Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Travelling forward in time to 30,000 years ago, it's the middle of an ice age. The landscape is dominated by mighty mammoths, living side-by-side with woolly rhinos, giant deer and two separate species of human. The programme follows the fate of a herd of mammoths in their annual struggle against the harsh ice-age conditions. Every summer they spend on the grassy plains of what will one day become the bottom of the North Sea, but every winter they are forced to head for the less exposed valleys further south. It is a journey fraught with danger: mammoths can get trapped in frozen bogs, and the herd must run the gauntlet of hunters like cave lions and the deadly Neanderthals.

Hollywood actor Jason Scott Lee has been a student of Bruce Lee's martial art Jeet Kune Do for 20 years and in Secrets Of Shaolin. He fulfils his lifelong dream of joining the institution that invented kung fu - Shaolin Temple. In an intense two-week kung fu bootcamp, Jason will not only discover Shaolin's centuries old secrets of turning the human body into the ultimate weapon, but also experience the spiritual effects of it's Zen Buddhist practices. Secrets of Shaolin promises to be a stunning, action-packed insight into the world's most famous martial art and a spectacular celebration of the place, people and culture that has inspired generations of fans.

This remarkable series profiles on the major defendants of the Nuremberg war crimes trials. In the first episode, Nathaniel Parker plays the most inscrutable Nazi on trial at Nuremberg, Hitler's architect and armaments minister Albert Speer.
He was the only defendant who unreservedly accepted responsibility for the Nazis' crimes. But was Speer's remorse genuine or just a clever defense strategy to get off the hook? The film tells the intriguing behind-the scenes-story of Speer's trial and his showdown with unrepentant rival, Hermann Goering.

The second episode tells the story of the trial of Hermann Goering, Hitler's charismatic and ruthless second-in-command. On trial for his life at Nuremberg, the unrepentant Reich Marshal turned the tables on the Allies. So much so that Chief Prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson began to wish the Allies had followed Churchill's suggestion and shot the leading Nazis out of hand. This documentary drama traces the behind-the-scenes story of Goering's attempt to re-ignite Nazism from the courtroom.

Salvador Dali's strange crucifixion is often called the greatest religious painting of the 20th century. Yet its artist was a notorious blasphemer some of whose work had outraged the Catholic Church. The Christ of St John of the Cross by Salvador Dali is the first of two extraordinary crucifixions painted by Dali in the early 1950s. The painting is based on a 'cosmic dream' Dali is said to have had, in which the nucleus of the atom was a figure of Christ himself.
The painting offers a surrealist view of the crucifixion of Christ, and is based on a drawing by the 16th century Spanish friar Saint John of the Cross. But Dali's vision was somewhat unique, using an unusual artistic perspective in which Christ is seen from above. His Christ of St. John of The Cross was inspired by a weird mix of Spanish mysticism and nuclear physics, with his Christ being modelled by a Hollywood stuntman. It's also a masterpiece of painting technique.

Each year an unbelievable feeding frenzy takes place in the oceans of South Africa as billions of sardines migrate up the KwaZulu-Natal Coast. Wild Ocean captures spectacular breaching whales, feeding sharks, diving gannets, and massive bait balls inside and up close on the screen. The migration has provided an annual food source for both life in the sea and the people living along the African shores for countless generations. The film demonstrates how business, government, and the local people have joined forces to protect this invaluable ecological resource.
The film will delve audiences into an epic underwater struggle for survival and reveal the economic and cultural impact the migration has on the coastal communities. Wild Ocean is an explosive, symphonic documentary film about man and nature which captures one of natures greatest migration spectacles through the magic of IMAX.