Documentary which follows the story of Mark Devlin and his team of scientists as they try to figure out how all the galaxies formed by launching a revolutionary new telescope under a NASA high-altitude balloon. Their adventure takes them from Arctic Sweden to Inuit Canada, where failure forces the team to try again on the desolate ice of Antarctica. The obsessions, personal and family sacrifices, and philosophical and religious questioning of a professional scientist are all laid bare.

A far cry from the images of Japan portrayed in the world's media, Sean McCallister 's thought-provoking documentary, Japan: A Story Of Love And Hate shows that the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever. Sean was granted unique access to both live with and film the daily lives of couple Naoki and Yoshi and through this story of love and survival he reveals a hidden underclass called the 'New Poor', in the world's second richest economy. Naoki, 56, had it all in Japan's bubble economy days, he ran a business with 70 staff, drove a brand new BMW and lived in a six-bedroom house. But when Japan's economy crashed in the early 1990s he lost everything, ending up divorced and penniless. He was saved from homelessness by his new girlfriend, 29-year-old Yoshie, who took him in despite living in a tiny one-room apartment. At his age, the only job Naoki can find is part-time at the post office, which means working seven hours a day and earning just 4,000 pounds a year. Yoshie now has to find extra jobs to support him, working 15 hours a day in three jobs. Each evening she leaves Naoki at home to do the housework and heads to a sleazy chat bar, where she is paid to drink, flatter and flirt with married men. Naoki sees his relationship with Yoshie like father and daughter and admits that since losing his business he has lost his confidence in both his professional and social life.

Documentary looking at Shanghai Circus school, where the gruelling training regimes result in some of the best acrobats and circus performers in the world. Children as young as eight have their unformed bodies stretched and tested to breaking point as they learn to master the most taxing feats of acrobatic grace and daring. Harsh demands are also made of teachers and parents as their proteges strive to be number one in the circus, the Chinese way.

Meet three young boxers — two men and one woman — from Bukom, Ghana, a unique town with a unique boxing culture. The Fighting Spirit follows their extraordinary journeys to triumph and defeat, in and out of the glittering prizefighting rings of Europe and America, and intimately portrays what home, culture, love, and loyalty mean to modern Africans.

Qatar is said to be the world's richest country, while competitive debating is said to be a training ground for future world leaders. So when the Qatari Emiress charged two recent Oxford graduates with creating the country's first national debate team and taking them to the world championships, the stakes were high. This documentary follows the journey of five ambitious teenagers as they are initiated into the cut-throat subculture of competitive high school debate. Training in London, Doha and New York, they learn more about the world as they hone their debating skills. The kids are charismatic and cultured, with strong views and immense curiosity. Only 20 per cent of Qatar's residents are Qatari, and the team reflects this - Tina is Iranian, Vartan is Syrian-Armenian, Fatima is Iraqi, Ayesha is from Pakistan and Talal is half Lebanese, half Qatari.

Spain is reeling from an avalanche of allegations of baby theft and baby trafficking. It is thought that the trade began at the end of the Spanish civil war and continued for 50 years, with hundreds of thousands of babies traded by nuns, priests and doctors up to the 1990s. This World reveals the impact of Spain's stolen baby scandal through the eyes of the children and parents who were separated at birth, and who are now desperate to find their relatives. Exhumations of the supposed graves of babies and positive DNA tests are proof that baby theft has happened. Across Spain, people are queuing up to take a DNA test and thousands of Spaniards are asking 'Who am I?'Katya Adler has been meeting the heartbroken mothers who are searching for the children whom they were told died at birth, as well as the stolen and trafficked babies who are now grown up and searching for their biological relatives and their true identities.

A failed coup attempt, a British mercenary in a grim African prison, a dictator accused by the West of torture and beneath it all, a spectacular underwater oil reserve that the world's major powers would love to get their hands on. It may sound like the latest John LeCarre bestseller, but it's the real-life intrigue behind Simon Mann's African Coup, Storyville's penetrating look at mysterious goings on in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny West African nation newly rich from oil and infamous for corruption. Filmed over eighteen months, with access to key players, the film offers a unique look inside a country that rarely allows in the foreign press.The story proper begins in 2004, when a group of mercenaries, headed by Mann, is arrested in Zimbabwe. Equatorial Guinea's president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, accuses them of plotting a bloody coup d'etat to steal his country and its oil. When Mann is sentenced to 34 years in Equatorial Guinea's feared Black Beach jail, he claims to be only a part of a Western plot to grab the country's vast oil resources. This fast-paced thriller of a film travels the globe to unravel that plot, from South Africa to Spain, from London to Washington - promising to reveal the truth of what happened in the most controversial coup attempt in recent history.But as this all plays out, another actor has its eye on Obiang's oil: China. The Chinese government showers the country with largesse. A new capital city rises from the jungle. Accused by the US of corruption and horrifying human rights abuses, President Obiang welcomes China as his new best friend. Simon Mann's African Coup sheds light on the uncomfortable realities of oil politics in the 21st century.

Through the Looking Glass uncovers the lost story of how armed forces gunned down a largely peaceful demonstration in Uzbekistan, in the heart of Central Asia. Demonstrators had been gathering daily in the eastern city of Andijan through 2005 to call for justice in this highly repressive state – but after almost 100 days the military moved in and opened fire, running down the demonstrators as they tried to get away. Around five hundred people are thought to have been killed.

West Lake Restaurant in South China's Changsha can safely call itself the biggest Chinese restaurant in the world, with its staff of 1,000 working 5,000 tables and serving no fewer than 150 ducks per day and 200 snakes per week. The words of the restaurant's staff and guests are used in the film to paint a picture of modern China: the proprietress, one of the city's 20 self-made millionaires, speaks candidly about her failed marriage; a bridegroom-to-be who is celebrating at the restaurant explains the modern Chinese customs associated with the wedding party; and a waitress visits her poor parents in the countryside. Through these scenes, we gain insight into the unique combination of the ancient religious values and the new capitalist values with which China is stepping into the 21st century. What becomes very clear is that not everyone is set to benefit from the economic boom.

Nagieb Khaja, a young Danish journalist of Afghani origin, travels to Lashkar Gah, capital of the province of Helmand in Afghanistan. Because journalists aren't allowed out of their hotels without a military escort, contact with the civilian population is pretty near impossible. But Khaja has a trick up his sleeve. He gives 30 civilians cell phones equipped with HD cameras and asks them to film their daily lives. This provides us with a rare glimpse into the war-torn existence of regular Afghanis, a valuable antithesis to our very Western perspective on the war.

An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, a radical communist movement led by Pol Pot. Among the victims were film director Thet Sambath's mother, father and brother. In 1999 Sambath decided to seek confessions and explanations from former Khmer Rouge officials at all levels. None had previously admitted any killings.

Nineteen-year-old Masha is a spokesperson in the government-friendly and strongly-nationalistic Russian youth organization, Nashi. The movement aims to protect Russia against its 'enemies'. Masha was seduced by the high energy of the movement by the age of 15 and has got a lot of benefits in return for her loyalty. But then she starts seeing a group of critical journalists. Among them is the well-known blogger, Oleg Kashin, who compares Nashi with 'Hitlerjugend'. Masha is defending her movement, but she starts recognizing how harassment and dirty provocations against the Russian opposition by 'unknown perpetrators' is going on around her. When Oleg is getting seriously beaten up and nearly dies, Masha has to take a stand for or against Nashi.

The Philippines, 1997. As a tropical storm beats down on the Philippine island of Cebu, two sisters leave work and never make it home. That same night, hundreds of miles away in Manila on a different island, Paco Larranaga, 19, is at a party, surrounded by dozens of reliable witnesses. The missing women, Marijoy, 21,and Jacqueline Chiong, 23, are Chinese-Filipinos. Paco, accused of their rapes and murders, is a Spanish mestizo who belongs to a political clan that includes a former president. Beefy and tough, with a past of petty offenses, he neatly fits the role of privileged thug - and that is how he is cast by a frenzied media circus that cheers his eventual sentence to death by lethal injection. Reflecting schisms of race, class, and political power at the core of the Philippines' tumultuous democracy, clashing families, institutions, and individuals face off to convict or free Paco. Their irreconcilable versions of reality and justice play out in a case that ends a country's use of capital punishment, yet fails to free an innocent man.

Israel is the only country in the world where 18-year-old girls are drafted for compulsory military service. In To See If I'm Smiling, a few of them describe their experiences during their two years in the army. All of these young women were stationed in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, places where the conflict is intense. Although they were not directly involved in armed operations, they were in positions that provided a unique perspective on the tense relationship between Israel and the Palestinian population. For the first time, they speak openly about their experiences, in interviews that are complemented with both archive footage and personal material. Their two years of service left an indelible impression on each of them. They explain what it was like to hold their own as the only female soldier among men, but they also talk about their moral dilemmas and doubts regarding the way the Palestinians are treated at the checkpoints. Ultimately, they touch on the inevitable numbness that people end up feeling, and the fading boundary between what they could once so clearly distinguish as good or evil.

In an unmarked office at the end of a dirt track, veteran activist David Kato labors to repeal Uganda's homophobic laws and liberate his fellow lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender men and women, or "kuchus." But David's formidable task just became much more difficult. A new "Anti-Homosexuality Bill" proposes death for HIV-positive gay men, and prison for anyone who fails to turn in a known homosexual. Meanwhile, local newspapers have begun outing kuchus with vicious fervor under headlines such as: "HOMO TERROR! We Name and Shame Top Gays in the City." David, Uganda's first openly gay man, is one of the few who dare to publicly protest state-sanctioned homophobia. Working with an idiosyncratic clan of fellow activists, David fights Uganda's government and tabloids in the courts, on television, and at the United Nations. Because, he insists, "if we keep on hiding, they will say we're not here." But one year into filming and just three weeks after a landmark legal victory, on January 26, 2011, the unthinkable happens: David is brutally murdered in his home. With unprecedented access, this documentary depicts the last year in the life of a courageous, quick-witted and steadfast man whose wisdom and achievements were not fully recognized until after his death.

Leaving the Cult follows three teenagers who escape from the chokehold of the FLDS, a secretive polygamist sect located on the remote Utah/Arizona border. Joining more than a thousand other exiles, the boys must survive in the alien landscape of mainstream America without parents, money, or education. With access to private sermons, hidden photographs and inside testimony. Leaving the Cult delivers a stunning, unforgettable coming of age story that twists and turns with the speed and delivery of fiction but never runs from the truth. Go inside the heart of polygamy, religious extremism, and the narrow roads of escape, and discover three young men whose courage to think for themselves, has inspired audiences worldwide.

This is the incredible story of Or, a 22-year-old Israeli man who secretly finances a sex reassignment surgery in Thailand, without his family's knowledge. Director Shirly Berkovitz captures Or's journey to become a woman. Back in Tel Aviv, she must face her family and the price of seeking her true identity. "I'm about to show myself as the new me, as the female me. And it's gonna be tough," she says. This is an exciting tale about fear, self-doubt, willpower, and the importance of family and being able to be who you are.

What do you do when your mother suddenly disappears and never comes back? During the conflict in Northern Ireland, a number of people were killed and then secretly buried by the IRA. Uncovering new hard evidence that Gerry Adams, currently President of Sinn Fein, was deeply involved in one of the killings, this is a landmark documentary on the Irish 'Troubles', the hard men who drove it and issues of accountability when peace finally comes.

Federal Penal Colony No. 56 is situated in central Russia, in the middle of a forest larger than Germany and a seven-hour drive from the nearest city. In winter, temperatures fall to 40 below zero. There are 260 prisoners serving out their sentences here, all of them for murder. Following tough negotiations, filmmakers Nick Read and Mark Franchetti managed to gain access to this isolated world, where they focused their meticulous eye for detail on the prisoner's daily lives.

The Undocumented tells the stories of migrants who have died in the Arizona desert, and follows them on their long journey home. In Arizona, it depicts the efforts of the Pima County Medical Examiner and the Mexican Consulate of Tucson to identify the dead with the ultimate goal of returning them to their families. In Mexico, the film documents the reunification of the dead with their families and chronicles stories of loved ones who disappeared while crossing the border, never to be heard from again.

Neglect, poverty and sexual abuse were key features in Lisbeth Zornig Andersen's childhood. As an adult, she has managed to transcend her upbringing: achieving a great career and a happy family of her own. Today she revisits her past - a journey that is much harder than she ever imagined.

A journalist with no scruples and a pair of Danish comedians travel to North Korea with a mission to use humour to uncover the truth behind one of the world's most notorious regimes. On the pretext of being a small Danish theatre troupe on a cultural exchange, the filmmaker was granted permission by the North Korean government to stage a performance for a select audience in the capital. In reality, the troupe was comprised of an unscrupulous journalist, Mads Brugger, and two Danish/Korean comedians, Jacob and Simon, of whom the former is handicapped. Their goal is to use humour to expose the intricate effects of an oppressive regime. The film follows the troupe as they are lovingly yet firmly escorted by a motherly government employee around the important historical sights, and as they 'collaborate' with other government officials on their performance.

An intimate portrait of Yemen as the revolution unfolds, told through the eyes of warm-hearted local tour guide Kais. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Sean McAllister portrays Kais' transformation from sceptic of the revolutionary cause to participant with characteristic intimacy and frankness. The film tracks Kais from his initial irritation with the demonstrations against President Saleh's 33-year reign to his witnessing the determination of the demonstrators, which culminates in a massacre of 52 protesters. This is a personal and at times deeply shocking documentary which takes the viewer to the heart of what is like as a normal civilian to live through a revolution.

Wherever war breaks out, men with guns rape. In the Democratic Republic of Congo possibly hundreds of thousands of women and girls were brutally raped. In Weapon of War military perpetrators unveil the hidden motives and strategies of rape as a war crime. An ex-rebel explains how he raped. Like for many, starting a normal life again is a struggle filled with trauma. In an attempt to reconcile with his past, he meets one of his victims. Captain Basima is working as a priest in Congo's army and confronts perpetrators of rape. He urges them to change just like he did. Part of BBC series Storyville Global.

Two friends abandon their peaceful lives in Canada and return to their home country of Libya to fight in the revolution. Hamid and Tarek have never fired a gun, but in 2011 they run recklessly toward the war, fueled by their hatred of Muammar Gaddafi and their desire to be part of history. Once they get to Libya, their paths diverge immediately - Hamid blazes ahead with fearless enthusiasm, easily fitting into the boyish camaraderie among the rebel forces. Tarek's journey is more introspective and unsure. He's far from a natural-born soldier. Untrained fighters in an unconventional war, these boys risk everything to reach the front lines of battle. For eight months, the cameras document raw moments of personal and breathtakingly dangerous acts of war and sacrifice as Hamid and Tarek join the rebels taking on Gaddafi's army. Director Rachel Beth Anderson captures the chaos and giddiness of revolution, the brutal loss of lives and innocence. Her intimate interviews with Hamid and Tarek chart their descent into war as they discover who they are and what they are capable of. In Tarek's words, "The end of the story is different than what I thought."

Photojournalist Nick Danziger returns to Kosovo and tries to trace the ethnic Albanian people he pictured in refugee camps during the war in the Balkans.

Maryam Erfan looks at the booming Middle Eastern and Iranian art market. She asks why is there such an interest in works of art that have previously been ignored by buyers from outside the region and meet experts who fear the bubble could yet burst.

On January 11, 2007, Andrew McAuley set out on his quest to become the first person to kayak from Australia to New Zealand to cross 1600 km of one of the most dangerous oceans on Earth - the Southern Ocean stretch of the Tasman Sea. After a month at sea, Andrew had successfully endured all the difficulties and a three-day Category 9 storm. On February 9, New Zealand maritime authorities received his distress call but they could not save his life. 'Kayak Man' is a stirring psychological portrait of McAuley's unshakable need to claim a first and to conquer the unknown - a need that would ultimately cost him his life.

In the Indian city of Mumbai, 13 people die on public transportation every day. What's more, traffic has increased so rapidly that the entire city becomes gridlocked during rush hour. The solution is a massive suspension bridge to be built off the coast, linking the north of the city to the south and providing considerable relief from the crippling and deadly traffic jams. But lack of funding has drawn construction of the bridge to a standstill, so the municipal government has come up with an alternative plan: to build split-level highways in 96 places around the city, in hopes of keeping the traffic moving. Mumbai Disconnected follows supporters and opponents of this project from the man who just wants to get to work safely every the residents opposed to the never ending construction.