Cause of Life: Calvin

Fifty years later, the real Melvin Dismukes chronicles his first-hand experience of the infamous Algiers Motel Incident, for which he was wrongly charged with first-degree murder in 1967.

A feature documentary set in Kigali, Rwanda, the epicenter of the genocide that left a million dead two decades earlier. The film follows eccentric retired Dartmouth Professor Emeritus, Andrew Garrod, as he mounts Romeo and Juliet with college students from both Hutu and Tutsi backgrounds. Hopes, expectations, pasts, personalities and cultures collide as opening night approaches.

A virtuoso jazz pianist and film composer tracks his family's lineage through his 91-year-old grandfather from Jim Crow Florida to the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Growing up in a Quaker household, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was raised to believe that she had as much right to an education as anyone else. But as a girl in the 1940s in Northern Ireland, her enthusiasm for the sciences was met with hostility from teachers and male students. Undeterred, she went on to study radio astronomy at Glasgow University, where she was the only woman in many of her classes. In 1967, Burnell made a discovery that altered our perception of the universe. As a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University assisting the astronomer Anthony Hewish, she discovered pulsars — compact, spinning celestial objects that give off beams of radiation, like cosmic lighthouses. (A visualization of some early pulsar data is immortalized as the album art for Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures.”)

Kim Hill was a rising singer when she met a young rapper named will.i.am, but she quit the Black Eyed Peas just before they became famous.

Rosary Castro-Olega was a retired nurse who returned to the frontlines to fight the virus, ultimately becoming one of the Filipino-American nurses who were disproportionately killed by the virus.

She is arguably the greatest living women’s basketball player. She’s won three national trophies; she played in the ‘76 Olympics; she was drafted to the NBA. But have you ever heard of Lucy Harris?

In the late 1960s, Haddon Salt built a fast-food empire. Then Kentucky Fried Chicken came knocking.

A hard-working bricklayer from the projects, Humberto Trujillo helped build the main Phoenix post office — and rose to become his city’s first Hispanic postmaster.

It was the late 1990s, and 3,000 young actors around the world were scouted for the role of a lifetime. On the ride home from school, Devon Michael’s mom told him he’d be auditioning for "The Phantom Menace," one of the most anticipated movies ever. From 3,000, the producers narrowed it down to three, and soon Michael was at Skywalker Ranch doing a test screen with George Lucas and Natalie Portman.