Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Genetic breakthroughs have shed light on how life evolves in real-time. From filling in the missing links to creating a new species, in the last 50 years scientists have solved some of the biggest mysteries of evolution. In this episode, we look at revolutionary discoveries that shook the world and may shape our future.

The inspirational story of Owen Suskind, a boy of considerable promise, until he developed autism at the age of 3. He was unable to speak until he and his family discovered a unique way to communicate by immersing themselves in the world of classic Disney animated films. This emotional coming-of-age story follows Owen as he graduates to adulthood and takes his first steps toward independence.

In this powerful continuation of his personal journey, Chris Hemsworth takes viewers around the world to test the boundaries of body and mind. Confronted with chronic back pain and concerns about memory decline, he seeks answers not in laboratories but in life-changing challenges designed by scientists, health experts, and elite trainers. From the nerve-racking task of learning to play the drums—culminating in a breathtaking live performance with Ed Sheeran before 70,000 fans—to enduring brutal Special Forces–style trials in South Korea involving electrocution, pepper spray, and freezing waters, each step reveals the fragile balance between vulnerability and resilience. His raw honesty and willingness to fail make the journey as intimate as it is inspiring.
On our website, viewers can enjoy the entire adventure with the three episodes combined into a single video, seamlessly following Hemsworth as he explores how to live better, face fear, and unlock the science of resilience and longevity.

Chris has always worked to keep his body healthy; now it’s time to start looking after his brain. Neurologist Dr. Sharon Sha challenges him to go off-grid into the wilderness without a GPS or map. Teaming up with his buddy, First Nations artist Otis Hope Carey, Chris will need to tune into nature to navigate through Otis’ remote ancestral homeland. The hike stirs up Chris’s most precious memories.

Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastian Elcano set sail to gain control of the global spice trade, but end up becoming the first expedition to circumnavigate the earth. The yearslong voyage—along with the suffering, the violence and the loss of life and property—were all in pursuit of a shorter route to the so-called Spice Islands (now the Maluku Islands) and their much-coveted aromatics.
The film puts in perspective the 16th century—the Age of Exploration, the Age of Discovery and the Age, problematically, of Colonialism. It also was an age of heroes. As the documentary insists, the journeys undertaken by the men whose names we learned in grade school and whose exploits straddled the 1400s and 1500s—including Ponce de Leon, Vasco da Gama, Lope de Aguirre and even Columbus—were about money, sometimes trade, sometimes plunder. But just as advances in medicine have often been propelled by war, knowledge about the world has been a byproduct of profit-seeking. Likewise, heroism.

Just outside Paris, inside a hi-tech vault, and encased in three vacuum-sealed bell jars, rests a small metallic cylinder about the diameter of a golf ball. It may not look like much, but it is one of the most important objects on the planet. It affects nearly every aspect of our lives including the food we eat, the cars we drive, even the medicines we take. It is the Kilogramme, the base unit of mass in the International System of Units. Yet over time, its mass has mysteriously eroded by the weight of an eyelash. A change that, unbeknownst to most, unleashed a crisis with potentially dire consequences.
The film follows the ensuing high-stakes, two-year race to redefine the weight of the world, and tells the story of one of the most important objects on the planet.