once a saviour for the mistreated, as well as a shameless self-promoter acutely aware of her own celebrity. More >
	POM WONDERFUL PRESENTS: THE GREATEST MO… (USA, 88 min) A film about product placement - funded entirely by product placement. Morgan Spurlock, the provocateur behind Super Size Me and Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? (MIFF 2008), wanted to make a documentary about product placement. In fact, given its prevalence, he decided he could probably raise the $1.5 million himself - via product placement. The result is a madcap journey through the increasingly parodic halls of America's marketing departments. More >
	POSITION AMONG THE STARS (Netherlands/Indonesia, 109 min) "A rich mosaic of Indonesia today... poignant, breathtaking, and a singularly stellar vérité triumph." - Sundance Film Festival Dutch filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich rounds off his award-winning documentary trilogy about the desperately poor Sjamsuddin family with this affectionate and powerful conclusion to the series. Helmrich has followed the Sjamsuddins, a Christian- Muslim family living in the slums of Jakarta, for more than a dozen years, constructing this quiet epic of life on the periphery. More >
	PROJECT NIM (UK, 93 min) "Reminds us that while our close genetic relatives are as intelligent as they come, we can be the biggest chumps." - Guardian The follow-up to James Marsh's Oscar winning Man on Wire (MIFF 2008), Project Nim takes us into a 1970s social experiment to bridge the gulf between human and animal: teaching a chimp to communicate with sign language by raising it with a human family. More >
	THE REDEMPTION OF GENERAL BUTT NAKED (USA, 83 min) "Utterly fascinating, with a charismatic central figure - love him or loathe him - who is made for the big screen." - Hollywood Reporter A naked, gun-toting murderer who lead an army that massacred thousands during the Liberian Civil War, Joshua Milton Blahyi (known to his victims as 'General Butt Naked') has now repented. Reinvented as a firebrand evangelist, he now preaches love, forgiveness and tolerance to those he himself once brutalised. But what are the limits of forgiveness for a mass murderer? Is his quest to make amends real, or a way to evade justice? More >
	RESURRECT DEAD: THE MYSTERY OF THE TOYN… (USA, 90 min) Toynbee Idea / In Kubrick's 2001 / Resurrect Dead / On Planet Jupiter Something strange is on the streets. Cryptically proclaiming the above four lines (and weirder), the Toynbee Tile phenomenon has seen hundreds of street tiles discovered in major cities across the US and South America for over 20 years. Is it a street-art conspiracy, or the public ravings of a deranged individual? More >
	SODANKYLÄ FOREVER - THE CENTURY OF CIN… (Finland, 89 min) "Peter von Bagh carves a forceful, fastmoving, often melancholic but frequently funny essay about cinema as the essence of the 20th century. " – Film Comment Peter von Bagh is a filmmaker, film historian and director of the Midnight Sun Film Festival. Sodankylä Forever is von Bagh's tribute to the force and legacy of cinema, which see him assemble over 20 years of interviews with luminaries such as Milos Forman, Jacques Demy, Samuel Fuller, Michael Powell, Abbas Kiarostami and Monte Hellman. These legends of cinema talk about their influences, censorship and, of course, their love for film. More >
	TABLOID (USA, 84 min) Sex, crime, religion and flavoured lube - the interview subject of Errol Morris's new documentary possess a personality as outrageous as the story she tells. Joyce McKinney was just an ordinary, everyday former beauty-queen-turned-bondage-call-girl. That is, until she kidnapped, bound and molested a Mormon gentleman. More >
	TEARS OF GAZA (Norway, 83 min) "Few antiwar films register with the disturbing immediacy and visceral terror of Tears of Gaza." - Variety Documenting the human impact of the 2008 – 2009 bombing of Gaza by the Israeli military, director Vibeke Løkkeberg has made use of local Palestinian crews to provide footage of a conflict largely unseen by the Western media. More >
	THINK GLOBAL, ACT RURAL (France, 113 min) "Films full of warnings and disasters have been made and have served their purpose, but now it is time to show that solutions do exist." - filmmaker Coline Serreau Focusing her lens on the catastrophic state of the worldwide agriculture industry, filmmaker Coline Serreau exposes the trail of destroyed livelihoods they've left in their wake. An entire countryside in France is left abandoned, hundreds of thousands of farmers have ended their own lives throughout India, and in many areas whole generations are left jobless. More >
	EL VELADOR (Mexico/USA, 72 min) "An exquisite study of a rapidly expanding cemetery at the center of Mexico's drug wars." - Variety In Mexico, the war on drugs has become a literal war, resulting in the bloodiest conflict since the Mexican Revolution. Nearly 35,000 people have been killed since 2007, and the narco-cemetery at the heart of it all has grown to obscene dimensions - a mighty necropolis peppered with extravagant mausoleums belonging to the cartel bosses, standing next to the simple graves of the crime-lords' victims. More >