Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

In recent years, close study of the aging process has opened up new ways that could help us all live healthier for longer. Can we move beyond treating individual diseases, and instead treat the aging process itself? But would a longer life necessarily be a better life? A loose-knit group of researchers believe the real breakthrough is extending our health span - the period of life spent free of disease". Hear from Laura Deming, who dropped out of M.I.T. at the age of 14 and committed herself to finding and funding projects that can expand the human health span, and Dr. Brian Kennedy, whose work in the basic biology of aging has been crucial to the development of countless other researchers' work.

In Los Angeles, a remarkable experiment is underway; the police are trying to predict crime, before it even happens. At the heart of the city of London, one trader believes that he has found the secret of making billions with math. In South Africa, astronomers are attempting to catalogue the entire cosmos. These very different worlds are united by one thing - an extraordinary explosion in data. Meet the people at the forefront of the data revolution, and reveals the possibilities and the promise of the age of big data.

An explosive investigation brings together 34 senior figures from the U.S. government, military, and intelligence community who claim the world has been kept in the dark for decades. Through firsthand testimony and insider access, the documentary examines allegations of an 80-year cover-up surrounding the existence of non-human intelligent life, and the hidden efforts to conceal encounters, evidence, and recovered technology. What emerges is a portrait of secrecy at the highest levels of power, challenging everything we think we know about our place in the universe.
As the story unfolds, the focus shifts to a clandestine global race, where major nations are locked in a secret struggle to reverse-engineer technology of non-human origin. Beyond the shock of the revelations, the film explores the profound consequences disclosure could have for humanity’s future, while offering rare behind-the-scenes access to those leading a bipartisan push to bring the truth into the open. It is a gripping look at secrecy, power, and a reality that may be far bigger than we ever imagined.

Just under 200 years ago scientists discovered something profound, that electricity is connected to another of nature's most fundamental forces - magnetism. In the second episode, Jim discovers how harnessing the link between magnetism and electricity would completely transform the world, allowing us to generate a seemingly limitless amount of electric power which we could utilise to drive machines, communicate across continents and light our homes. This is the story of how scientists and engineers unlocked the nature of electricity in an extraordinary century of innovation and invention.

Between 1850 and 1950, three cataclysmic revolutions shook China to the core, but out of them, today's China emerged. The film begins in Canton with the meeting of a US missionary and a Chinese student. Inspired by the Christian story and calling himself God's second son, Hong unleashed the bloodiest war of the 19th century, the Taiping Rebellion.
As imperial China weakened, foreign influence grew. Treaty ports expanded, bringing growth and wealth, trams, railways and western sensibilities. But this provoked another surge of violence, the Boxer Rebellion, an attack against the foreigners, which was crushed by those same foreigners, who extorted a huge indemnity - $60 billion in today's money.
Then in 1912, the empire fell, and many groups contested China's future. In World War I, China sent 100,000 men to the western front, only to be humiliated at Versailles when German colonies in China were handed to Japan. Between the two world wars, the disparity between rich and poor, city and countryside increased. We visit Hong Kong's Peninsular Hotel in the jazz age and then follow Mao on the Long March to Yan'an, the heartland of revolution.
World War II came to China two years earlier than it did in the west. Wood talks to a survivor of the Japanese massacre of Nanjing in 1937 and then charts the triumph of the communists, before ending the story with Mao's death and the boom time of the last 30 years. The series ends with the warmth of the Chinese family and, at Beijing's Altar of Heaven, a final haunting glimpse of eternal China.

Inside one of America’s deadliest prison systems, a group of incarcerated men defy fear and isolation to reveal the truth hidden behind concrete walls. Through smuggled footage, letters, and interviews, they expose a network of corruption, abuse, and systemic neglect that has claimed countless lives. Their courage turns confinement into resistance, transforming their voices into weapons against silence.
As investigations deepen, the film uncovers how the state’s drive for profit fuels overcrowding, forced labor, and violence — conditions that thrive in secrecy. What begins as a story of survival becomes a powerful quest for justice, giving a face and a voice to those the system tried to erase.