Mali’s Music defines the country’s cultural identity. Radical Islamists are threatening the musicians. Together with the stars of Malian Global Pop – Fatoumata Diawara, Bassekou Kouyaté Master Soumy and Ahmed Ag Kaedi – we embark on a musical journey to Mali’s agitated heart. Can their music reconcile the country? IMDB

‘Electoral Dysfunction’ uses irreverent humor to illuminate how voting works – and doesn’t work – in America. Hosted by Mo Rocca (a Correspondent for CBS News, a panelist on NPR’s ‘Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!’ and a former Correspondent for ‘The Daily Show’), the film is structured as a road trip that begins when Mo makes an eye-opening discovery: The Constitution does not guarantee the right to vote, putting America in the company of Libya, Iran and Indonesia. Mo explores the battle over voter fraud and voter I.D.; searches for the Electoral College; critiques ballot design with Todd Oldham; and encounters experts and activists across the political spectrum who offer commentary on why our voting system is broken and how it can be fixed.

From the team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim’s extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature – and indeed our own – is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

How do you put a life into 500 words? Ask the staff obituary writers at the New York Times. OBIT is a first-ever glimpse into the daily rituals, joys and existential angst of the Times obit writers, as they chronicle life after death on the front lines of history.

The Lover’s Guide 3D is the latest in the best selling series of sex education DVDs that help to educate consenting adults in the pleasures of love making. By imparting knowledge of how the body works along with how to stimulate your partners desires by being attentive to their needs, showing you specific techniques and maintaining a clear open approach to the subject matter, the documentary manages to inform and express without the need to be graphic. By advocating safe sex within a loving relationship and an emphasis on increasing desire and sustaining sex, this educational tool should appeal to those starting out or those already in a stable relationship.

The ostensibly simple story of a sympathetic veteran teacher giving Italian lessons to a weekly class of diverse immigrants is given infinitely more depth and complexity by the manner in which director Daniele Gaglianone renders his story. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, truth and artifice, and between documentary and drama, Gaglianone has created a film within a film. You see the apparent artifice of Gaglianone’s crew using professionals, including the noted film actor Valerio Mastandrea as the teacher, interlinked with ‘real’ immigrant protagonists, studying the language to improve their chances of employment and of gaining a permanent residence permit. Thus in the course of the lessons there is simultaneously the painful and upsetting relation of the students’ personal stories but also humour, as they interact and share their humanity, bridging cultural differences, united in their striving to make a better life for themselves. (Source: LFF programme)

Griffin Dunne’s years-in-the-making documentary portrait of his aunt Joan Didion moves with the spirit of her uncannily lucid writing: the film simultaneously expands and zeroes in, covering a vast stretch of turbulent cultural history with elegance and candor.

Scientists seek to find if Big Bull, a bull shark who stretched more than 10-feet long and weighed over 1,000 pounds, is actually the matriarch of a unique population of giants.

“Finding Joseph I” is a feature documentary chronicling the eccentric life and struggles of punk rock reggae singer, Paul “HR” Hudson, a.k.a. Joseph I, the legendary lead singer from Bad Brains.

Through the lens of photographer and physician Eric Overton, Collodion: The Process of Preservation captures a fearless, and uncommonly vulnerable self-portrait of American wilderness, our relationship to each other, and the possibility that nature itself may be all we need to find common ground.

The 2016 Reebok CrossFit Games were a grueling five-day, 15-event test to find the fittest man and woman on Earth. “Fittest on Earth: A Decade of Fitness” follows the dramatic story of the top athletes who qualified and competed and offers an inside look at what it takes to be among the world’s elite athletes, both in training and on the competition floor. The CrossFit Games challenge competitors to perform intense physical tasks, but the hardest part is sometimes mental. Athletes often learn the details of the events only minutes before they begin, and everyone handles the pressure differently. Which of these fierce competitors will rise to the top and earn the title of Fittest on Earth?

The first career-spanning film chronicling the life of Picabo Street, the alpine skiing icon of the 1990s and co-director Lindsey Vonn’s childhood hero. From her unorthodox childhood in Idaho to her Olympic successes, dramatic recoveries from ill-timed injuries and her arrest in 2015 due to false abuse allegations, this documentary provides an intimate look at Street’s fascinating life through an emotional interview with Vonn and behind-the-scenes footage of Street’s life.