Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

In America the summer twilight brings out a magical display of glittering lights. Millions and millions of fireflies, an ethereal sight. But behind this twinkling facade is a fierce female setting a deadly trap. The femme-fatale of fireflies is part seductress, part vampire, as Reese shows us the fireflies' deadly trickery to provide nourishment to their young.

Deep in the jungles of Taiwan lives female giant golden orb-weaver spider -- among the biggest web building spiders on the planet. With a leg-span of almost eight inches and silk like kevlar, she's a fearsome predator. But the orb spiders must find a way to mate with her male counterparts, who are approximately 10 times smaller and 500 times lighter than she is.

Professor Brian Cox continues his epic exploration of the cosmos by looking at the faint band of light that sweeps across the night sky - our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The Sun is just one of almost 400 billion stars that form this vast, majestic disk of light, our own home in the universe. Thanks to a cutting-edge space we’re finally able to reveal the Milky Way’s dramatic history and predict its cataclysmic future.
Our galaxy started out a fraction of the size it is today, and Gaia telescope has revealed how it grew over the eons. Beautifully rendered VFX based on the very latest Gaia data has uncovered the remarkable story of our galaxy’s evolution. As our young galaxy encountered rival galaxies, it experienced a series of violent growth spurts and intense periods of cataclysmic change while battling to survive. Each time our galaxy feeds, a new era of star formation begins, fuelled by incoming torrents of fresh gas and energy. And there is another collision to come. Another, larger galaxy is coming our way. Andromeda is heading straight for us at a quarter of a million miles per hour. The Milky Way’s long-term fate is in the balance.

This American science fiction horror anthology film was produced by Steven Spielberg and John Landis. The film's production achieved notoriety when the actor Vic Morrow and two illegally-hired child actors were killed in a stunt helicopter crash during filming of Landis' segment. The Movie leaves those involved in the making of the film cursed by the memory of the incident they witnessed.

Feast your eyes on a reconstruction of the mega-city and its amazing buildings. Alexandria, built in the middle of rancid marshland, had become in less than a century, the greatest city of the Mediterranean. An ideal position at the crossroads of east and west, and one that brought her great riches. Huge, modern, gleaming white and cosmopolitan, like no other in antiquity, it created its own identity.
While the beauty of its planning, its great arteries, its temples and its ports would be equalled only by its openness to the rest of the world. And the monumental achievements of its sovereigns, still shrouded in mystery, we'll never cease to fire our imagination for millennia to come.

The last episode explores Mescaline, the psychoactive molecule in San Pedro and peyote cacti, a sacred medicine that Native Americans have had to fight for the right to use. At the Indigenous practices there's always an elder, someone who knows the territory very well, who's presiding. There's usually a group, a community is involved, There's always an intention, a purpose to what you're doing, and you're treating it as sacred, in order to achieve altered states of consciousness, which contribute to worship in various ways, or celebration or healing.
But maybe all this is not so new to Western culture after all. In the old Greek histories of Eleusis, people who were initiated there got the drink, the kykeon, and then they had the illumination. The precise recipe is a mystery, but we know that the kykeon was a psychoactive brew that was used at the Eleusinian mysteries, a sacred annual ritual of enlightenment practiced by some of the world's greatest minds including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. So why did this ritual come to an end more than 1,000 years ago? Was the possibility of illumination or achieving a higher consciousness considered threatening to the powers that be? Have the drug wars been merely an extension of that fear?
Psychedelics has a major part in how we can heal as a community, how we can heal as a city, and how we can heal as a country. The current renaissance of psychedelics could not come at a better time as the world confronts a crisis in mental health. But psychedelics have much to offer. The psychedelic experience changes the mind in ways that will help scientists better understand how it works. All these altered states allow us to probe what is the greatest mystery in all of nature. The emergence from mere matter of something as miraculous as consciousness. But an even bigger question is whether psychedelics might help us address the environmental crisis of how we think about our place in nature. One of the greatest gifts of psychedelics is how they reanimate the natural world, allowing us to perceive the subject, the spirit of all species, not just our own. And to feel a deeper sense of interconnectedness with nature.