For two-and-a-half decades, Spalding Gray mined the details of his life to provide comedic commentary on the subjects of art, sex, family, and mortality — but a 2001 car crash changed everything.

Antoine is a five-year-old in Montreal who of late has become a detective, and he’s hot on the trail of a disappearing woman named Madame Rouski.

In person: director Laura Bari

In this surreal dark comedy, an Orthodox Jewish organization and an eccentric Israeli mother lock horns over the remains of her teenage daughter’s body.

In person: director Eytan Harris

The Ponce family’s traveling circus has journeyed throughout rural Mexico for generations, but mounting debt and a difficult nomadic lifestyle threaten to halt the grand tradition.

In person: director Aaron Schock

The disappearance of the honeybee population is one of the most vexing mysteries of our time, and this artful film begins to unravel it.

In person: director Carter Gunn

A filmmaker’s hoped-for expose of a Western mining company results in a comedy of errors involving his relationship with his Indian driver and guide.

In person: director Simon Chambers

LSD athletes, camel herders, karaoke kids and salacious swingers — these are your guests at this specially made Dinner Party.

In person: director Amy Grappell

A scary, surreal survey of Ghuangzhou, China, as if Eraserhead were a documentary.

In person: director Huang Weikei

True Life Fund selection. On a mission to investigate and to also forgive the brutal murderers who perpetrated the Killing Fields of Cambodia, journalist Thet Sambath is seeking truth and reconciliation.

An warts-and-all look at thirty years in a single Peruvian family’s life.

In person: director Mikael Wiström and Alberto Herskovits

Natural gas exploration in the US isn’t so natural after all, Josh Fox learns, as he sets out to expose a rapacious industry before it lays waste to his beloved river valley.

In person: director Josh Fox

A Swedish director captures life in his eccentric hometown.

In person: director Mikel Cee Karlsson

An Irish convert to Islam faces off with an evangelical Christian: will either budge?

In person: director Stephen Marshall

We go beyond the body count as we track returnees from a Latino cage fighter to a Congressional candidate.

In person: co-director Petra Epperlein

Identity crises from around the globe including a deer who thinks he’s a cow, the story of how Ernest Hemingway created Hemingway, and a teenager at a crossroads.

Ike & Tina Turner, the space chimp, Nikita Khrushchev, Saddam Hussein, Little Eva, the CIA and Rock Hudson all play parts in Adam Curtis’ jaw-dropping mash-up of 50 years of empire building and storytelling.

In person: director Adam Curtis

A dreamy, intimate portrait of a small-town teenage girl wrestling with her future.

In person: director Robert Greene and d.p. Sean Price Williams

The changing face of Iran as seen through a portrait of taekwondo star Sarah Khoshjamal, its first female Olympic qualifier.

An epic adventure movie about one family’s place amongst the 120 million people in China who return from the factories in coastal cities to their vilages in the interior.

In person: director Lixin Fan

In this visionary film by our True Vision honoree, an Iraqi doctor and political candidate struggles with the chaos that has engulfed his country

A stunning film following two brothers in Cape Town, South Africa accused of murder.

In person: directors Andy Wolff and Stefanie Brockhaus

A warm-hearted look at Rachel, a mentally challenged teenager, as she and her mother Jane struggle to find independent living options.

In person: director Charlotte Glynn

With dreams of NASCAR dancing in their heads, three tweens compete on the national go-kart circuit.

In person: director Marshall Curry

An immersive journey with an American platoon inside the one of the most dangerous combat zones in Afghanistan.

In person: co-director Tim Hetherington

The definitive look at the outsider comedian considered to be the greatest of his generation.

In person: The co-directors

The sunny side of global warming: with glaciers receding, all that gold in them thar hills is now exposed, and ripe for some greedy adventuring.

In person: the directors

How do you plan for something to last 100,000 years?

In person: the director and Maria Fortiz-Morse, director of Trash Out

A portrait of an iconic performer shown still in her irreverent prime, as vulnerable — and funny — as ever.

In person: the director

Ron Galella was the original American paparazzo, a social pariah and celebrity scourge. But at 79, he now feels like more of a pop idol himself and, surprisingly, an artist.

In person: director Leon Gast and producer Adam Schlesinger

This shorts compilation goes from Bobcat Goldthwait’s behind-the-scenes look of his childhood home movies to the unfathomable journeys that parents of disappeared children endure.

In person: director Melanie Levy

Disarming confessions from eight couples sitting up in bed.

In person: director Pippa Robinson

Meet the crackpot inventor responsible for 3,357 inventions, including the floppy disk, in his almost 80 years.

In person: director Kaspar Astrup Schroder

A loving and humorous portrait of a small Italian village and their plan to build a giant mirror.

In person: director David Christensen and editor Annalisa Schillaci

A Yemeni taxi driver struggles with his past ties to Bin Laden and a brother-in-law who is imprisoned at Gitmo.

In person: director Laura Poitras

A devilishly absurdist road trip inside the heart of North Korea’s evil empire.

In person: d.p. and editor Rene Johannsen

A Mexican circus performer is torn between family tradition and her husband’s desire for an ordinary life in this exquisitely shot piece of observational filmmaking.

In person: director Nuria Ibáñez

Two Mexican directors’ sure-handed celebration of their culture, in the shadow of El Norte.

In person: co-director Carlos Hagerman

Art and commerce collide inside the mouse house as Disney animation studio bounced back during a tumultuous period.

In person: producer Peter Schneider

Brazilian artist Vik Muniz returns to his homeland and to Jardim Gramacho — the largest garbage dump in the world.

In person: director Lucy Walker

This nostalgic, impressionistic snapshot of male adolescence captures two years in the lives of a group of Canadian prep schoolers.

In person: director Sarah Goodman

Raised lovingly by her father, Morgane has turned 18 and faces a crossroads. Her struggle to reconcile her feelings about her absent mother is captured with beautiful tenderness.

Lubo watches over the bats, while his mother watches over him. A quirky portrait of a man who follows his own spirit, even if it’s a bit “upside down.”

A bromance involving a particular genus of American men, homo competitivus.

Oscar-winnng director Cynthia Wade returns to T/F with this moving film about a 15-year-old Cambodian boy who dreams of being a karaoke superstar despite suffering from arsenic poisoning.

Using found footage, Jay Rosenblatt weaves a stark yet poignant look at people’s choices to end their life. Haunting and beautiful, the film handles a very difficult subject with grace and humanity.

A hilarious, animated anecdote from Dock Ellis, who tried a little LSD, played a little baseball.

Take a journey behind the scenes of the Goldthwait Home Movies, as Bobcat and his siblings run their commentary on the making of these family moments.

A brief portrait of a deer who thinks he’s a cow.

Interviews and animation explore our naïve notions about baby-making. (Plays with The British in Bed.)

A poignant, intimate portrait of a Welsh man who hears voices, featuring his simple and powerful voiceover. “Two people inhabited my head; one was me and one was not me.” (Plays with Antoine.)

A colorful layering of images, this experimental film delivers glimpses of life in Vietnam like a slot machine before our eyes.

Director Matthew Killip travels the globe, introducing us to some of our furry relatives. (Plays with Cowboys in India, Circo and Greetings from the Woods.)

The hard-to-believe story of Ron Dante, con man, outlaw and quite possibly mad genius. (Plays with The Invention of Dr. NakaMats.)

16-year old Sydney is articulate in ways she can never express — a complex woman inside a severely autistic body. Levy captures the sensitive care-giving of her mother and Sydney’s artistic musings.

Who was Hemingway? This carefully constructed piece looks back on Hemingway’s creation of the adventurous writer, inspired by an experience in Pamplona.

From Narges Abyar in Iran comes a brief time in the life of Reza Abdolbab, an old man who cares for a camel. We see street scenes in the old city, a religious ceremony, and a climactic and dramatic processional reenactment of Persian battles.

A photography archive gets inundated with the strangest of requests, and this film illustrates them with a massively clever animated style. (Plays with Disorder.)

In which we finally find out what’s lurking in your pants’ pockets. (Plays with Antoine.)

Dustin Grella uses stop-motion animation to reflect on the loss of his veteran brother. (Plays with Rachel Is.)

Love knows no boundaries — even for your parents, as Amy Grappell learns in this subtle, artful reflection.

A portrait of kids hanging out at a swimming hole in 1967. (Plays with It Felt Like a Kiss.)

On the banks of a Japanese river, engineering men have built makeshift homes. Striking imagery and humorous moments provide insight into their unique lifestyles.

A heart-breaking look at the parents of disappeared children and how difficult it is to “understand missing.”

A mesmerizing look at the workers who enter foreclosed homes. (Plays with Secret Screening Orange.)

Spectators flock to the India-Pakistan border to watch the countries’ flags lower. Three children take advantage of the crowd, hawking DVDs in this stunning slice of life.

On the one end of the spectrum, we have the modern sound-bitten world of TV journalism, with complex stories boiled down to slogans and humans to cartoons. On the other is a new wave of filmmakers, with Laura Poitras leading the charge, that dedicate themselves to nuanced, provocative explorations of contemporary issues. Poitras immerses herself in crucial events of our time, emerging with innovative, hand-crafted works that simultaneously serve as gorgeous art and essential journalism. While working as a chef, Poitras began studying film in the late 1980s at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her instructors included avant-garde legends Ernie Gehr and George Kuchar. She then studied political theory at New York’s New School for Social Research, working, after hours, as a film editor. Her debut Flag Wars (2003, co-directed with Linda Goode Bryant), though ostensibly about the gentrification of an African-American neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio by largely gay homebuyers, spins a heartbreaking tale of mutual mistrust, misuse of power and broken lines of communication. What could have been a purely topical tale grew into something grander and timeless, thanks to the creativity, attention, patience and care of the filmmakers. My Country, My Country (2006) explores still more epic themes: betrayal, civil war and global imbalances of power. Poitras spent eight months in Baghdad, following a Sunni doctor in the run-up to Iraq’s compromised 2005 national elections. As unembedded filmmaker, Poitras provides the viewer visceral evidence of a country under enormous stress and grief, of days filled with small but constant humiliations, mind-boggling tragedies and unescapable fear and death. “The image can hold this pain,” she told one interviewer. With The Oath (2010), Poitras weaves the stories of two men, brothers-in-law, who are united in friendship and a onetime belief in Al Qaeda, but are now separated by chasms both physical and idealogical. Poitras creates a narrative structure as intricate and filled with reversals as a Shakespearean tragedy; critic Dennis Lim described it as going “so far beyond the media’s customary thumbnail sketches of terrorists as to be almost disorienting.” With just three films completed, Poitras already has won a Peabody, an Emmy, and Oscar nomination and awards at SXSW, Full Frame and Sundance. But her audiences are the real winners: in an age of shrinking, increasingly myopic journalism, her deep and visionary films chart us towards a new way of engaging with nonfiction and serve as a bold challenge to other filmmakers to follow in her footsteps.