Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

The film chronicles Allen's career - from teen writer to Sid Caesar's TV scribe, from stand-up comedian to award-winning writer-director averaging one film-per-year for more than 40 years. Exploring Allen's writing habits, casting, directing, and relationship with his actors first-hand, new interviews with A-listers, writing partners, family and friends provide insight and backstory to the usually inscrutable filmmaker.

Writing itself is 5,000 years old, and for most of that time words were written by hand using a variety of tools. The Romans were able to run an empire thanks to documents written on papyrus. Scroll books could be made quite cheaply and, as a result, ancient Rome had a thriving written culture. With the fall of the Roman Empire, papyrus became more difficult to obtain. Europeans were forced to turn to a much more expensive surface on which to write: Parchment. Medieval handwritten books could cost as much as a house, they also represent a limitation on literacy and scholarship.
No such limitations were felt in China, where paper had been invented in the second century. Paper was the foundation of Chinese culture and power, and for centuries how to make it was kept secret. When the secret was out, paper mills soon sprang up across central Asia. The result was an intellectual flourishing known as the Islamic Golden Age. Muslim scholars made discoveries in biology, geology, astronomy and mathematics. By contrast, Europe was an intellectual backwater.
That changed with Gutenberg’s development of movable type printing. The letters of the Latin alphabet have very simple block-like shapes, which made it relatively simple to turn them into type pieces. When printers tried to use movable type to print Arabic texts, they found themselves hampered by the cursive nature of Arabic writing. The success of movable type printing in Europe led to a thousand-fold increase in the availability of information, which produced an explosion of ideas that led directly to the European Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that followed.

Austrian director Michael Glawogger travels to five countries to focus on some of the worst jobs imaginable: Ukrainian miners crawl into tiny cracks in old coal pits to scratch out a few bags of winter fuel; Indonesian workers trudge long distances carrying baskets with hundreds of pounds of sulfur chunks extracted from a steaming mountain; Pakistanis risk explosions and burial under tons of scrap iron as they dismantle huge carrier ships. The visuals are everything here. Despite the hardships depicted, many sequences have a dreamlike beauty. In addition, the director has a bone-dry sense of irony; during the Ukraine scenes, he frequently cuts away to a statue of Stakhanov, the "hero" lauded by the Soviets for his superhuman work habits. He also shows us an old German smelting works that's been converted into a theme park.

The world’s first flying car might be on the market sooner than we think, and as a new, cutting-edge invention goes through a series of gruelling tests, behind-the-scenes access reveals the secrets of this sci-fi innovation. With the ability to carry up to 250 kg (551 lb) of payload at speeds up to 80 km/h (50 mph), the 12-rotor Seraph is developed by the Bristol-based company aptly named Vertical Aerospace, and is the Britain's leading electric VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) air taxi candidate.

Welcome to the thrilling second season of ‘Our Planet’. Get ready for an astounding journey through breathtaking landscapes and fascinating wildlife. This series, with its captivating cinematography and powerful storytelling, immerses us in Earth's natural beauty and reminds us of the importance of protecting it as we face crucial challenges. Through David Attenborough's masterful narration we will connect with the magnificence of our shared home with other species and be inspired to take action to preserve its splendor. Join us in celebrating the awe-inspiring planet we call home!
Be it buffalo, polar bears, humpback whales or albatross chicks, migration is a vital survival strategy for animals to feed, reproduce and find home.

The inside story of how a small band of fanatical jihadi fighters became the world's richest terror army ever. Featuring the first major TV interview with an imprisoned senior leader of the self-proclamed Islamic State, Peter Taylor looks behind its medieval savagery and investigates how it became so fabulously rich and resilient.