NBC News Decision 2012

After the 2011 Japanese tsunami, citizens from the Pacific Northwest find belongings washed ashore and embark on a journey to reunite them with their owners in Japan, bridging nations through shared grief and hope.

He was one of the greatest Polar explorers. He was also a world-class photographer. For the first time, the photos and films of South Australian, Sir George Hubert Wilkins are being brought together in this new documentary by Peter Maddern. From under the North Pole ice and deep among the front lines of the Western Front in the Great War, from sailing high above the earth in the Graf Zeppelin to riding the roiling seas on Shackleton's Quest, Wilkins kept his cameras going. His photographic record of the 30 years from 1910 to the Second World War is like no other. If you haven't heard of this great man, this is a time to sit back and be amazed at what he achieved, at what he witnessed and at how he isn't better known in his home town. Part of the 'Bringing Wilkins Home' initiative.

In the artificial landscape that is Los Angeles, where even palm trees are imported, nothing epitomizes man's short-sighted efforts to reshape the face of the earth more than the LA River: modified beyond recognition, its flow tapped before it even reached the surface, the river was used, abused and essentially forgotten. But when an unassuming boater insists on seeing it as a river again, a local controversy takes on national dimensions, and the once-derided eyesore turns into a source of hope for the City of Dreams. 'Rock the Boat' is a fun, high-energy and, ultimately, moving film that tells this every-man's adventure and looks at the price nature has to pay for our urban lifestyle.

A documentary film about designers who turn their dream into a business in Hong Kong. Designers Inbetween is a documentary revealing Hong Kong's creative industry through the lens of a range of start ups to industry's leading professionals. It is and introduction to what lies in the near future for creatives; rather than working in-house, creating micro brands and working as an independent consultant.

A compilation film, produced by the American Museum of Natural History, with footage from six major expeditions of the 20th-Century; the Stoll-McCracken Siberian Artic expedition, for the American Museum of Natural History, on the schooner "Morrissery."; the exploration of Borneo and Bali by Gene Lamb; an African expedition by James L. Clark, vice-director of the American Museum of Natural History; the Imperial-Trans-Atlantic Expedition under the guidance of Lieutenant Commander J. R. Stenhouse that made it to the Ross Sea; footage from the Byrd Antartic Expedition, shot by Dr. Laurence E. Gould, geologist and second-in- command; and footage from the Tarlano Ethnological Expedition of the Amazon River by Harold Noice.

Award-winning director Yoav Shamir (Defamation, Checkpoint) sets out on an entertaining and insightful international quest, exploring the notion of heroism through a multi-faceted lens. From ordinary heroes to freedom fighters, primates to humans, behavioral scientists to geneticists, even Ayn Rand to Raelians, Shamir leaves no stone unturned, and along the way unveils the fundamental truths of human nature.