John Dobson, the inventor of the Dobsonian telescope, would today be celebrating his 99th birthday, were he alive. A self-described "belligerent atheist" in his teens, Dobson - who later became a monk - died in January, in Burbank, California, some 10,000km from his birthplace, Beijing. Cheap to make, Dobson's invention put large telescopes within the sights of amateur astronomers. Dobson came from an academic family; his maternal grandfather founded Peking University, an institu-tion that hosted many of China's movers and shakers, including Mao Zedong …

The outspoken filmmaker told the festival, "We're talking about the essential essence of this nation, of how it was built, this whole century: you've not dealt with it." Stone, who is famous for confronting difficult cultural and political issues in his work, first caught the world's attention with a series of films on the Vietnam war, in which he fought. In 2003, he directed , a documentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For it, he interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu …