Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Two and a half thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates worried that the wide use of writing would have a negative impact on people's minds. He said that writing would create forgetfulness, because people will not use their memories. They would trust the external written characters and not remember themselves. In a world with an ever-growing tech industry, Michael Stevens tries to find out what effect technology has on our brains. He finds Technology isn't just changing our lives, it's changing our brains. In his experiments he tests what just 10 days of gaming does to things like our spatial memory.

Donald Trump is the 45th President of the United States and commander in chief of America's armed forces, the most powerful position in the world. But who is Donald Trump? What's he really like? And what does he really believe? To find the answer, we’re going back to his roots. This documentary tells the remarkable story of Donald Trump's family, an extraordinary immigration success story.
It reveals how Trump's penniless German grandfather arrived in America in the 1880s, and ended up running bars and brothels in the gold rush. And how his Scottish mother travelled from the Outer Hebrides to New York and worked as a maid before marrying Donald's tycoon father. We will meet his driven parents, his wayward brother, and his three wives.

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.

The second part, Nothing, explores science at the very limits of human perception, where we now understand the deepest mysteries of the universe lie. Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to answer one very simple question - what is nothing? His journey ends with perhaps the most profound insight about reality that humanity has ever made. Everything came from nothing. The quantum world of the super small shaped the vast universe we inhabit today, and Jim can prove it.

Dash Snow rejected a life of privilege to make his own way as an artist on the streets of downtown New York City in the late 1990s. Developing from a notorious graffiti tagger into an international art star, he documented his drug- and alcohol-fueled nights with the surrogate family he formed with friends and fellow artists Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen before his death by heroin overdose in 2009.
Drawing from Snow's unforgettable body of work and involving archival footage, Cheryl Dunn's exceptional portrait captures his all-too-brief life of reckless excess and creativity.

When Homo sapiens, which means 'wise ones,' discovered and controlled fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, everything changed. Fire allowed us to cook food and heat dwellings, and it served as a focal point for storytelling and sharing cultural identity among community members. We don't yet have established parameters for what it means to be 'distinctly human,' It would seem the only thing that separates us from other animals, Neil deGrasse Tyson ponders, is our neurotic need to feel 'special'. Against the backdrop of the Halls of Extinction, Tyson insists that there must be a clear distinction between ourselves and animals that justifies our eating them, wearing them and even bringing an end to their species.
From the birth of the devil in ancient Persia to a searing story of saintliness among macaque monkeys, this episode is an exploration of human potential for change. It concludes with the story of how one of history's greatest monsters was transformed into one of its shining lights.