At first glance Brazil appears to be an alluring playground of exciting carnivals, sultry samba, divine football and a vibrantly diverse people. But behind this dazzling facade lies a disturbing story of historys largest-ever slave population. Astonishingly Brazil, a Portuguese colony, received ten-times more African slaves than the numbers transported to North America. This programme looks at those estimated 4 million people with whose blood, sweat...

Trans is an extraordinary documentary feature film about men and women… and all the variations in between. It is an up-close and very personal journey into the transgender world through the memorable stories and the unusual lives of a remarkable cast of characters. Here we will explore the Transgender Community, perhaps the most misunderstood and mistreated minority in America and around the world. It begins with the story of Lt. Commander Christopher...

They came for the hormones and stayed for the healthcare. These are the pioneering patients of the first free clinic in the country for trans folks, 1993 in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. More than a film about a clinic, the filmmakers had access to the unvarnished stories of 12 courageous individuals, who share their life experiences in the "Bad Old Days" decade by decade-- from the closeted 1950s, through the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s-- all illustrated...

"A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution-from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality-and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told,...

What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture of Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, and finally to the modern world,...

Annemarie Jacir's politically charged feature debut is the story of Soraya, a Brooklyn-born woman who travels to Palestine to retrieve her grandfather's savings, frozen in a Jaffa bank account after his 1948 exile. Her status as a dispossessed exile and encounter with contemporary politics provides a rare glimpse in to the Middle East of today.

In 1975, after 460 years of Portuguese rule, Fretilin, the revolutionary front for an independent East Timor, declared independence for the small nation. Ten days later Indonesia invaded. Fretilin, and the resistance army Falintil, fought the Indonesian military for the next 24 years. A third of the population - over 250,000 people - died as a result of the occupation. In 1999, Indonesia agreed to a United Nations supervised referendum and the people...

"As America's Mercury Seven astronauts were launched on death-defying missions, television cameras focused on the brave smiles of their young wives. Overnight, these women were transformed from military spouses into American royalty. They had tea with Jackie Kennedy, appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and quickly grew into fashion icons. Annie Glenn, with her picture-perfect marriage, was the envy of the other wives; platinum-blonde Rene Carpenter...

Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, showing how each room has figured in the evolution of private life.

In October 1969 hundreds of young people, clad in football helmets and wielding lead pipes, marched through an upscale Chicago shopping district, pummeling parked cars and smashing shop windows in their path. This was the first demonstration of the Weather Underground's Days of Rage. Outraged by the Vietnam War and racism in America, the organization waged a low-level war against the U.S. government through much of the 1970s, bombing the Capitol building,...