Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

A look at the life of Michael Jackson from his early days at Motown Records to the release of his hit 1979 album, Off the Wall. One morning, a television set broke down in a living room in Gary, Indiana, leaving a large family of children with nothing to do, so they started singing. Soon the family was singing at talent shows and winning trophies. Their first four recorded songs would top the charts, and launch the career of one of the greatest entertainers the world has ever known. Journey from Motown to Off the Wall allows audiences to travel with Michael as he gets his start at Motown, strikes a new path with CBS records, and forges a relationship with legendary producer Quincy Jones. An illuminated portrait emerges of how an earnest, passionate, hard-working boy would become the "King of Pop".

An exploration of active volcanoes in Indonesia, Iceland, North Korea and Ethiopia, Herzog follows volcanologist and co-director Clive Oppenheimer, who hopes to minimize the volcanoes’ destructive impact. What is the Herzog’s quest? To gain an image of our origins and nature as a species. He finds that the volcano—mysterious, violent, and rapturously beautiful—instructs us that, "there is no single one that is not connected to a belief system".

Legendary master filmmaker Werner Herzog chronicles the virtual world from its origins to its outermost reaches, exploring the digital landscape with the same curiosity and imagination he previously trained on earthly destinations. Herzog leads viewers on a journey through a series of provocative conversations with cyberspace pioneers and prophets such as PayPal and Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, Internet protocol inventor Bob Kahn, and famed hacker Kevin Mitnick, that reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works - from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships.

Eternal life is humanity’s oldest dream. It may be finally coming true. Today, at least in the West, the quest for immortality has shifted from the metaphysical to the technical and the scientific. In this film we will investigate the advancement of this research in laboratories around the world. With cryonics technology improving, human cloning now possible, mind uploading and digital brain simulation thriving, reversing the aging of cells and organs feasible, immortality may seem right around the corner. In some countries, such as the US, Russia and Europe, private companies are financing and promoting the promise of immortality or at least a longer life expectancy. Are they selling a reality or utopia? We will meet scientists, neurophysiologists, computer specialists, geneticists, and biologists, and also hopefuls of immortal life, futurists, sociologists and businessmen. We will film different research laboratories and cities built for the aging; we will interview the experts as well as the anonymous men and women who speak about their relationship with life and death and those who simply embody it.

Dan Snow uncovers the lost Vikings in America with space archaeologist Dr Sarah Parcak. Sarah uses satellites 383 miles above the earth to spot ruins as small as 30cm buried beneath the surface. As Sarah searches for Viking sites from Britain to America, Dan explores how they voyaged thousands of miles when most ships never left the shoreline. He also tracks their expansion west, first as raiders and then as settlers and traders throughout Britain and beyond to Iceland and Greenland. In North America they excavate what could be the most westerly Viking settlement ever discovered.

The film goes deep beneath the surface to explore the lives of man's greatest parasite. Morgan Spurlock unveils a new form of documentary horror storytelling, journeying around the world to bring viewers face to face with rats while delving into our complicated relationship with these creepy creatures. Taking us into the rats nests in ways never before captured on film, RATS dives deep into New York City's parks, subway tunnels, and sewers; venture to rice paddies in Cambodia and Vietnam where rats are caught and sold as food, cross worldly streets in India paroled by the revered Night Rat Killers, journey to English countryside where packs of terriers kill hundreds of rats per day, and look inside a New Orleans lab, where scientists are studying how flooding and abandoned neighbourhoods are making rats more invasive than ever.