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Bitter Lake

   2015    Culture
And epic film by Adam Curtis that explains why the big stories that politicians tell us have become so simplified that we can’t really see the world any longer. The narrative goes all over the world, America, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia, but the country at the heart of it is Afghanistan. Because Afghanistan is the place that has confronted our politicians with the terrible truth, that they cannot understand what is going on any longer". The coumentary reveals the forces that over the past thirty years rose up and undermined the confidence of politics to understand the world. And it shows the strange, dark role that Saudi Arabia has played in this. But Bitter Lake is also experimental. Curtis has taken the unedited rushes of everything that the BBC has ever shot in Afghanistan - and used them in new and radical ways. He has tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really happened in Afghanistan. A counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.

Escape to Europe and Cycle of Terror

   2015    Culture
This episode covers the European refugee crisis, the largest refugee migration since World War II. Following the refugees on their journey, Vice sets out to cover not only the trials of those seeking asylum from the Syrian conflict, but the reactions from the Western world and the countries that have sought to take them in. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, the response in many regions has been oppositional, especially in the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels ISIS attacks. In addressing this modern world crisis, Vice depicts the severe trials and tribulations faced by the desperate refugees, and the consequences, noticed or unnoticed, of turning them away.
Series: Vice

Deliver Us From Evil

   2006    Culture
From director Amy Berg: 'Just a year and a half ago, after spending over four years on the same story for CNN and CBS before that, a paedophile priest named Oliver O'Grady decided he would participate in the film I wanted to make. It became Deliver Us From Evil -- the story from inside the sickest mind possible, the secrets that were meant to stay in the private files and crypts of the Roman Catholic Church, and the blind trust in those they perceived as God's messengers that left families with no faith and children with no innocence. After filming for a week and a half, the then defrocked priest mentioned he might need to move to Canada after this film comes public. Seeing the pain, corruption and missed opportunities to provide ministry to those in need was truly a tragic story to watch and the loss was more devastating than I ever imagined. It was so difficult to be so close to such a horror story that in the priest's words "never should have happened.".

Only the Dead

   2016    History
A war story unlike any ever seen. A story of what happens when one ordinary man, Time magazine war correspondent Michael Ware, transplanted into the Middle East by the reverberations of 9/11, butts into history. Ware handpicked and given a shattering video tape by the most feared, most hated terrorists on the planet to announce his arrival of the world stage sets out on an epic journey into the deepest recesses of the conflict as he seeks answers. Answers that he thinks will lead him to the Truth. The invasion of Iraq has ended, and the Americans are celebrating victory. The year is 2003. Alone and in secret one man, Abu Musab al Zarqawi is planning the real war. Step- by-step he lays out his plan in a letter to Osama bin Laden: the suicide truck bombings; the bloody horrors of the civil war; the televised beheadings. He carries out his grand design to transform the invasion into one of the most brutal conflicts our time and a catastrophe for the planet...and he does it all on camera. He gives the tape to Michael Ware. The tape sets our correspondent off on an epic voyage as he seeks answers. As he seeks what he thinks will be the Truth.

Roads to Revolution

   2009    Art
Andrew Graham-Dixon explores how Russia changed from a feudal nation of aristocratic excess to a hotbed of revolution at the beginning of the 20th century and how art moved from being a servant of the state to an agent of its destruction. From monuments that celebrate the absolutism of the tsars to the epic Russian landscape as inspiration; from the design and construction of gold and glittering palaces to the minutiae of diamond-encrusted Faberge eggs; and eventually to the stark and radical paintings of the avant-garde, the journey through Russian art history is one of extraordinary beauty and surprise.
Series: The Art of Russia

The Sound and the Fury: A Century of Modern Music. Wrecking Ball

   2013    Art
It begins by examining the shift in the language and sound of music from the melodies and harmonies of giants such as Mozart, Haydn and Brahms into the fragmented, abstract, discordant sound of the most radical composers of the new century - Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky and beyond. It examines how this new music was a response to the huge upheaval in the world at the start of the 20th century, with its developments in technology, science, modern art and the tumult of the First World War. Featuring performances of some of the key works of the period, performed by the London Sinfonietta, members of the Aurora Orchestra and composer and pianist Timothy Andres, the story of this episode in music history is brought to life through the contributions of the biggest names in modern classical music, among them Steve Reich, John Adams, Michael Tilson Thomas, Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin and Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker.
Series: The Sound and the Fury