Presenting journalistic documentaries capturing the world's overlooked people and places.
Filmmaker Gabriel Leigh takes us into the complicated world of the frequent-flyer-mileage obsessed.
Southern Africa: Troubled Water: What happened to the promise of the PlayPump? Haiti: The Rice Dilemma: The third in a series of FRONTLINE reports on Haiti with correspondent Adam Davidson of NPR's Planet Money. West Papua: The Clever One In the remote highlands of Indonesia, an American artist finds a peculiar bird with a special talent.
In this special edition, three stories from a country battling for its own survival.
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy takes a dangerous journey through Pakistan to investigate the recruitment methods of a militant branch of the Taliban; Correspondent Douglas Rushkoff travels to South Korea to see how the country's digital revolution is changing the place and its people.
The inside story of a group of shop owners and young activists who stood up to the powerful Sicilian mafia. Carola Mamberto explores the story of a restaurant owner - backed by an upstart anti-mafia movement of young people and an elite law enforcement team - who refused to pay the mafia's monthly "tax," taking a stand against mob bosses who've kept Italy in their grip for decades.
Filmmaker Beate Arnestad moved to Sri Lanka in 2002 and saw that an entire generation was growing up surrounded by violence. Her resulting film My Daughter the Terrorist, recut and excerpted here, goes inside the special Tamil Tigers' suicide division and is believed to be the first time any suicide bomber has spoken on film about their training and motivations.
On the one-year anniversary of Burma's September uprising, when hundreds of thousands of monks protested for change, the country's military junta continues to wage war against its own people and the crisis there has slipped back into obscurity. Our correspondent inside Burma reports on what comes next for the pro-democracy movement there.
Elena Ghanotakis reports from Cape Town, South Africa, home to extreme disparities between rich and poor and the highest levels of sexual violence in the world.
Cataracts are the leading cause of preventable blindness in the world. In Tibet, where many people live at 15,000 feet, the disease is epidemic. After meeting with the Dalai Lama and struggling with his own religious identity, American Dr. Marc Lieberman, set out to help. "Eye Camp" follows his mission to restore vision at the top of the world.
With Iraq mired in a chaotic civil war, those who can get out are doing so. According to the latest United Nations figures, 50,000 Iraqis a month are now leaving their country. Those who remain try to survive any way they can, like the resourceful Kurdish smugglers in this week's Rough Cut.
Trying to become a baseball star in a small, poor country in West Africa, where soccer is the sport of choice, is a tall order. But as reporter Zachary Stauffer discovers in this week's Rough Cut, Ghana has some true believers in America's game.
"You must learn how to say no", booms Ugandan evangelical minister Martin Ssempa. "Say I do not want to have sex. I have chosen not to have sex". So begins this Rough Cut, which looks at the controversy over U.S. funding for AIDS relief in Africa.
While trekking in Nepal in 1998, American John Wood saw that many children couldn't afford to go to school and that schools in the poorest rural areas had a chronic shortage of books. It was a transformational experience for Wood that spurred him to start a literacy program called Room to Read.
Samantha Grant heads to Chennai in southern India to explore the illicit kidney trade. Traveling between India's high-tech center of Bangalore and the slums to the south, Grant spoke to government officials, doctors, kidney brokers and donors to try to find out why so many people are still getting paid to give up their kidneys even though a law was passed 12 years ago to regulate the practice.
Who hasn't dreamed of one day living on a far-off island in the South Pacific? But there is trouble in paradise, especially if you live on an island nation as narrow and flat as Tuvalu, where the average elevation is a mere six feet above sea level. When you live that close to the water's edge you pay very close attention to the ocean, especially if it begins to rise.
Karzan Sherabayani is a Kurdish exile living in Britain. Twenty-five years ago, Sherabayani escaped from Iraq, where he had been imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein's secret police. In January 2005, he returned to Kirkuk, to vote in the first national elections since the overthrow of Saddam's regime. Swiss producer Claudio von Planta went with him to film the story for the BBC.
