One of the most wondrous markers of the end of the day is a murmuration of starlings

The flight of a starling flock at dusk, know as a murmuration, is one of nature’s most beguiling sights. Blurring the line between the individual and the group, murmurations involve synchronised swooping patterns to ward off predators and exchange information in a manner that’s still something of a mystery to scientists. This two-minute excerpt from the Dutch filmmaker Jan van Ijken’s short documentary The Art of Flying follows a spectacular aerial performance from a massive, shape-shifting starling flock over an open field in the Netherlands.

What does freedom look and feel like after four decades wrongfully imprisoned?

‘It feel like, I went to sleep at 18 and I woke up at 60.’

In May 1975, 18-year-old Rickey Jackson was arrested in Cleveland, Ohio for a murder he didn’t commit. After being convicted, he spent two and a half years on Death Row and an additional 26 years in Ohio prisons, maintaining his innocence throughout. Jackson was finally exonerated in 2014 when a key witness recanted, claiming his eye-witness testimony had been coerced by police. In Send Me Home, Jackson reflects on his decades of incarceration from the vantage of his current life – one so overflowing with the things he dreamed of in prison, he sometimes doubts its reality. Using immersive 360° video technology, the film contrasts suffocating prison scenes with Jackson’s new life with his wife and stepchildren. While grateful for his freedom, Jackson can’t help but think of time lost, as well as the tragic flaws in the US criminal justice system, which has exonerated more than 150 Death Row inmates since 1973 and almost certainly executed innocent people. You can read more about Jackson’s case at Lonely Leap.

Algorithms are opinions, not truth machines, and demand the application of ethics

It can be easy to simply accept algorithms as indisputable mathematic truths. After all, who wants to spend their spare time deconstructing complex equations? But make no mistake: algorithms are limited tools for understanding the world, frequently as flawed and biased as the humans who create and interpret them. In this brief animation, which was adapted from a 2017 presentation at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in London, the US data scientist Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction (2016), argues that algorithms can be useful tools when thoughtfully deployed. However, their newfound ubiquity and massive power calls for ethical conduct from modellers, regulation and oversight by policymakers, and a more skeptical, mathematics-literate public.

Dispatches from a cowboy past: a one-room classic country radio station (barely) holds on

Before KHIL was pulled off the air by its new owners in October 2018, the radio station for Willcox in Arizona had been broadcasting classic country music to the small town’s residents and passersby for more than half a century. While much of the United States has moved on from sparsely strummed songs of whiskey and heartbreak, such music still very much defines this remote place: the singer and Western star Rex Allen (1920-99) is Willcox’s most beloved native son, and the Rex Allen Arizona Cowboy Museum and Willcox Cowboy Hall of Fame its most notable attraction. In Lonesome Willcox, the US filmmakers Ryan Maxey and Zack Wright profile Mark Lucke, KHIL’s unlikely lone employee in the station’s waning days. Living and working from the studio, Lucke keeps the classic country crooners alive for the town’s mainly elderly population, who sense their heritage and way of life being buried beneath the Arizona dust. But while Lucke finds satisfaction in playing songs that lift the locals’ spirits, he has a complicated relationship with the boozy, ne’er-do-well characters that populate them, following his own abusive childhood.

Exit, pursued by Death: a young artist and rabble-rouser mines comedy from mortality

In her short documentary Jonah Stands Up, the US director Hannah Engelson profiles her friend Jonah Bascle: a creative, defiant spirit and New Orleans native who is dealing with a terminal heart condition related to his muscular dystrophy. The setup might sound familiar, but the short film and its subject are refreshingly subversive, refusing to fall into tired clichés about confronting disability and illness with bravery. A scrappy and heartfelt DIY production, the film uses animations inspired by Bascle’s artwork, footage of his standup comedy sets, and emotionally raw doctor’s visits to tell his story. Through Engelson’s tribute, Bascle is never presented as an inspirational force, but rather as the many things – a 20something artist, a disability-rights advocate, a rabble-rousing political candidate, a friend – he was in life.