Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

It's a natural history epic. It's a compelling detective story. It's a scientific adventure at its best. It took Dr Fred Urquhart almost 40 years to discover the monarch butterflies' secret hideaway and prove the most incredible migration on Earth. Following the year-long annual migration cycle of the butterflies, the award-winning production team filmed hundreds of millions of monarchs in their remote overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico in 2011 and again in 2012 and also along their migratory routes from Canada, across the U.S. and into Mexico. The film immerses you in the astounding migration experience as two generations of the butterflies migrate north and then a Super Generation miraculously finds its way from Canada to a few isolated mountaintops in Mexico.

This documentary tells the story a young polar bear's epic migration through the icy waters of Hudson Bay and his subsequent adventures on land, where he must spend the ice-free season. It is his first summer alone without his mother to guide and feed him. His struggle to survive is set against the biggest environmental story of our time: climate change. The stunning images were taken with more than eight different kinds of cameras including, for the first time, a polar bear collar-cam; a remote control Truck-cam; a mini Heli-cam, and several underwater cameras.

This episode covers the European refugee crisis, the largest refugee migration since World War II. Following the refugees on their journey, Vice sets out to cover not only the trials of those seeking asylum from the Syrian conflict, but the reactions from the Western world and the countries that have sought to take them in. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, the response in many regions has been oppositional, especially in the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels ISIS attacks. In addressing this modern world crisis, Vice depicts the severe trials and tribulations faced by the desperate refugees, and the consequences, noticed or unnoticed, of turning them away.

The journey continues into Asia, the world's greatest land mass, in a quest to discover how early hunter-gatherers managed to survive in one of the most inhospitable places on earth - the Arctic region of Northern Siberia. Alice also explores what may have occurred during human migration to produce Chinese physical characteristics, and considers a controversial claim about Chinese evolution: that the Chinese do not share the same African ancestry as other peoples.

As the early June sun begins to set over a calm river in Central Hungary, masses of ghostly shapes emerge from their larval cases to take to the air for the first time. They are mayflies and in a spectacular display, thousands of them demonstrate how the very first wings were used. From the stunning aerobatics of hoverflies in an English garden to the mass migration of purple crow butterflies in the valleys of Taiwan, this episode tells the tale of the first animals ever to take to the air. Unique footage reveals the lightning fast reactions of bluebottles and hoverflies, filmed with one of the world's fastest cameras, and Sir David Attenborough handles the world's largest (and perhaps most ferocious) insect - the Titan beetle.

Until World War II, Latino immigration to the United States was overwhelmingly Mexican-American. Now three new waves bring large-scale immigration from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. As the Puerto Rican government implements a historic overhaul over a million Puerto Ricans are encouraged to leave for the US mainland, to alleviate the economic pressure. A young Juanita Sanabria arrives in New York, works hard in the garment district, but encounters hostility and discrimination. Ethnic tensions explode in youth gang warfare depicted in films like West Side Story, etching the stereotype of the knife wielding Puerto Rican in the American consciousness.