MIPCOM: Al Jazeera has picked up two documentaries from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), ahead of the start of Mipcom.

The broadcaster has acquired Patricio Henríquez’s political doc Uyghurs: Prisoners of the Absurd, and Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan’s animated doc The Wanted 18.

Al Jazeera English has taken English-language rights worldwide, excluding the US, for the feature length versions of the films (90’ and 75’ respectively), while Al Jazeera Arabic has taken Arabic-language rights worldwide for the TV-length versions of the films (both 52’).

Billed as a political thriller, Uyghurs looks at a group of men from China’s persecuted Uyghur minority who were detailed as terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. The doc screened at IDFA in Amsterdam last November.

The Wanted 18, meanwhile, blends interviews, archival footage and claymation to tell the absurdist story of a tiny suburb of Bethlehem which created a co-operative dairy farm, only to see its 18 cows declared “a threat to the State of Israel.”

The film played last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, and has won awards at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, the Carthage Film Festival and the Traverse City Film Festival.

Elsewhere, French broadcaster Histoire, part of the TF1 Group, has picked up two of the NFB’s historical docs.

The first, Alain Vézina’s Sombré dans l’oubil: l’histoire de l’Empress of Ireland (Journey to Oblivion: The Empress of Ireland Story), looks at the Empress of Ireland maritime disaster on its 100th anniversary.

The second, Sur les traces de Maria Chapdelaine (Remembering Maria Chapdelaine), comes from Quebec filmmaker Jean-Claude Labrecque and retraces the cinematic journey of French director Julien Duvivier, who arrived in Quebec in 1934 to shoot a film adaptation of a Louis Hémon novel.

Talking to C21 in Cannes, NFB head of sales and digital distribution Lorne Price picked out new feature docs The Amina Profile, Trapped in a Human Zoo and The Ninth Floor as his key titles for this year’s Mipcom. The latter film looks at an infamous incident of students protesting against racism, and clashing with police, at a Montreal university in the late 1960s.

“Even though this happened in Canada in 1969, with what’s going on currently in the US with the Black Lives Matter movement, hopefully that will allow the film to travel,” Price explained, adding that he was optimistic about the state of the MIP market for sellers.

“Last market I felt that things were starting to pick up, and this market we’re booked, booked, booked,” he said.