Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Fresh water is our most precious resource and it defines the distribution of life on land. Follow the descent of rivers from their mountain sources to the sea. Watch spectacular waterfalls, fly inside the Grand Canyon and explore the wildlife below the ice in the world's deepest lake. Witness unique and dramatic moments of animal behaviour: a showdown between smooth-coated otters and mugger crocodiles; deep-diving long tailed macaques; massive flocks of snow geese on the wing and a piranha frenzy in the perilous waters of the world's largest wetland.

Could nuclear fusion hold the answers to the energy crisis? It is the process that has forged all matter in the universe. It lights the stars and it is what transformed the lighter atoms that formed in the Big Bang into heavier atoms. In Can We Make a Star on Earth?, Brian Cox peers beyond the glare of our Sun to reveal the hidden forces that provide its power. He discovers how this fusion energy has kept our closest star burning for five billion years. Brian believes humanity must build a star on Earth to ensure survival. Will scientists be able to harness fusion power and achieve abundant, cheap, clean energy?

This second instalment looks at how Vladimir Putin arrived in the Kremlin as a vulnerable and unknown president, whom the Russian oligarchs expect to control. The programme reveals how he asserted his hold on power and ultimately surrounded himself with his KGB peers, as well as his philosophy as regards traitors and enemies. The film also examines the stories of businessman Boris Berezovsky and defector Alexander Litvinenko, who both stood up to Putin and wound up dead on British soil.

The definitive story of cinema’s most iconic figure, from an impoverished childhood in London through a spectacular rise to fame, until his scandalous fall from grace and a self-imposed exile. His stage persona and incendiary media portrayal defined how he was perceived, but his private life has always been shrouded in mystery - until now. Never-before-heard recordings, intimate home movies and newly restored classic films reveal a side to Chaplin that the world never got to see.
Filmmakers Spinney and Middleton shed light on Chaplin’s family life, his contentious relation to the political commotions of the 20th century, and artistic genius.

'What Makes Me?', explores the question of how the brain gives rise to our thoughts, emotions, our memories and personality. Philosophers and great thinkers have for millennia pondered the question of how physical stuff can give rise to mental processes. Last century, the new field of neuroscience joined the discussion, and Dr David Eagleman explains that to a neuroscientist, the answers to such questions lie in a deep understanding of the brain.

As of 5 July 2016, the United States Strategic Command tracked a total of 17,852 artificial objects in orbit about the Earth, including 1,419 operational satellites. Take a look at the mounting threat of debris in Earth's atmosphere, the potential dangers of such 'junk' and what can possibly be done to avoid a crisis. The film is a visually explosive journey of discovery that weighs the solutions aimed at restoring our planet's orbits.