Canberra filmmaker Andrew Pike spent eight years in the production of his documentary Message From Mungo, and the result enjoys its debut screening on Sunday, August 3, at Palace Electric Cinema as part of the line-up of films in the 2014 Stronger Than Fiction documentary film festival.

Pike and his fellow filmmaker Ann McGrath will introduce their film (4.15pm) and answer questions about the complex process of piecing together a story with a strong Canberra connection, about the Australian National University archaeologists who uncovered and removed the bones of Mungo Lady from Lake Mungo in the 1970s, with the best of intentions, and the emotional fight to have her returned.

The opening night film of the 2014 Stronger Than Fiction Documentary Film Festival is French director Julie Bertuccelli's School of Babel (Thursday, July 31, 6.30pm). Bertuccelli spent the better part of a year here in 2010 producing and directing the Australian-French co-production The Tree.

With School of Babel, she returns to her roots in observational documentary, placing her camera in the classrooms of a multinational school in Paris to allow us an insight into students integrating into a new culture.

The press notes for the film put the word ‘integration’ in quotation marks because of course life isn’t that simple, both from the tolerance of the society taking them in but also some of the difficult concepts these children bring with them, far to adult and far too ingrained into their old cultures to be their own genuine ideas, and the kinds of concepts that seed trouble for years to come.

School of Babel is surprisingly emotive viewing as we watch teacher Brigitte Cervoni help her students work through their French lessons, but also the weight of the troubles they have fled from, including war and abuse.

When Israeli filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger digs into his family history after the death of his 98-year-old grandmother, the resulting family bombshell is the basis for his gripping doco The Flat (Friday, August 1, 6pm).

Among her possessions, Goldfinger discovers a coin with a swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other which will lead him past his deliberately unquestioning mother all the way back to the German homeland his grandmother fled in the 1930s.

In addition to curating a brilliant program of documentary film, festival directors Deborah Kingsland and Simon Weaving have drawn on the pool of locally-based academics and film historians to provide audiences with further insight and discussion into the ideas we see on-screen, and following The Flat this discussion is led by Dr Ben Mercer, a specialist in post-war German history.

The Kill Team (Friday, August 1, 8.30pm) won Best Documentary at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival for its insightful look behind the official United States Government-sanctioned story of United States troop activity in Afghanistan.

21-year-old infantryman Adam Winfield attempts to turn whistleblower on the war crimes being committed by his fellow troops, he places his own life in danger and finds himself being shut down by his superiors.

Dan Krauss’s documentary has access to many of the figures involved in the case, though notably not all of those accused by Winfield, and with Winfield himself asking the camera why would young men trained to kill not act on these taught concepts.

We so rarely see films from Bangladesh here, so Are You Listening! (Saturday, August 2, 1.30pm) is on my must-see list. A documentary about a Bangladeshi family fighting for survival following a home-destroying tidal wave, this is the latest in a line of films showing that while politicians and lobbyists and AM radio talk jocks can do their best to convince themselves that climate change isn’t happening, real people living at or below sea level have another narrative to tell. This screening is followed by a Q&A with Dr Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt - a specialist in resource management and environmental sustainability in the Asia-Pacific region from the ANU.

Film enthusiasts and historians have long lauded American documentarian Errol Morris notably since his film The Thin Blue Line raised questions about the American legal system. With The Unknown Known (Saturday, August 2, 4pm), Morris turns his camera to the man history may come to recognise as the architect of the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld.

This film hasn’t been well-reviewed overseas for Morris’s lack of edge in his journalism, so I’m keen to see for myself whether Morris has lost his edge or is allowing his viewers their own opinions.

Following the screening of a double bill of indigenous cinema (Saturday, August 2, 8.30pm) ABC radio host Alex Sloan will be in conversation with filmmaker Steven McGregor.

Audiences may be more keen to hear about McGregor’s recent work writing for that great TV series Redfern Now, but they will also get the opportunity to see his latest documentary film Big Name No Blanket which follows the life and legacy of Warumpi Band frontman George Rrurrambu. This film screens with the doco Buckskin about South Australian aboriginal man Jack Buckskin and his quest to improve knowledge about Indigenous language and culture.

Parents whose children participate in any sport that has the word ‘extreme’ in the title should take their kids to see The Crash Reel (Saturday, August 2, 8.30pm). It chronicles world champion snowboarder Kevin Pearce’s comeback, albeit not in the way he might have intended, from the devastating brain injury he received from a bad landing on the ski fields while in training for the Winter Olympics.

The twice Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Lucy Walker pulls together a very accessible documentary that begins as a triumph-over-injury doco but becomes a warm portrait of a family working together. I was moved throughout this film by all of its characters warmth and grit.

As much pure beautiful art as it is cinema, Watermark (Sunday, August 3, 2pm) is a glorious poem about the way man uses water. Photographer Edward Burtynsky embraces 5K video photography in a collaboration with documentarian Jennifer Baichwal who he teamed with in 2006 to make Manufactured Landscapes. The screening is followed by a Q&A with the ANU’s Dr Jamie Pittock, an expert of sustainable water management and climate change adaptation.

The Manor (Sunday, August 3, 6pm) is the kind of case study about a struggling small business every MBA student should watch – if only because it would be far more enjoyable than their usual reading bricks. The Manor is a strip club run by the Cohen family in rural America, a business that tears the family apart as much as it keeps them bonded together.

And if all of that inspires you to pick up a camera and start a new career in documentary, you can cast your idea to the wind and see if the breeze picks it up (along with some cash to motivate you) at the Documentary Pitch Slam (Saturday, August 2, noon) at Hotel Hotel in NewActon.

Session times and film details at www.strongerthanfictiondocs.com.