With optional Hebrew subtitles. Simon Schama's history of the Jewish experience plunges into the lost world of the shtetl, the Jewish towns and villages sewn across the hinterlands of Eastern Europe which became the seedbed of a uniquely Jewish culture. Shtetl culture would make its mark on the modern world, from the revolutionary politics of the Soviet Union to the mass culture of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood. It was also the birthplaces of Hasidism, the most visible, iconic and, arguably, most misunderstood expression of Jewish faith and fervour. This chapter of the story travels from the forests of Lithuania, where Simon's own family logged wood and fought wolves, to the streets of the Lower East Side where the sons of shtetl immigrants wrote the American songbook. With grim inevitability, the story returns to Eastern Europe in 1940 - where the genocidal mechanisms of the 'final solution' were beginning to grind the shtetl world into dust and ash.

The wartime contributions of five prominent Hollywood film directors during World War II are profiled. The documentary focuses on five directors – John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens – whose war-related works are analysed by modern filmmakers, respectively Paul Greengrass, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, and Lawrence Kasdan. In the first episode, John Ford's The Battle of Midway was approved directly by President Franklin D. Roosevelt while Frank Capra fights to get Why We Fight made.

In 1971, after being rejected by Hollywood, Bruce Lee returned to his parents' homeland, Hong Kong. Over the next two years, he'd complete four iconic films that would define his legacy, a legacy cut short when he died, stunningly, in the summer of 1973. He was 32 years old. Directed by Bao Nguyen, 'Be Water' is a gripping, fascinating, intimate look at not just those final, defining years of Lee's life, but the complex, often difficult, and seismic journey that led to Lee's ultimate emergence as a singular icon in the histories of film, martial arts, and even the connection between the eastern and western worlds.
The film chronicles Lee's earliest days, as the son of a Chinese opera star born while his father was on tour in San Francisco, and then raised in Hong Kong over what became an at times troubled childhood. Sent to live in America at the age of 18, he began teaching Kung Fu in Seattle, and established a following that included his future wife, Linda. His ambition ever rising, Lee eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he strove to break into American film and television. There, despite some success as a fight choreographer and actor, it was clear Hollywood wasn't ready for an Asian leading man - and so he returned to Hong Kong to make the films that would in fact make him a legend, his international star skyrocketing just as his life was cut short.
'Be Water' is told by the family, friends, and collaborators who knew Bruce Lee best, with an extraordinary trove of archive film providing an evocative, immersive visual tapestry that captures Lee's charisma, his passion, his philosophy, and the eternal beauty and wonder of his art.

In 2014, the International Space Station had to move three times to avoid lethal chunks of space debris and there is an increasing problem of satellites mysteriously breaking down. With first-hand accounts from astronauts and experts, know the scale of the problem of space junk. Our planet is surrounded by hundreds of millions of pieces of junk moving at 17,000 miles per hour. Now the US government is investing a billion dollars to track them, and companies around the world are developing ways to clear up their mess - from robot arms to nets and harpoons. Learn the science behind the hit film Gravity and discovers the reality is far more worrying than the Hollywood fiction.

After becoming the most powerful mob boss in the country, Al Capone now finds himself locked up in America's newest and harshest maximum security prison: Alcatraz. Prohibition has recently been repealed and one of the Outfit's most important sources of income dries up. With Capone cut off from all communication, his most trusted men, Frank Nitti, Tony Accardo and Paul Ricca, must keep his organization from collapsing. With Americans flocking to theaters by the thousands, the movie business is raking in millions of dollars a month. To take advantage of Hollywood, Nitti recruits Willy Bioff. Acardo breaks into a new racket in Chicago: slot machines. With help from Ricca, Accardo builds a network of slots in Chicago bars, earning up to $20,000 a year. By the end of 1939, the Outfit is bringing in more money than ever before... But new problems start to appear.

An intellectual freedoms documentary based around the interpersonal triumphs, and defeats of the three main characters against the largest industry in the known universe. The media industry. Based on the lives of the three founders of The Pirate Bay: Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm