A Flickering Truth (New Zealand/Afghanistan)  

Seven decades of priceless film history had to be hidden when the culture-hating Taliban took over Afghanistan. (Remember what they did to those magnificent Buddhas?) This clever and anxiously assembled doc, shot under wartime conditions, follows an Afghan expat who returns from Germany to rescue his country’s deteriorating cinematic history, which includes visits with JFK, shots of female paratroopers, and silent-era melodramas.

It’s a profound journey, alternately harrowing and uplifting, and only slightly dampened by an insistently funereal score.