Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Oscar-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone was granted unprecedented access to Russian president Vladimir Putin during more than a dozen interviews over two years, with no topic off-limits. This remarkable four-part documentary series provides intimate insight into Putin's personal and professional lives, from his childhood under communism, to his rise to power, his relations with four U.S. presidents, and his surprising takes on U.S.-Russian relations today. Witness the most detailed portrait of Putin ever granted to a Western interviewer.

In the third part of his journey into the history of Christianity, Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch charts Orthodoxy's extraordinary fight for survival. After its glory days in the eastern Roman Empire, it stood right in the path of Muslim expansion, suffered betrayal by crusading Catholics, was seized by the Russian tsars and faced near-extinction under Soviet communism. MacCulloch visits the greatest collection of early icons in the Sinai desert, a surviving relic of the iconoclastic crisis in Istanbul and Ivan the Terrible's cathedral in Moscow to discover the secret of Orthodoxy's endurance.

North Korea, formerly known as the hermit kingdom, is perhaps the largest source of instability as regards world peace. Its border is one of the most militarized in the world. The lack of impartial information, both inside and coming out of the country, is the perfect setting for a propaganda war, which will be analysed in the film through numerous examples of the surprising way in which information is manipulated, in and about North Korea. Alejandro Cao de Benos, the sole foreigner who works for the People's Republic of Korea Government, and many locals will show us their vision of the reality in North Korea. The other side of the story will be reflected through interviews to South Korean citizens, human rights advocates, diplomats, propaganda experts, etc.

Eisenhower and the CIA played a great part in the shaping of the world in the 1950's; the development of the Cold war and the nerve-wrecking battle against communism, driven on by the U.S.