
KINGDOM OF PLANTS WITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH
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MONSIEUR AZNAVOUR
Director: Mehdi Idir
Charles Aznavour, the son of Armenian immigrants who became a defining voice of France, died in 2018 aged 94. Two years later, his sons, Mischa and Nicolas, announced they had been working with their father on a biopic to be released this year: Aznavour’s centenary. This stunning musical drama is an intimate portrait of the artist’s life that's packed with biographical information. Growing up in poverty gave him an unswerving determination to reach the top; by the 1940s, he was playing cabarets with Pierre Roche, but his ambition was a solo career and a mass audience. Tahir Rahim plays Aznavour in a drama punctuated with disarmingly honest anecdotes from family members, giving us both the man and, of course, his music.

TO KILL A MONGOLIAN HORSE
Director: Xiaoxuan Jiang
Saina’s father never taught him to ride: he simply put him on the back of a horse, a Mongolian herdsman’s natural habitat. Saina now earns his living performing spectacular tricks in equestrian shows for tourists, trying to make enough money to cover his father’s gambling debts as well as support his little son. His true vocation, however, is caring for his sheep and horses on the grasslands that stretch as far as the eye can see - a way of life under threat from climate change, encroaching poverty and profiteering mining companies. A moving, superbly shot portrait of a man clinging to the things that make that life worthwhile: the endless sky, the silence, his herdsman’s heritage and his beloved horses.

YALLA PARKOUR
Director: Areeb Zuaiter
One of Zuaiter’s strongest memories of her mother is her radiant smile as a young woman on the beach in Gaza on one of the family’s regular holidays to Palestine. Her cousins would mock Areeb’s “outsider” accent, but according to her mother, this was where she belonged. From her current home in the US, Zuaiter combs the web for images that evoke something of her mother and finds teenager Ahmed Matar and his friends, a parkour team who use the ruins of Gaza’s bombed buildings as obstacle courses, laughing for joy against a background of explosions. She tracks Ahmed down online and the two become friends; meanwhile, he is determined that parkour will be his route out of the prison their shared homeland has become.

TASTE THE REVOLUTION
Director: Daniel Klein
For nearly 25 years one of Oscar winner's Mahershala Ali's earliest, craziest and most brilliant performances has been hiding in a vault. Director Daniel Klein shot a film in the year 2000 about a group of revolutionaries putting on a world summit to counter political apathy and encourage America to stand up to capitalism but then world events got in the way and the film vanished. Now, after a call from Ali, who plays a revolutionary leader, the director has gone back over the footage and reimagined the film as a mockumentary about a documentary film crew trying to capture an event that they hope will be a modern-day Woodstock, but turns out to be more Fyre Festival.