Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

The Greek tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece has been told for 3,000 years. It's a classic hero's quest tale - a sort of ancient Greek mission impossible - in which the hero embarks on a sea voyage into an unknown land, with a great task to achieve. He is in search of a magical ram's fleece, which he has to find in order to reclaim his father's kingdom of Iolkos from the usurper King Pelias. Michael Wood discovers a story of heroism, treachery, love and tragedy that would make Hollywood proud.

The final episode explores dinosaurs' extraordinary ability to survive. Featured dinosaurs include the bizarre magyarosaurus, which lived in the shadow of the biggest flying animal - hatzegopteryx - and showed an amazing adaptation to island life; and the weird nothronychus, a carnivore that gave up meat eating. This astonishing capacity to evolve into ever more diverse and bizarre forms meant that dinosaurs not only spread throughout the world, but also dominated life upon it for more than 160 million years. It was only an unprecedented extraterrestrial event that finally saw the end of planet dinosaur.

A Personal Journey Into The Uncharted Depths Of Nerd Culture, A Realm Full Of Dangers, Creatures And More Or Less Precarious Working Conditions.
Artist and life-long nerd Johannes Grenzfurthner is taking us on a personal road trip from the West Coast to the East Coast of the USA, to introduce us to places and people that shaped and inspired his art and politics. Traceroute wants to chase and question the ghosts of nerddom's past, present and future. An exhilarating tour de farce into the guts of trauma, obsession and cognitive capitalism.

A fifth of the land on our planet is covered by desert. Deserts may appear to be barren and empty, but they are of crucial importance to life. For those that can overcome their challenges they provide a vital refuge. The Grasslands are one of our planet's most productive landscapes. They support the greatest aggregations of large animals on Earth. Cameras follow desert elephants seeking sustenance, bison roaming North American grasslands and caterpillars living the good life underground.

Four and a half billion years ago, the young Earth was a hellish place, a seething chaos of meteorite impacts, volcanoes belching noxious gases, and lightning flashing through a thin, torrid atmosphere. Then, in a process that has puzzled scientists for decades, life emerged. But how? Join mineralogist Robert Hazen as he journeys around the globe. From an ancient Moroccan market to the Australian Outback, he advances a startling and counterintuitive idea—that the rocks beneath our feet were not only essential to jump-starting life, but that microbial life helped give birth to hundreds of minerals we know and depend on today. It's a theory of the co-evolution of Earth and life that is reshaping the grand-narrative of our planet’s story.

One of Cezanne’s best-known pictures, but it is also one of his most mysterious. Why did the so-called father of modern art paint two old men hunched over a game of cards? What is the picture trying to tell us?
By exploring Cezanne’s puzzling religious beliefs and his passion for Mary Magdalene, the patron saint of Provence, Waldemar Januszczak uncovers the surprising secrets of a haunting masterpiece.