Storyville : Season 13

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.

Documentary telling the strange story of fashion designer Gianni Versace, a household name and designer to the stars, who was murdered on the steps of his Miami mansion in 1997.

Documentary following Olly Williams and Suzi Winstanley, two unique wildlife artists who simultaneously work on the same painting of exotic and endangered animals while on location in the wildest corners of the world. The film shows how they work and why what they do is so important.

Documentary about punk band Heavy Load, subject to the combustible flux of ego, ambition, fantasy, expectation and desire that fuels any emerging band, but uniquely made up of musicians with and without learning disabilities. This makes the band's survival a precarious negotiation between two different worlds - on the one hand the institutional timetable of day centres, work placements and social workers and, on the other, the chaotic slacker life of rehearsal rooms, studios and gigs.

Director Nahid Persson follows the lives of two Iranian women whose misfortunes have landed them in the same run-down building. Their husbands are serving long prison sentences, both have been left to look after their young children and both have had to resort to prostitution to support their heroin habits. Persson's sympathetic portrait follows them as they struggle to create a better life for themselves and their children.

Powerful documentary from Emmy award-winning director Tom Roberts which explores the profound human consequences of America's frontier wars through the moving personal journey of retired US Major Robert 'Snuffy' Gray, who fought with the controversial 7th Cavalry Regiment.

Documentary telling the true story of five young British freestyle footballers' journey across the Americas to Argentina in the hope of meeting their hero, Diego Maradona, a coming-of-age road movie about a group of young men in pursuit of a lifelong dream. The group is made up of urban youths, most of whom have never been abroad before. There is a devout Christian, a cheeky scouser, a failed footballer, a pampered teen and an asylum seeker from Somalia. These boys, ranging in age from 17 to 22

Documentary about self-confessed war profiteer Fidelis Cloer, who, in a career spanning two decades of global turmoil, has supplied kings, presidents and the occasional dictator with the finest luxury armoured vehicles money can buy. In his world, where security is a commodity that can be bought and sold, violence is to sales as the weather is to wheat futures. Always with an on eye on growth opportunities, Fidelis found himself the perfect war when the US invaded Iraq

Profile of iconic war photographer Robert Capa, whose career spanned five epic conflicts across three continents before his untimely death at the age of 40. The film traces Endre Freidman's transformation from a young Jewish boy in Budapest to his becoming Robert Capa, the most famous war photographer in the world.

Documentary about two children who have been directly affected by wars in their respective countries. Six-year-old Murtaza took a landmine home to play with and it blew up in his hand, a familiar story in Afghanistan where one child is killed or injured every day by unexploded munitions. Fifteen-year-old Yagoub suffers from rheumatic heart disease, which if left untreated is life-threatening. Refugees from Sudan's 20 years of unrest, his family are unable to pay for treatment at the local

Documentary, made by her great niece, about the British Jewish baroness who fell in love with the jazz genius Thelonious Monk. Pannonica Rothschild was born with everything, got married and had five children, but one track by a man she had never met inspired her to leave and start a new life in America. Helen Mirren is the voice of 'Nica', while Sonny Rollins, TS Monk Jr, the Duchess of Devonshire, Quincy Jones, Lord Rothschild, Roy Haynes, Chico Hamilton and others appear as themselves.

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

Nati Baratz's documentary chronicles a former disciple's search for his reincarnated Tibetan master. After 26 years of isolated meditation in a mountain cave, Lama Konchog became one of the greatest Tibetan masters of our time. When he passed away in 2001 at 84, the Dalai Lama instructed his shy, devoted disciple Tenzin Zopa to search for his master's reincarnation. This 'unmistaken child' must be found within four years, before it becomes too difficult to remove him from his parents'

After 50 years, will the Jew accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the Holocaust be exonerated? Dr Israel (Rezso) Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew who tried to rescue the last million Jews of Europe by negotiating face to face with Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, was gunned down by another Jew who never set foot in Nazi Europe. After 50 years, his assassin Ze'ev Eckstein breaks his silence on the fateful night he shot and killed Kasztner. This documentary re-opens the history books on

D Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Prions - the particles that would emerge as the cause of Mad Cow disease - while working with a cannibal tribe on New Guinea. Over his years working amongst the tribes of the South Seas, he adopted 57 kids, bringing them to a new life in Washington DC. But, at the height of his career, rumours began to spread he was a paedophile. Gajdusek would argue that if sex with children was okay in their own cultures, he wasn't wrong to join in.

Set against the breathtaking backdrop of the Himalayas, this documentary follows the gripping adventure of six Tibetan teenagers on a climbing expedition up the 23,000 foot Lhakpa Ri, on the north side of Everest. A dangerous journey soon becomes a seemingly impossible challenge made all the more remarkable by the fact that the teenagers are blind. Believed by many Tibetans to be possessed by demons, the children are shunned by their parents, scorned by their villages and rejected by society.

Detective Jahlk is the most famous private eye in Brazil, specialising in 'corporate crime' and employing a team of young female agents. This documentary follows the case brought to Jahlk's attention by a 68-year-old import-export entrepreneur, a divorced workaholic who suspects a link between his company and drug-trafficking and fears that his son Luiz might be involved. Discretion is paramount, so Jahlk sends in his 'angels' Natasha, Julia and Tania to infiltrate Luiz's social network and

J Robert Oppenheimer was one of the most celebrated scientists of his generation. Shy, arrogant and brilliant, he is best known as the man that led the Manhattan Project to spectacular success. As the years progressed he also grew into a scientific statesman, leading a government agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, which was trying to develop ways to avoid a nuclear arms race. His attempts at politics, though, were a lot less successful than his scientific endeavours. As he grew more powerful

Set in a north London residential home for the active elderly, this documentary paints a portrait of life at the Mary Feilding Guild and of three of its oldest residents. With a combined age of almost 300, Rose, Hetty and Alison continue to be powerfully engaged in their individual brands of activism - from journalism to anti-war demonstrations - whilst quietly negotiating the final years of their lives. Rose, Hetty and Alison are fervently concerned about the state of the wider world and work

The definitive film biography of a mythic American figure, a man that Tom Wolfe called 'our greatest comic writer', whose suicide led Rolling Stone magazine, where Thompson began his career, to devote an entire issue to the man that launched a brash, irreverent, fearless style of journalism - named 'gonzo' after an anarchic blues riff by James Booker. Gonzo is directed by Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-nominated director of Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room and the director of the Academy

Documentary based on Philippe Petit's autobiographical book To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers. In August 1974, French wire-walker Philippe Petit spent nearly an hour walking, dancing, kneeling and lying on a wire which he and his friends had strung in secret between the rooftops of New York's Twin Towers. Six years of intense planning, dreaming and physical training fell into place that morning. Already an accomplished wire-walker, Petit had caught sight of an

Nati Baratz's documentary chronicles a former disciple's search for his reincarnated Tibetan master. After 26 years of isolated meditation in a mountain cave, Lama Konchog became one of the greatest Tibetan masters of our time. When he passed away in 2001 at 84, the Dalai Lama instructed his shy, devoted disciple Tenzin Zopa to search for his master's reincarnation. This 'unmistaken child' must be found within four years, before it becomes too difficult to remove him from his parents' care.

When thinking of devastated cities in the World War II, Naples is often forgotten, but when it was liberated by the Allies it was on its last legs, with 200,000 homeless and no power, transport, food or running water. The Allies quickly brought food to the starving population and medicine to the sick, but this led to the creation of a huge black market involving almost the entire population as Naples became a city of vice, crime and chaos. When the war ended, alarmed by Soviet support for the

In September 2009, Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on a 30-year-old warrant. In 1978, the filmmaker skipped bail and escaped to France. For decades, no-one truly understood why. This documentary that reveals the truth about the bungled legal proceedings which brought about his escape. In her riveting reopening of this controversial and, as it turns out, very complex case, filmmaker Marina Zenovich fashions a perceptive and intelligent exploration of what really happened and casts a

People who work in the city either make money out of money, or from the proximity of money. But what do they feel about their jobs? In Men of the City, filmmaker Marc Isaacs goes behind the headlines to examine the state of mind and motivation of men in the city.