Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

After the success of Florence and the Uffizi, a new film production by Sky 3D and the Vatican Television Centre, taking you on a journey through the four Papal Basilicas in Rome and their treasures: St. Peter’s (one of the 25 destinations most visited by travellers from all over the world), St. John in the Lateran, St. Mary Major and St. Paul Outside the Walls. Four majestic buildings – each with a precious papal altar, each a treasure trove of timeless works of art and a destination for millions of travellers and pilgrims over the centuries – play the leading role in a new film tour that has been recognized as a work of cultural interest by the film board of the Ministry of Culture, Heritage and Tourism.

Nick Yarris, a convicted murderer who has spent 23 years on Death Row and was released in 2004 when DNA evidence proved he was innocent of the crime, tells his story. In a non-linear structure, he reveals his early life, youthful transgressions, arrest, and time on death row, with several twists and turns. This gripping documentary reels you in, closer and closer, finally playing its hand in the closing moments.

The great flood in the Okavango turns 4,000 square miles of arid plains into a beautiful wetland. Elephant mothers guide their families on an epic trek across the harsh Kalahari Desert towards it, siphoning fresh water from stagnant pools and facing hungry lions. Hippos battle for territory, as the magical water draws in thousands of buffalo and birds, and vast clouds of dragonflies. Will the young elephant calves survive to reach this grassland paradise? The experienced mother elephants time their arrival at the delta to coincide with the lush grass produced by the great flood.
In a TV first, the programme shows the way they use their trunks to siphon clean water from the surface layers of a stagnant pool, while avoiding stirring up the muddy sediment on the bottom with their feet. Lechwe swamp deer, zebras, giraffes, crocodiles and numerous fish and thousands of birds arrive in the delta. And, in a phenomenon never before filmed in the Okavango, thousands of dragonflies appear - seemingly from nowhere - within minutes of the flood arrival, mating and laying eggs. As the flood finally reaches its peak, elephants and buffalo, near the end of their epic trek across the desert, face the final gauntlet of a hungry pride of lions. In a heart-wrenching sequence, a baby elephant is brought down by a lion in broad daylight.

Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson join filmmaker Chris Columbus and other esteemed cast members across all eight Harry Potter films as they travel back to Hogwarts for the first time to celebrate the anniversary of the franchise’s first film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which premiered 20 years ago.
The retrospective will tell an enchanting making-of story through all-new in-depth interviews and cast conversations, inviting fans on a magical first-person journey through one of the most beloved film franchises of all time.

Embark on a thrilling journey through time and five continents to the heart of creativity. Fusing social history, politics, science, nature, archaeology and religion, this international landmark series unravels a universal mystery - why the world around us looks like it does. Modern-day mysteries are answered by journeying back to the beginning of civilisation via some of the most amazing man-made creations in the world. In the first episode, one image dominates our contemporary world above all others: the human body. How Art Made the World travels from the modern world of advertising to the temples of classical Greece and the tombs of ancient Egypt to solve the mystery of why humans surround themselves with images of the body that are so unrealistic.

This is the story of a book that could have changed the history of the World. To the untrained eye, it is nothing more than a small and unassuming Byzantine prayer book. For faintly visible beneath the prayers on its pages are other, unique, writings - words that have been lost for nearly two thousand years. The text is the only record of work by one of the world's greatest minds - the ancient Greek, Archimedes - a mathematical genius centuries ahead of his time. Hidden for a millennium in a middle eastern library, it has been written over, broken up, painted on, cut up and re-glued. But in the nick of time scientists have saved the precious, fragile document, and for the first time it is revealing just how revolutionary Archimedes' ideas were. If it had been available to scholars during the Renaissance, we might have reached the Moon over a hundred years ago.