Civilisations

Two-fisted cowboys fight for law and order in their encounters with outlaws.

Interrogated by a customs officer, a young man recounts how his life was changed during the making of a film about the Armenian genocide.

The life and art of Christopher Pratt. 'Canada's most famous living painter' - The Globe & Mail. This is the first feature-length documentary that Christopher Pratt has agreed to participate in. An honest, funny, eloquent, bizarre, and sometimes unsettling account of his life and art, and an extremely important cultural document.

A Chickasaw man survives great hardships and tragedy to establish a vast ranching empire along the famous cattle highway of the American West.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili looks at how we have created machines that can simulate, augment, and even outperform the human mind - and why we shouldn't let this spook us. He reveals the story of the pursuit of AI, the emergence of machine learning and the recent breakthroughs brought about by artificial neural networks. He shows how AI is not only changing our world but also challenging our very ideas of intelligence and consciousness. Along the way, we'll investigate spam filters, meet a cutting-edge chatbot, look at why a few altered pixels makes a computer think it's looking at a trombone rather than a dog and talk to Demis Hassabis, who heads DeepMind and whose stated mission is to 'solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else'. Stephen Hawking remarked 'AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. Or the worst'. Jim argues that AI is a potent new tool that should enhance our lives, not replace us.

In the 1980s Keith Haring blazed a trail through the galleries and nightclubs of downtown New York's art scene. Rebellious and ingenious, Haring chose to operate both inside and outside the art world. Inspired by the city's graffiti scene, he made New York's subways, tarpaulins and walls his canvas. This new feature documentary blends stunning archive and an edgy soundtrack, with tender and candid first-hand accounts of Haring. It tells the extraordinary story of an artist who lived and created with a boundless energy, throughout the social, cultural and political counter-revolution of the 1980s.

These days, nobody takes Rubens seriously. His vast and grandiose canvases, stuffed with wobbly mounds of female flesh, have little appeal for the modern gym-subscriber. And it's not just the bulging nudity we don't like. The entire tone of Rubens's art offends us. Everything in it is too big - the epic dramas full of tragedy, the fantastical celestial scenery, the immense canvases and murals adorning the walls and ceilings of Europe's grandest palaces. All of it seems too much for modern sensibilities. But Waldemar Januszczak begs to differ. In Waldemar's eyes, Rubens has been traduced by modern tastes, and a huge misunderstanding of him has taken place. By looking in detail at Rubens's fascinating life, by understanding his art in more enlightened ways, Waldemar sets out to correct the extra-large misconceptions that have arisen about Rubens.

Siri wakes to find herself trapped inside a brutalist candy-coloured dreamhouse. Despite the cutesy decor, the place is far from benign, and she and her inmates are encouraged to compete for survival while being watched over by surveillance cameras, 24/7. Presiding over the group is an authoritarian diva who speaks entirely with the voice of Kenneth Clark from the 1960s BBC series Civilisation. As she forces the women to go head-to-head in a series of demeaning tasks, Siri, with the help of fellow inmate Alexa, starts subverting the rules and soon reveals the sinister truth that underpins their world.

A three-part psychedelic comedy featuring an eight foot tall bug man who leads a civilization of blue-colored beings.

Professor Saul David examines Prince Albert's role in shaping British culture, governmental policy and international relations in Victorian Britain.

It is possible that only one per cent of the wonders of ancient Egypt have been discovered, but now, thanks to a pioneering approach to archaeology, that is about to change. Dr. Sarah Parcak uses satellites to probe beneath the sands, where she has found cities, temples and pyramids. Now, with Dallas Campbell and Liz Bonnin, she heads to Egypt to discover if these magnificent buildings are really there.

The Body Machine is a landmark special on the human body that shows us just how much, how many, how large, how strong, how fast - just how amazing the body really is. Utilizing impressive large-scale real-life stunts, CGI and strong character stories, the show makes the staggering scale of the inner workings of the body tangible. We will show you how far our blood travels in just one day - an astounding 19, 000 km - from Quebec City to Buenos Aires and back. You will see all the cranial fluid you produce in your lifetime laid out in front of you - all 26,280 pint glasses worth. And in just one day you will take 23,000 breaths - enough air to fill 7,714 helium balloons. You will see all this and much more.

An ideological and physical barrier fell on 9 November 1989 in Berlin. For 28 years, this 155 km wall divided Germany in two, separating friends and family. The recent discovery of some documents reveals the stories of those who managed to escape to join their loved ones, or simply to regain their freedom. Demonstrating imagination and courage, some dug tunnels to get under the Berlin Wall, others inflated balloons to fly over it, while others disguised themselves with fake uniforms. By combining archives, reconstitution sequences and intrigue scenes, this documentary plunges us into a Berlin that has now disappeared, through the prism of the art of escape under the GDR.

The Richardson Olmsted Campus, a former psychiatric center and National Historic Landmark, is seeing new life as it undergoes restoration and adaptation to a modern use.

Already a successful portrait photographer, Hannah sets to reinvent this art form. Abandoning herself to a creative process that might easily be mistaken for madness, she's soon visited by mirror images of herself, as well as her daughter's ghost. Inspired by the life of photographer Hannah Maynard (1834-1918).

Racism: A History is a three-part British documentary series originally broadcast on BBC Four in March 2007. It was part of the season of programmes broadcast on the BBC marking the 200th anniversary of the Slave Trade Act 1807, a landmark piece of legislation which abolished the slave trade in the British Empire. The series explores the impact of racism on a global scale and chronicles the shifts in the perception of race and the history of racism in Europe, the Americas, Australia and Asia. The series was narrated by Sophie Okonedo.

Archaeologist and historian Richard Miles traces the development of Western civilization, from the first cities in Mesopotamia to the fall of the Roman Empire. In this six-part series, Miles travels through the Middle East, Egypt, Pakistan and the Mediterranean to discover how the challenges of society -- religion and politics, art and culture, war and diplomacy, technology and trade -- were dealt with and fought over in order to maintain a functioning civilization. Stories are told of disappeared, ruined and modern cities, from ancient Iraq to modern Damascus, to reveal how successes and failures of the ancients shaped the world today.

Sir Kenneth Clarke guides us through the ages exploring the glorious rise of civilisation in western man. Beginning with the bleakness of the dark ages to the present day, we consider civilisation's articulations and expressions in some of man's finest works of art.

Andrew Marr's History of the World is a 2012 BBC documentary television series presented by Andrew Marr that covers 70,000 years of world history from the beginning of human civilisation, as African nomadic peoples spread out around the world and settled down to become the first farmers, up to the twentieth century.

Richard Hammond reveals secret animal abilities from the natural world, and discovers how those same animals have inspired a series of unlikely human inventions at the very frontiers of science.

How We Invented the World is the ultimate action-packed, hi-energy, landmark series that examines the four inventions that define the modern world - mobiles, cars, planes and skyscrapers -celebrating the people and connections that made them possible. Each playing a crucial role in where we are now in the 21st Century - able to travel the globe, to talk to one another at any time at the push of a button, to live in huge cities, to commute, to capture the world we live in, making the fantasies we create come to life. This four part series lifts the lid on how these iconic inventions came to be. Showcasing the people who have shaped our lives in ways that they could have never imagined or anticipated, this series reveals stories of human ingenuity, extraordinary connections, unprecedented experimentation and jaw dropping accidents that created the world as we know it.

It spans over 5,000 years of history that have shaped the world. It is full of spectacular sites and epic stories and an evolving society of inventors, heroes, heroines, villains, artisans and pioneers. Professor Joann Fletcher reveals the highs and lows of the most beguiling civilisation in humanity’s rich history in this four-part series made for BBC2.

Using the latest 3D scanning technology, Alexander Armstrong and Dr Michael Scott uncover the hidden history of Italian civilisation and city life.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. takes a look at the history of Africa, from the birth of humankind to the dawn of the 20th century. A breathtaking and personal journey through two hundred thousand years of history, from the origins, on the African continent, of art, writing and civilization itself, through the millennia in which Africa and Africans shaped not only their own rich civilizations, but also the wider world.

Our History is no more than a series of incredible events. From the birth of a thousand-year-old empire to the death of a flourishing civilization, from the creative genius of a handful of men to a worldwide cultural revolution, the most infinitesimal of our decisions can influence the future of humanity. Every episode guides us to revisit a key event, a crossroads in our History where the world swings one way or the other. With spectacular reconstructions created by 3D modeling specialists, every story is told in sequences, which gives new perspective for today.

Created by Canadian filmmaker Mark Kenneth Woods and co-produced by Michael Venus, the first season of the world's first LGBT themed sketch comedy TV show started airing on OUTtv in July 2005. The second season began airing in September, 2006 and, after a hiatus, a third season debuted in July, 2009. The show also aired on SelecTV/OUTtv in Australia in 2006. Pink TV in France, Belgium, Switzerland and other territories started airing the first 2 seasons of the show with the alternate title "Le Venus Show" in September, 2006. The show began airing in the Netherlands and the Benelux in April, 2008 on OUTTv. here! network in the USA began airing the show in August, 2008. Filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, the sketch comedy show blends politics and pop culture with humour and irreverence.

In the fourth and fifth centuries, B.C., the Greeks built an empire that stretched across the Mediterranean from Asia to Spain. They laid the foundation of modern science, politics, warfare and philosophy, and produced some of the most breathtaking art and architecture the world has ever seen. It was perhaps the most spectacular flourishing of imagination and achievement in recorded history.

A landmark, three-part series that tells the human story through our relationship to water. We find out how our success is intimately connected to our control of the molecule, but that the growth of our civilizations has also created a dangerous dependence on a precious resource. One that may be about to run out.

Articulate connects audiences to the human stories behind art, offering a trustworthy, visually stimulating, never ordinary take on classical, contemporary, and popular art forms. From acclaimed musicians and best-selling authors to designers changing the way we live, each episode explores what great creative thinkers and doers can tell us about who we are, who we’ve been, and who we might become.

Secrets to Civilisation is a groundbreaking History series which explores the recent explosion in data about our planet's past, offering a completely fresh perspective on the ancient world from the Bronze Age to the fall of Rome.