Dancers in Beijing celebrate the city?s successful bid for hosting the 2008 Olympic Games (AFP)

It?s an initiative to ?scout for and showcase the best innovative, daring and experimental television programmes? from all over the world.

And between Thursday and Saturday, Calcuttans will be able to sample 10 documentaries from various parts of the globe on issues as diverse as corruption in the Olympics to the needs of the disabled, and the al Qaida?s methods to spread its propaganda.

The selection of ?thought-provoking? television programmes, to be screened at the Max Mueller Bhavan, is called Hard Realities or Just Fiction and is being organised by International Public Television (Input).

Input is an international voluntary organisation founded in 1978, which conducts an annual screening conference in a different country each year. This time, the event was held in San Francisco in the first week of May.

?Hard Realities? will showcase the best of films shown at San Francisco,? said S. V. Raman, programme officer of the Max Mueller Bhavan. ?The selection process is held in Potsdam, in Germany, and there are many Germans actively involved with Input.?

On offer are documentaries like Buying the Games (UK), which unearths the ill practices and corruption in the negotiations that take place to buy the Olympic Games. There?s also Media Jihad (Japan), revealing a secretive al Qaida media group known as As-Sahaab, that produces propaganda videos.

Kindergarten (China) examines the life of a first-grader, while Ghosts of Rwanda presents eyewitness accounts of the Rwandan genocide.

This is the third year that Input films are being screened at Max Mueller Bhavan, Calcutta. ?The response to the past editions has been tremendous, particularly from the younger generation,? Raman added.

Bengali news channel Tara Newz has also tied up with the festival. ?The documentaries gel with the kind of programmes we air and the outlook of our channel,? offered Amit Chakraborty of Tara Newz.