History

Giacomo Puccini, the son of a Tuscan organist, achieves world-wide recognition as a composer of operas and dies from throat cancer in the middle of an artistic crisis, at the age of just sixty-six.

Story of life of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the priest called "The Solidarity Chaplain", murdered by communist secret police.

The true story of Australia’s most notorious convict, Alexander Pearce and his infamous journey into the beautiful yet brutal Tasmanian wilderness. A point of no return for convicts banished from their homeland, Van Diemen’s Land was a feared and dreaded penal settlement at the end of the earth.

A band of Chicago counterfeiters hatched a plot to steal the President's body from its tomb outside Springfield, Illinois, and hold it for a ransom of $200,000. The story shows how important this beloved President remained to a public so unprepared for his violent death in 1865.

An unauthorized chronicle of the life of Roman Polanski.

In 1899, Lord Kang must decide which of his three sons will take over his family's Chinese banking empire. When circumstances dictate that he appoint his unreliable youngest son, family bonds are pushed to the limit as father and son clash in a climate of political turmoil. Winner of the Special Jury Award at the 2009 Shanghai International Film Festival.

We go behind the scenes and into the minds of artists as they capture, commemorate, and, at times, condemn our presidents.

The sinking of the Titanic was far more than a simple accident. It was a tragedy that could have been prevented. It was the result of a long chain of mistakes: a fatal series of avoidable human errors that sent the Titanic and more than half of her passengers to their watery graves. Based around the official inquiry held immediately after the event, plus evidence that's come to light since the wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985, National Geographic, in this drama-documentary special, answers the question: Who Sank the Titanic?

In the wake of one of the worst social experiments in the history of mankind, 'I'm not Black, I'm Coloured' is one of the first documentary films to look at the legacy of Apartheid from the viewpoint of the Cape Coloured. A people who in 1994, embraced the concept of Desmond Tutu's all encompassing 'rainbow nation', but soon thereafter realized that freedom, privilege, economic growth and equality would not include them. A people who for more than 350 years has been disregarded, ignored, belittled, and stripped of anything they can call their own enduring a complex psychological oppression and identity crisis unparalleled in South African history.

Just days after the Civil War ended, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre. As a fractured nation mourned, a manhunt closed in on his assassin, the twenty-six-year-old actor, John Wilkes Booth. The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln tracks the converging paths of the president and his killer, then tracks and draws connections between their last journeys, in the forms of Lincoln's funeral train route and Booth's desperate efforts to escape.

"The Wash is a portrait of the river wash that runs behind the older part of Newhall, California, where Lee and I used to live. We shot the wash on Super8 film and then finished it on video. It is a collaboration between us, describing the ways the wash is used, and the people who use it, ourselves included. It charts the way this land has changed since they began developing Newhall and the surrounding community of Valencia for housing, a development that is expected to bring over 250,000 more people into the area by the year 2015."

Kingdom of Hungary, 17th century. As she gets older, powerful Countess Erzsébet Báthory (1560-1614), blinded by the passion that she feels for a younger man, succumbs to the mad delusion that blood will keep her young and beautiful forever.

In the final phase of Salazar's life, the statesman recalls his life, his choices, the decisions he made, and those he could have made. Revealing the man behind the figure who ruled Portugal for 40 years was the great challenge: Salazar, as a statesman, is known to the general public. The myth of the stoic, staunchly religious, and asexual statesman is counterbalanced in this film.

A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.

On October 12th, 1978, New York Police discovered the lifeless body of a young woman, slumped under the bathroom sink in a hotel room. She was Nancy Spungen, an ex-prostitute, sometimes stripper, heroin addict, and girlfriend of Sex Pistols' bassist Sid Vicious.

The film interweaves the personal accounts of polio survivors with the story of an ardent crusader who tirelessly fought on their behalf while scientists raced to eradicate this dreaded disease. Based in part on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky, Features interviews with historians, scientists, polio survivors, and the only surviving scientist from the core research team that developed the Salk vaccine, Julius Youngner.

A compilation of twelve short stories from one of Puerto Rico's most prolific writers, Abelardo Díaz Alfaro. These are: "El figurín", "El ejecutivo", "El muerto encogío", "La historia de la polilla", "Julia Rosa", "El funerario", "La mujer y su poder de dominio", "La locura del Rock & Roll", "Las píldoras juvenilinas", "Una estatua al ñame", "El bautizo de la leche", and "Una suegra lista".

The story of Hannah Senesh, a Hungarian poet who was captured by the Nazis, while trying to rescue Jews in WWII.

The story of Robert Badinter who was the major architect of the abolition of the death penalty in France .