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.

Try Harder!

Tango with Putin

President

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

Final Account

A woman's Holocaust memoir took the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher revealed an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.

Misha and the Wolves

A Storyville documentary that follows Nelson Chamisa's campaign to restore democracy to Zimbabwe. Can a free, fair and transparent election truly be possible?

Putin’s Russia, former music radio producer Natasha Sindeeva dreams of becoming famous and decides to build her own TV station to focus on pop culture.

Tango with Putin charts Natasha’s journey, from building the station, Dozhd, to recruiting an open-minded team of outcasts who find themselves reporting on some of the biggest and most controversial stories of the day while trying to protect independent journalism in their country.

In a cluttered news landscape dominated by men, a group of women set up India’s only newspaper run entirely by women. All of them are from the lowest caste, Dalit, and are expected to fail, but instead they stir a revolution.

This Oscar-nominated film follows chief reporter Meera and her team of journalists as they break with tradition to work on the frontlines of India’s biggest issues.

Writing with Fire

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.

The Distant Barking of Dogs

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.

The Earth Is Blue as an Orange

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.

The Truffle Hunters

In August 2020, a plane travelling from Siberia to Moscow made an emergency landing. One of its passengers, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was deathly ill. Taken to a local Siberian hospital and eventually evacuated to Berlin, doctors there confirmed that he had been poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent implicated in attacks on other opponents of the Russian government. President Vladimir Putin immediately cast doubt on the findings and denied any involvement.

While recovering, Navalny and his team unravel the plot against him, finding evidence of the Kremlin’s involvement, and prepare to go public with their findings.

Navalny

In this documentary, Dutch film director Klaartje Quirijns originally set out to document therapy. She was interested in the sessions of a friend, Michael Moskowitz, who was unravelling a lifetime of family trauma inherited from the legacies of World War II. In these rarely filmed sessions, led by esteemed American psychotherapist Kirkland Vaughans, Klaartje begins to understand that all lived experience is shaped through the lives of our parents.

In the ultimate display of vulnerability, Klaartje then decides to turn the camera on herself, beginning a journey to unravel her own family secrets. She traces the lineage of her story across three generations – her mother, herself and now her two daughters. Meanwhile, Vaughans continues to guide viewers through the complexities of the mind, showing how easy it is to become colonised by the behaviour of our parents.

Your Mum and Dad: A Devastating Truth

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.

Into My Name

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 the civil rights movement in the US, African Americans and oppressed people throughout the world.

Citizen Ashe

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.

On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World)

Mikhail Gorbachev helped to shape the 20th century, being 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 former Russian leader in his final years, before his death in August 2022, living alone in an empty house outside Moscow and carrying the burdens of his past.

Gorbachev. Heaven

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.

One Day in Ukraine

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.

And Still I Sing

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.

Midwives

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.

Beneath the Surface

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.

The Fire Within

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 House Made of Splinters

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 diehard 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.

A Bunch of Amateurs

Showcasing the best in international documentaries, Storyville has developed an enviable reputation since its inception more than a decade ago. Screening over 340 films, from some 70 different countries, the strand has garnered a staggering array of awards: five Oscars, 15 Griersons, three Peabodys and two International Emmys. In true, unique, Storyville style, the new series promises to deliver the strand's usual eclectic mix of compelling stories from across the globe.

Try Harder!

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Season 26 Episodes22

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