Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Bitcoin is the most disruptive invention since the Internet, and now an ideological battle is underway between fringe utopists and mainstream capitalism. "Banking on Bitcoin" shows the players who are defining how this technology will shape our lives. Bitcoin's early pioneers sought to blur the lines of sovereignty and the financial status quo. After years of underground development Bitcoin grabbed the attention of a curious public, and the ire of the regulators the technology had subverted. After landmark arrests of prominent cyber criminals Bitcoin faces its most severe adversary yet, the very banks it was built to destroy.

In the center of the story is the life of the indigenous people of the village Bakhtia at the river Yenisei in the Siberian Taiga. The camera follows the protagonists in the village over a period of a year. The natives, whose daily routines have barely changed over the last centuries, keep living their lives according to their own cultural traditions. Werner Herzog and Russian co-director Dmitry Vasyukov takes viewers on yet another unforgettable journey into remote and extreme natural landscapes. The acclaimed filmmaker presents this visually stunning documentary about indigenous people living in the heart of the Siberian Taiga. Deep in the wilderness, far away from civilization, 300 people inhabit the small village of Bakhtia at the river Yenisei. There are only two ways to reach this outpost: by helicopter or boat. There's no telephone, running water or medical aid. Follow the Siberian trappers through all four seasons of the year to tell the story of a culture virtually untouched by modernity.

Last year, just before Thanksgiving, I approached my dad, Leonard Nimoy, about the possibility of working together on a film about Mr. Spock. I had skimmed through some of the books on the making of Star Trek and felt there was so much more to explore about the creation and development of Mr. Spock. And the timing seemed right, as the 50th anniversary of Star Trek the original series was not that far away. Dad agreed that now was the right time, and that he was 100% committed to collaborating with me on this project. He also reminded me that we were (then) just days away from the 50th anniversary of the start of production on 'The Cage,' the original pilot for Star Trek in which dad first appeared as Mr. Spock.

Everyone from the most simple-minded to the deepest thinking has pondered a question that strikes at the core of our existence: Is there life after death? What happens to the soul after we die? People who have had near-death experiences claim to have visited the other side before getting yanked back into consciousness. Now, some of the brightest minds in science are trying to understand how life can persist beyond the physical and what will it look like. It might be a quantum state based on the fundamental laws of the universe. Ultimately, it is a journey that struggles to decode the most complicated instrument in the universe: the human brain.

'Deliver Us from Drought' - Over the past years, Texas has experienced the worst drought in its recorded history. 97% of the scientific community agrees that human activity has contributed to extreme weather patterns around the world. But many Texans--legislators, community leaders and citizens--don't attribute their drought to humans, and have taken few if any initiatives to limit the state's CO2 emissions, currently the highest in the country. "The Resource Curse" - As humanity's appetite for energy grows exponentially, the extraction industry scrambles to the most remote regions on Earth. In the undeveloped Melanesian country of Papua New Guinea, America's Exxon Mobil has staked its claim to a $19 billion liquid natural-gas project. While some see Exxon's mammoth presence as the catalyst that will usher the underdeveloped country into the 21st Century, others predict the initiative could plunge its people into civil war.

Written and presented by David Attenborough, who said: 'One of the most wonderful things about filming plants is that you can reveal hidden aspects of their lives, you can capture the moment as one plant strangles another, and as they burst into flower. But whilst time-lapse photography allows you to see things that no human being has ever seen before". David begins his journey inside the magnificent Palm House, a unique global rainforest in London. Here, he explores the extraordinary plants that are so well adapted to wet and humid environments and unravels the intimate relationships between wet zone plants and the animals that depend on them. It was in the wet zones of the world that plants first moved on to land and in the Waterlily House David reveals how flowers first evolved some 140 million years ago. Watching a kaleidoscope of breath-taking time-lapses of these most primitive of flowers swelling and blooming in 3D, he is able to piece together the very first evolutionary steps that plants took to employ a wealth of insects to carry their precious pollen for the first time. David discovers clues to answer a question that even had Charles Darwin stumped: how did flowering plants evolve so fast to go on to colonise the entire planet so successfully?