One of the many things that angered people about Sarah Palin was her support for aerial hunting of wolves. In honor of the release of Palin’s book (and Nation editors Betsy Reed and Richard Kim’s response book, Going Rouge), our Got Docs feature this week is Return to the Wild: A Modern Tale of Wolf and Man from MoFilms.

Wolves have been around for ages, and the myths and stereotypes about them have been around almost as long. Laws that protected the wolves have led to an increase in their population, but that has brought them into contact with more people who aren’t used to predators in their midst. This documentary takes a look at the ways people and wolves can and do coexist, as well as the conflicts that inevitably arise.

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Last December, videojournalist Jennifer Utz and Mohamed, an Iraqi refugee, joined us at GRITtv to talk about Mohamed’s journey from Iraq to the U.S.

This week, our Got Docs feature is Jennifer’s documentary in production, From Baghdad to Brooklyn, telling Mohamed’s story, from his exile from Iraq after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for the killing of homosexuals “in the worst, most severe way possible.”  Mohamed, who is gay, wound up in Syria, where Jennifer met him and took up his cause. Mohamed’s story may have ended happily, but over a million Iraqis are still displaced. More of their stories are available here.

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“Movies are about movement,” says documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, and in his newest film, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, he examines the movement of ballet. The film gets inside the workings of the ballet, from rehearsals to marketing sessions, and follows the company through the production of seven ballets: Genus by Wayne McGregor, Le Songe de Medée by Angelin Preljocaj, La Maison de Bernarda by Mats Ek, Paquita by Pierre Lacotte, Casse Noisette by Rudolph Noureev, Orphée and Eurydice by Pina Bausch, and Romeo and Juliette by Sasha Waltz.

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Swedish filmmaker Jacob Andrén bought a few acres of rainforest as a primary school child. Along with 400,000 other Swedish schoolchildren and many others across the world, he raised money to keep the rainforest protected from development. As an adult, he decided to find out if the forest he supported was still there.

The Forest is the story of Jacob’s journey halfway across the world, to Costa Rica, to track down his patch of rainforest and to figure out, along the way, whether one person’s small contribution can make a difference. Thanks to WG Film for the clip.

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“Simmering disaster” is what renowned activist Mahesh Bhatt calls genetically modified foods. Though genetically modified foods have caused countless problems in lab tests, multinational corporations are pushing them into the stores and onto the plates of people across the world, and India’s staple foods are being manipulated without the knowledge of the people.

Poison on the Platter is a documentary examining the impact of GM foods on India’s population.

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This week’s Got Docs? features Zombie Girl.  Filmmakers Justin Johnson, Aaron Marshall, and Erik Mauck came across an ad proclaiming “Need 12-15 year-olds for zombie movie directed by twelve-year-old girl.” That girl, one Emily Hagins, was in the midst of making a feature-length zombie movie and ‘Zombie Girl: The Movie’, takes us all along for the ride, with her parents, her friends, and her dream to direct a scary movie.

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In this week’s Got Docs? we take a look at Subprimed by Kahil Shkymba, Nayo Joy Simmons and GRITtv’s own Sarah Friedland. It tells the story of the national foreclosure crisis through the eyes of hard-hit East New York.

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This week’s Got Docs? is Americana, by director Topaz Adizes.  Looking at the story of two young men who are preparing to enlist, the film follows their story while also traveling the world and looking at people who’ve lived under American bombs and carried American guns.  Beautifully shot, at times it almost feels like a fiction film, alas it is all too real. 

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Raymond Myles was a man of profound contradiction: gospel singer, maverick, prominent representative of the New Orleans Black Church, scorned gay worshipper. Now, he is the subject of Leo Sacks’ A Taste of Heaven: The Heartbreak Life of Raymond Myles, Gospel Genius of New Orleans.   

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In 1966, at the height of the Cold War and Apartheid in South Africa, Senator Robert Kennedy visited Cape Town where his "Ripple of Hope" speech connected the US Civil Rights movement with resistance to racial segregation in South Africa.  On his visit, he spoke with banned African National Congress president Albert Lutuli and at the Afrikaaner University Stellenbosch. Filmmakers Tami Gold and Larry Shore have teamed up to make RFK In The Land of Apartheid: A Ripple of Hope. It’s this week’s Got Docs?

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