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The Square (Al Midan)

   2013    History
A group of Egyptian revolutionaries battle leaders and regimes, risking their lives to build a new society. The Egyptian Revolution has been an ongoing rollercoaster over the past two and a half years. Through the news, we only get a glimpse of the bloodiest battle, an election, or a million man march. At the beginning of July 2013, we witnessed the second president deposed within the space of three years. The Square is an immersive experience, transporting the viewer deeply into the intense emotional drama and personal stories behind the news. It is the inspirational story of young people claiming their rights, struggling through multiple forces: from a brutal army dictatorship willing to crush protesters with military tanks, to a corrupt Muslim Brotherhood using mosques to manipulate voters. Directed by Jehane Noujaim, the film was nominated for the Academy Award and also won three Emmy Awards.

Spark

   2014    Science
Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the electrifying story of our quest to master nature's most mysterious force - electricity. Until fairly recently, electricity was seen as a magical power, but it is now the lifeblood of the modern world and underpins every aspect of our technological advancements.Without electricity, we would be lost. This series tells of dazzling leaps of imagination and extraordinary experiments - a story of maverick geniuses who used electricity to light our cities, to communicate across the seas and through the air, to create modern industry and to give us the digital revolution. Episode one tells the story of the very first 'natural philosophers' who started to unlock the mysteries of electricity. They studied its curious link to life, built strange and powerful instruments to create it and even tamed lightning itself. It was these men who truly laid the foundations of the modern world. Electricity was without doubt a fantastical wonder. This is the story about what happened when the first real concerted effort was made to understand electricity; how we learned to create and store it, before finally creating something that enabled us to make it at will - the battery.
Series: Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity

Nature Weirdest

   2023    Nature
We love nature and all its glorious diversity. Some creatures we admire for their deadly beauty, others because they are cute, but for some it's hard to figure out exactly why we like them so much, perhaps it's a quirk. How do you decide nature's weirdest animal? Is it the sloth that hangs upside down and moves so slowly that moss grows in its fur? Is it a sea pen that sits rooted to the seabed in endless darkness and emitting its own glow? Could it be carnivorous snails that leave the ocean to digest dead creatures on the beach, finches that drink blood, or the tarantula that keeps a frog as it's pet. But with nature's endless variety, which is the weirdest? We can't decide. Can you?

The Age of Revolution

   2016    History
Between 1850 and 1950, three cataclysmic revolutions shook China to the core, but out of them, today's China emerged. The film begins in Canton with the meeting of a US missionary and a Chinese student. Inspired by the Christian story and calling himself God's second son, Hong unleashed the bloodiest war of the 19th century, the Taiping Rebellion.
As imperial China weakened, foreign influence grew. Treaty ports expanded, bringing growth and wealth, trams, railways and western sensibilities. But this provoked another surge of violence, the Boxer Rebellion, an attack against the foreigners, which was crushed by those same foreigners, who extorted a huge indemnity - $60 billion in today's money.
Then in 1912, the empire fell, and many groups contested China's future. In World War I, China sent 100,000 men to the western front, only to be humiliated at Versailles when German colonies in China were handed to Japan. Between the two world wars, the disparity between rich and poor, city and countryside increased. We visit Hong Kong's Peninsular Hotel in the jazz age and then follow Mao on the Long March to Yan'an, the heartland of revolution.
World War II came to China two years earlier than it did in the west. Wood talks to a survivor of the Japanese massacre of Nanjing in 1937 and then charts the triumph of the communists, before ending the story with Mao's death and the boom time of the last 30 years. The series ends with the warmth of the Chinese family and, at Beijing's Altar of Heaven, a final haunting glimpse of eternal China.
Series: The Story of China

War of the Century: High Hopes

   2005    History
It was the bloodiest war in history, yet Hitler's brutal invasion of the Soviet Union and Stalin's subsequent fight back is surprisingly little known in the West. More than 30 million people died during Hitler and Stalin's terrible war in the East - more than in any other single war in history. With direct testimony from people who perpetrated atrocities and the victims who suffered on both sides, we bring the unspeakable to the screen and allowing victims and aggressors to tell the truth as they see it. In the first episode, we will look at Hitler's plans to invade the Soviet Union and the horror of the first months of conflict.
Series: War of the Century

Dragons of the Dry

   2008    Nature
About 340 million years ago a brand new family of animals was evolving in the primeval swamps. They were to go one step further than the amphibians who had emerged onto dry and before them. For they would eventually completely cut their ties with water. They were the ancestors of todays lizards. They evolved scaly impermeable skins and moved up into the forests. They diversified into a multitude of different shapes and sizes. They developed signalling systems to communicate with one another. And they squabbled as animals do. For food they hunted insects that were already well established on the land in great numbers. And here without returning to water they produced their families. They powered their bodies not only with food but with the heat that they drew directly from the sun.
As they diversified so they spread into the harshest of the lands habitats. The baking waterless deserts which eventually they would come to dominate. Discover jacky lizards that wave, wrestling beaded lizards and the the world's smallest chameleon, which is no bigger than his thumbnail, and the biggest lizard in Australia.
Series: Life In Cold Blood