Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Anthropologist Wade Davis and river advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr journey down the Colorado River on a two-week expedition to highlight water conservation issues. Traveling by rafts, kayaks and wooden dories, they are accompanied by their daughters and guided by Shana Watahomigie, a Native American National Park ranger. Filmed with a 350-pound 3D camera, it involved the cooperation of three Indian nations, the National Park Service, film sponsor Teva’s team of kayakers and more than a dozen experienced river guides. The film explores America's drought and freshwater shortages, the impact on the river of damming, and human water supply needs. Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk was directed by Greg MacGillivray and narrated by Robert Redford.

Heart disease is the number one cause of deaths worldwide, killing more than eight million people each year. Cardiac infarction, more commonly known as a heart attack, can happen without warning, killing heart muscle cells immediately. Even if the patient recovers, the damage to their heart may not.
But there are researchers frantically working to change that. Meet the people inventing the future of cardiac health, from new ways of imaging the body, to the possibility of 3D printing a functioning heart.

'Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia' Following Pr Rodolfo Coria, a world-reknown Argentinian paleontologist, we visit sites of major discoveries he has contributed to in Patagonia and travel back in time to see these amazing beasts come to life in 3D. Patagonia has given us the largest living animal to ever walk the Earth: the titanesque plant-eating Argentinosaur, and its nemesis, the Giganotosaur, a bipedal carnivore that could easily challenge the famous T-Rex.

David Attenborough discovers the plants that have evolved to shed their dependency on water enabling them to survive in the driest environments. The story begins at midnight in midsummer as David steps into the Princess of Wales Conservatory to witness the extraordinary nocturnal blooming of a cactus. The queen of the night, with its giant flowers, is the centre piece of a stunning symphony of cacti blooms that burst open in the desert (and at Kew) at night. In a mesmerizing 3D slow motion sequence, we discover the extraordinary connections between cacti and their natural pollinators: bats. As the sun rises, David meets other amazing plants. Species like the century plant, the Agave franzosini, which grows steadily for over 50 years, only to then flower itself to death with one mighty telegraph pole sized bloom which literally bursts out of the roof of Kew’s green house.

The mission of the film is to underline the crucial ecological role of coral reefs play in maintaining the well being of our planet, and to point out and warn against the dangers that are destroying the world's coral reefs. Entirely filmed using digital technology, thanks to it, the film was shot almost entirely with natural light, thus showing the underwater world as it exactly is. This is the closest you can get to dive without being there. Shot on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and in the Bahamas, it brings to you the amazing beauty of the many varieties of coral and the immense diversity of the marine life thriving there.

Bladderwort utricularia is a pond-dweller that is among the fastest known, its traps snapping shut in less than a millisecond. As the seasons change, David demonstrates how plants operate on a different time scale to us; how they modify their lives according to the time of year. We discover insects’ hidden links with plants, both as pests and pollinators. UV-sensitive 3D cameras reveal the invisible alter-ego of plants and their flowers’ mesmerizing patterns; a parallel-dimension of strange colours and stunning patterns through which plants communicate with them. With the aid of visual effects, David steps among the swirling vortices of plant scent; communication signals with which plants are inextricably plugged in to the natural world. And using a tuning fork, he demonstrates how plants and insects can even communicate with music. As autumn envelopes the Gardens, fungi reveal themselves not as the enemies of plants but their vital allies. In Kew’s atmospheric Fungarium, David discovers a specimen that has the power of mind control and another that lives underground where it has grown to be so big it can be counted as the largest single organism on the planet. It is 6 times bigger than Kew Gardens itself.