Here, two talks to watch as you buy tickets for the movie’s official opening tonight. First, a talk from JJ Abrams himself, “The mystery box,” given at TED2007:

And second, check out this talk from the incredible George Takei, aka the original Captain Sulu. At TEDxBroadway, the actor talks about why he’s created a musical about Japanese-American internment:

By Marianna Torgovnick

Some documentaries show us the strange, the exotic and the unfamiliar; others make us feel anew about something so everyday, we barely thought about it before. Some of my favorite TED Talks are built around great documentary films, like Deborah Scranton’s chilling “War Tapes” and Nathaniel Kahn’s moving search for “My Father, the Architect.”

Last week, I attended the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, a four-day bash featuring more than a hundred documentaries — new, classic, and invited — many of which will show theaters over the next year.

Below, find my nine favorite films from the festival, which no documentary fan should miss.

1. Stories We Tell (director Sarah Polley, 2012)
An invited film that has shown at festivals in Toronto and New York, Sarah Polley’s gorgeous documentary is structured liked a mystery in which trap doors keep opening. Once an actress, the still-young Polley has directed two feature films: Away from Her, and the enigmatic Take this Waltz. Stories We Tell literally turns the camera on Polley, her family and her friends in a quest to find the truth about her mother, who died of cancer when Polley was eleven. The youngest child in her family, Polley’s questions interrogate the meaning of love, marriage, parenting, fidelity, the meaning of fatherhood, and the possibility of creative chaos. If that sounds like a lot, it is. But this beautiful and cunningly structured film is not just wonderfully crafted — it is also haunting and evocative as Polley’s family history becomes a metaphor for, well, the stories we tell and what we mean when we tell them. Part documentary, part fictional recreation of the past, this film is 100% worth seeing.

2. Muscle Shoals (director Greg “Freddy Camalier, 2012)
A new documentary that has the impact of a musical freight train, Muscle Shoals chronicles the men and stars behind Fame Recording Studios in the small Alabama town called Muscle Shoals. Narrated by Bono (watch his talk, “The good news on poverty”), Keith Richards, Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys and others, the film features interviews with founder Rick Hall and his surprising back-up band, The Swampers, a group of local white teenagers. They looked, as the film says, like they worked at Walmart, but found within themselves the miraculous ability to endow singers like Franklin – not to mention bands from the Stones to Traffic — with a missing ingredient called soul. The Swampers eventually become Hall’s rivals, but the film wraps the whole story in glorious music and feel-good imagery. This Southern place exudes a special charm keyed to the rhythms of the Tennessee River and its green fields. Less known than it should be to music lovers, Muscle Shoals documents a center of the music scene that rivals Motown.

3. Our Nixon (director Penny Lane, 2013)
If you could have been a fly on the wall in the Nixon White House, what would you have seen? Our Nixon answers that question by culling recently available home videos made by Doug Chapin, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, all indicted during the Watergate scandal, all forced to resign from office and all (who knew?) avid cameramen. We don’t really see a more nuanced and likeable Nixon than popular lore records, but we do see and hear him more intimately than ever before. In one tiny image, he’s slumped into an armchair, his suit enveloping him as though it’s three sizes too big, in a way that epitomizes how this hard-working — and even talented — President was consummately a man lacking charm and grace. Near the end, Haldeman, who has resigned and is facing prison, calls a lonely Nixon, who is facing impeachment. “I love you boy. I love you like a brother,” Nixon says. You realize that this band of men, deservedly under the shadow of a history they failed to understand, had friendship and bonds of love rarely seen before in public.

4. The World According to Dick Cheney (Showtime, 2012)
Political junkies at the film festival moved on from Our Nixon to The World According to Dick Cheney, which revisits some of the most disastrous events of the George W. Bush presidency and documents the rift between Cheney — once an unchallenged force within the White House — and the President as his popularity plummeted. Part apologia, part expose, I list it as a must-see that will be available soon both on Showtime on Demand and on Netflix.

5. Manhunt (director Greg Barker, 2013)
An HBO Documentary Film that will be shown in May, Manhunt is not so much the anti Zero Dark Thirty as it is an alternative version. Taking a longer historical view, it focuses on the CIA’s twenty year search for Osama Bin Laden from the time when his disturbing messages first began arriving via video to his death in May 2011. It includes statements that most Americans never heard as a way of suggesting that Bin Laden’s death, rather than a cause for celebration — as it was for crowds in front of the White House that day — has left many questions unanswered. Two of the CIA agents shown — women in roles parallel to Jessica Chastain’s in Bigelow’s film — have since left the agency and participated in the documentary because, as one said at the Q&A after the screening, “History should not be dictated from the top.” A must-see for an informed public that remembers the World Trade Center attack of 2001, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and everything that has happened since.

6. American Promise (directors Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster, 2013)
The directors began filming their 5-year-old son, Idris, when he enrolled at the prestigious Dalton School along with his childhood friend, Seun. Both African American and from solid middle class Brooklyn families, the boys seem at first to experience bumpy rides at a mostly white school, adjusting unevenly to diversity. But the film rather quickly moves beyond race to raise questions about the parents’ frenetic belief that every quiz, every paper is a make-or-break moment in their son’s rise to a productive adult life. One boy stays at Dalton; the other goes to a self-defined all-black private school instead. As it follows both families and their sons through 13 years, the film manages not just to raise questions about the families and their choices — but also to make you really care.

7. Cutie and the Boxer (director Zachary Heinzerling, 2012)
Hard drinking and hard hitting Japanese artist Ushio Shinohara is turning 80 and is a reformed alcoholic as this film opens in New York, where he shares an apartment with his much-younger wife, Noriko, also an artist. Their relationship has had its ups and downs, illustrated both through home videos and shots of the couple and their adult son in their messy apartment and studio — where the rent is, it seems chronically, overdue, despite Ushio’s success. We see them negotiate with the Guggenheim and mount an exhibit of Ushio’s latest work — a stylistic breakthrough — and of Noriko’s cartoon series based on their marriage, where the character named Cutie is Noriko herself. A tribute to marriage, love and the power of personal growth within a long-term relationship, this is a handsome and well-made film that is a portrait of two artists as well as of marriage.

8. The Record Breaker (director Brian Mc Ginn, 2012)
At just 25 minutes, this hilarious and well-made film is less than a feature and more than a short. It wins hands-down as the funniest documentary of the year. With affection and good humor, the film chronicles the daffy and obsessive activities of Keith Furman, who renamed himself Ashrita when he began to break records in the Guiness Book to honor his guru, Sri Chinmoy. We see Ashrita catch malt balls in his mouth and then catch malt balls in his mouth while riding an elephant. We see him slice apples with a samurai sword and other hilarities, aided and abetted by a group of pals who cannot resist his child-like energy and zeal. Most of all we see him train to climb to Machu Picchu on stilts, a feat most people find challenging enough on foot. The authorities ultimately turn him back but Ashrita remains, as his father (who once disowned his son but now embraces him) says, “the happiest person I know.” Whether the malt balls or the samurai sword get you most, this film should make your day.

9. A Will for the Woods (directors Amy Browne, Jeremy Kaplan, Tony Hale, Brian Wilson, 2013)
Hard to see and hard to take, this documentary has the potential to affect not just individual viewers but the American way of death. Smart, articulate psychiatrist Clark Wang is dying of lymphoma and knows it when he attempts to arrange a “green burial”: no embalming, no vault-like coffin, no institutional feel or machines—just a grave in an open, protected landscape so that he can perceive his coming death and decay as part of a natural process and it can unroll that way in real time. The documentary visits “green cemeteries” in the U.S. which preserve landscapes and make the conservation of the land in perpetuity a gift of the burial. In some extremely painful sequences, we see Clark die and his wife wash his body. Then we witness burial in a simple wood coffin and a hand-filled grave topped by natural greenery in a patch of North Carolina woods that are a protected part of a more traditional cemetery run by a caring and committed woman. Small now, the movement seems destined to grow. Their elders owe the young filmmakers a debt for making this difficult but must-see documentary that will be available online at AWillfortheWoods.com if it does not find distribution. Rather than being a downer, the film won — perhaps surprisingly — the Audience Choice award.

Marianna Torgovnick is a Professor of English at Duke University and the director of the Duke in New York Program. Author of the books The War Complex and Gone Primitive, you can read much more of her work at MariannaTorgovnick.com.

There are seven different words in Dothraki for striking another person with a sword. Among them: “hlizifikh,” a wild but powerful strike; “hrakkarikh,”a quick and accurate strike; and “gezrikh,” a fake-out or decoy strike. But you won’t find these words in George R. R. Martin’s epic series A Song of Ice and Fire, which is where Dothraki originated as the language of the eponymous horse-riding warriors; rather these and more than 3,000 other words were developed by David Peterson, the world’s authority on Dothraki.

At TED2013, Peterson gave this fascinating TED University talk on the process of creating Dothraki for the TV series Game of Thrones. Based on Martin’s books, the HBO series premieres its third season on Sunday.

Peterson, who has a masters in linguistics from UC San Diego, was teaching English composition at Fullerton College when he heard that HBO was hiring someone to develop Dothraki for Game of Thrones. For the next four years Peterson developed the Dothraki grammar and wrote a dictionary of around 3,400 words.

Peterson is also the alien language and culture consultant at SyFy’s Defiance and the president of the Language Creation Society (LCS), which is made up of conlangers – creators of conlangs, or constructed languages.

Language enthusiasts have been creating languages from scratch since at least the twelfth century: for fun, for secret communication with loved ones, in pursuit of the perfect language. Conlangs have surged in popularity in recent years thanks to films and TV series like Avatar (whose characters speak Na’Vi), Lord of the Rings (Elvish) and Game of Thrones; the grandaddy of pop-culture conlangs is Star Trek‘s Klingon, a widely studied language almost as popular as Esperanto. (Both Klingon and Esperanto are available as subtitles on TED.com).

In the conlang community, Peterson is a hero. The same goes for John Quijada, the creator of Ithkuil, who was recently profiled by Joshua Foer in the New Yorker. Ithkuil seeks to encode as much information as possible in as small a space as possible, with as little ambiguity as possible. Is Ithkuil the perfect conlang? Perhaps. But Peterson says that he has never put much stock in the idea of perfection.

“Language,” he says, “is a system. We humans aren’t. We’re quite imperfect. When it comes to using even a perfect system, we will break it in some way.”

As Peterson says in his talk, a big part of the process of naturalizing conlangs is attempting to imitate the quirks and idiosyncrasies of a natural language as it evolves over time. In developing Dothraki, Peterson started by imagining how the Dothraki people would have spoken 1,000 years in the past. Creating a protolanguage allowed Peterson to evolve Dothraki “organically,” changing its sounds, grammar and semantics. But how do you create linguistic regression?

The first challenge in imagining a lost culture is to unlearn what you know about modern technology in order to grasp a linguistic view of the world before, say, books and medicine. Says Peterson, “You become part historian, part archaeologist, part detective. You say, ‘Here were my resources, how did I know all this stuff?’”

In the case of the Dothraki, there’s the added fact that the speakers exist in a fictional world, so their history is technically unknown, yet still must be realistic to the legions of fans scrutinizing the books and show.

(Why not just call up George R.R. Martin and ask? Not an option. According to Peterson, Martin is pleased with the existence of Dothraki but not especially invested in it, given how busy he is. In fact, he’s the one who occasionally calls up Peterson for a translation. Peterson happily gives it to him.)

But some aspects of Dothraki history are available to Peterson. Martin very clearly based the Dothraki on the Mongolians of the Silk Road era, with aspects of some Native American cultures mixed in. So Peterson draws on these sources for naming flora and fauna. Recently Peterson found out that in Mongolian there are two different words for animal poop, depending on whether it’s fresh or dry. (Dry animal poop is used for fires in winter, since it burns longer.) Now, he says, the Dothraki language makes this distinction, too.

Where existing context is not available, a conlanger can bring his or her own experiences to the language, as in the case of the Dothraki word for “to dream.” Peterson wanted to capture the essence of dreaming, which for him means feeling, while sleeping, that there’s no other life or world. Peterson started with the word for wood and changed it to its adjective form, wooden, or “ido.” Since in Dothraki wood is used to describe fake swords, “wooden” comes to be synonymous with “fake.” A dream then becomes a wooden life, a fake life. In Dothraki, to dream, or “thirat atthiraride,” literally means “to live a wooden life.”

While many conlangs are created for fictional characters, the majority are not. But a language is nothing without its speaker — so how do conlangers deal with the fact that their speakers have no history or culture? Is it possible to create a naturalized conlang without also creating an entire world around it? Indeed, it’s a challenge that Peterson discovered late. Initially he wasn’t interested in creating cultures, but realized that if you don’t have a very specific idea of who is speaking the language, your language automatically carries a whole host of cultural assumptions — probably yours.

An example Peterson often gives is creating a native word for “book.” It seems like a simple task, but this actually assumes quite a lot about the speakers: that they have a written form of their language; that they have something to write down; that they have some value for literature or scholarship; that literature or scholarship exists; that they’ve invented paper; that they’ve invented styluses, ink and book binding. One word, a world of assumptions.

As president of the LCS, Peterson communicates with and celebrates conlangers all over the world, handing out the annual Smiley Award to the year’s best created language. So what makes a good conlanger? “It’s a combination of somebody who is very technically minded, who is very good with puzzles or coding,” says Peterson. “And somebody who has a literary bone inside them, who is a big reader and loves stories.”

This marriage of the technical and aesthetic explains why Peterson’s favorite conlang is Sylvia Sotomayor’s Kēlen, which defies a universal element of language: It has no verbs. It’s common for created languages to have alien or unnatural constraints, says Peterson, but Sotomayor beautifully naturalized hers, bringing artistry to an engineered system.

Photo: HBO

George Takei, best known as Captain Sulu of Star Trek, says it’s been his “lifelong dream” to make it to Broadway. He came close in 1960 when he was invited to audition for a show. But he did not get the part.

“It was a body blow,” says Takei. “Suddenly, New York turned into a cold, heartless city.”

But now, at age 75, Takei is ready to try again. At TEDxBroadway, Takei tells us why he wrote a musical called Allegiance with composer Jay Kuo and writer Lorenzo Thione. The play speaks to an often-forgotten part of American history: Japanese American internment during World War II. It’s a story Takei knows very well.

“I was 5 years old when my parents got us up early one morning and hurriedly dressed us,” says Takei in this heartfelt talk. “My brother and I were in the living room, looking out the front window. I saw two soldiers with bayonets on their rifles come marching up the driveway. They stomped up the front porch and they banged on the door … We were ordered out of our home.”

Takei’s family spent four years in a prison camp in Arkansas. “Our only crime was looking like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor,” he says. “I remember the sentry tower with machine guns pointed down at us. I remember the searchlight that followed me when I made night runs to the latrine. As a 5-year-old kid, I thought it was kind of nice that they lit the way for me to pee.”

In this talk, Takei shares the profound impact the experience had on his family with humor and tenderness. And he talks about how he built interest in an unlikely musical about a subject he calls a “dark and shameful chapter of American history.” When Allegiance opened at the Globe Theater in San Diego in late 2012, it broke all box office records for the theater.

Maybe he’ll get that chance on Broadway soon.

Eric Whitacre has spent most of his career conducting traditional choirs. Then, in 2009, a fan video posted to YouTube sparked a crazy idea: could he take singers from across the globe, have them sing the same piece on video, and edit it together into a virtual choir? The results of this experiment quickly went viral. And at TED2011, Whitacre spoke about the aha moment behind the choir, and debuted a new piece from the unusual ensemble.

Eric Whitacre: Virtual Choir LiveIn today’s talk, given at TED2013, Whitacre takes this idea to the next level — combining multiple choirs on stage with singers from 32 different countries via Skype, all of them making beautiful choral music together in real time. Watch as Whitacre conducts this group in a performance of “Cloudburst.” »

Making this unusual performance happen was no small feat. In the video above, see how it was done, and hear from singers who took part despite their far-flung locations.

“This will go in the history books,” says Lucas Speck of Brazil.

Adds Whitacre, “To have a live choir there on the stage and then these singers from different countries signing with us in real time through Skype, it’s as if there aren’t borders anymore.”

The choirs who appeared on the TED stage are from:

• California State University, Long Beach Campus
• California State University, Fullerton Campus
• Riverside City College

A list of the remote singers and the countries they represent:

• Gina Alvarado, Argentina
• Wei Jiang, Australia
• Lucas Mateus, Brazil
• Ariana Del Bianco, Canada
• Anita Yañez, Chile
• Meg Ideker, China
• Gan Hui Wan, Malaysia
• Anabela Baric, Croatia
• Annika Kukk, Estonia
• Yohann Hamon, France
• Alexander Utech, Germany
• Kristín Þóra Jökulsdóttir, Iceland
• Saikumar Prabhakaran, India
• Christin N. Waldemar, Indonesia
• Moshe Jonathan Gordon, Israel
• Carol Anne Edington, Japan
• Julia Slepenkova, Kazakhstan
• Andreas Khalid L. Belboe, Norway
• Von DeGuzman, Philippines
• Joanna Trociuk, Poland
• Herson A. Perez Valentin, Puerto Rico
• Sandor Orbok, Romania
• Miloš Trujić, Serbia
• Anastassia Rakitianskaia, South Africa
• Amy Daniels, South Korea
• Miha Jejčič, Slovenia
• Jonathan Souza, South Korea
• Kuan-ming Lin, Taiwan
• Heidi Greimann, Turkey
• Daniel Borszik, UAE
• Patrick Williams, UK
• Jack Rowland, USA
• Maria Petrova, USA
• Jason Ekhabi Sibi-Okumu, USA

William Kamkwamba built a windmill out of spare parts to provide electricity for his family in rural Malawi, after seeing a similar design in a library book. It’s an incredible story — one that set TEDGlobal 2007 ablaze. William Kamkwamba: How I built a windmill Now, Kamkwamba is the subject of a new documentary, William and the Windmill, which makes its world premiere at the SXSW film festival on Sunday, March 10. It is up for the festival’s Documentary Competition.

Directed by Ben Nabors, William and the Windmill begins with Kamkwamba’s incredible feat of engineering but focuses on what happened after — as Kamkwamba becomes one young man straddling two cultures. It follows him as he travels to TEDGlobal, meets with renewable energy experts in the United States, enrolls in a pan-African high school, publishes a book and founds the nonprofit, Moving Windmills, which aims to bring schools, clean water, solar power and scholarship programs to his area. The film even follows Kamkwamba on a media tour, as he films segments on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Good Morning America.

William and the Windmill is an exploration of how ingenuity ripples out through the world, and the intense pressure that builds as this happens. As Kamkwamba says in the trailer, “My pressure comes when I’m thinking about, ‘Yeah, I did this and I did this. So, now what next?’ Maybe people out there, they’re waiting. Expecting a lot of things from me.”

When Nabor and TED’s own Tom Rielly took to Kickstarter in 2011 to raise the funds to edit this film, pledgers donated more than $111K. So if you’re at SXSW, make sure to see it. And stay tuned to the TED Blog for a Q&A with Kamkwamba and information on when you can see this doc.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In an extraordinary finale for TED2013, Eric Whitacre stages a type of performance that has never been seen before, with a choir assembled to sing his composition, “Cloudburst.” It’s not just any choir. He’s joined on stage by 100 live singers formed from choirs from California State University, Long Beach Campus, California State University, Fullerton Campus, and Riverside City College. That’s been done before. He is also joined, via Skype, by 32 singers from 32 different countries connecting from their homes.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Whitacre is famous for his Virtual Choir, and the follow-up, shown first on stage at TED. But no one has ever attempted to put a live choir together with a virtual one. In part this is because of the latency issues of the connection. It’s less than a second, but in singing that is still a potentially huge problem. So, he adapted “Cloudburst,” one of his earliest pieces, to embrace that latency.

The effect is stunning. We listen to this amazing piece, aware of the vast connection enabled by the Internet.

Photo: Ryan Lash

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

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Last night at TED2013, the Motion Picture Association of America hosted a nighttime discussion on the topic of how film has shaped some of modern day’s most cutting-edge technology. John Underkoffler: Pointing to the future of UIThe prime example: John Underkoffler’s user interface inspired by his work on Minority Report.

We were joined by Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects division of Lucasfilm, responsible for films like the Star Wars, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible franchises. The aim of their work is primarily to inspire people with new fictional technologies, but even to encourage longing for those technologies to exist. Lucasfilm Chief Strategy Officer Kim Libreri and Industrial Light & Magic Art Department Creative Director David Nakabayashi discussed how technology gets involved before a script is even written. In the case of Minority Report, Spielberg consulted 50 scientists to ask them what the future would look like. And it seems films can even inspire real-world technology — they gave the example of digital surgery, which was inspired by The Matrix.

Safwat Saleem puts out a global call to the bemused, disappointed and outraged. Photo: Ryan Lash

On Monday on the TED Fellows stage, Safwat Saleem made the crowd roar and squirm with his art – satirical and profane posters and animated shorts skewering racism, the absurdity of politics, petty dishonesty and general stupidity. In a word, bullshit. Here at TED2013, he’s launching a new project, called “Pardon Me, but WTF?” – a call to the general public for their own stories of bullshit, an act of public catharsis which Saleem will curate and make into art.

What exactly are you looking for? Do you have examples of the kind of bullshit you’re looking for. What constitutes bullshit in the first place?

I don’t want to say. I’m being ambiguous on purpose because I have a strong feeling that, six months into it, strong themes will begin to emerge and I’ll base the rest of the project on those themes.

My art was mostly about race and social injustice and immigration issues and Islamophobia – all the things that I thought were bullshit. It’s very political. But the stuff that I’ve been getting from others is much more personal. Someone’s father left them 10 years ago and they never heard from them again, for example. But also it’s very mundane stuff. One lady sent in a story that her 3-year-old pooped his pants, and she asked him, “What’s going on? Why did you poop your pants?” And he said, “It’s not my poop. I didn’t poop in my pants.” And she goes, “Well, then whose poop is that?” And he goes, “It’s Daddy’s. Daddy pooped in my pants.”

So it’s funny stories and it’s serious stories. I feel that, when it’s done, it will be kind of like This American Life meets Post Secret, where we’ll learn about each other through art. That’s the goal.

So you’re going global. Global bullshit?

Global bullshit. Exactly. All kinds of bullshit collected together. That’s the plan. I’d love to hear your stories of bullshit, absolutely. So please visit my website, and submit your story.

http://vimeo.com/60231606

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Brothers Rich + Tone Talauega are choreographers whose energy is so powerful one performance makes the whole room seem to vibrate. This morning at TED, with the help of music producer Keith Harris, they unleash an eclectic menagerie of dance forms that meld martial arts, hip-hop and classical dance. The intensity is palpable across the theater as we watch dancers from across the world float, fight, shake, bend, fold, pirouette.

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