The Man who Tried to Feed the World • 2020

98:43

Mikhail Gorbachev helped to shape the 20th century, being the architect of glasnost and perestroika. His actions brought down the Berlin Wall, giving countries of the former Soviet Union a chance to break away and be free. But while to many in the west he remains a hero, in his own country Gorbachev is condemned for destroying the Soviet empire. This film is an intimate portrait of the former Russian leader in his final years, before his death in August 2022, living alone in an empty house outside Moscow and carrying the burdens of his past.

2022 • People

58:54

Nearly 80 years after her death, Marie Curie remains by far the best known female scientist. In her lifetime, she became that rare thing: a celebrity scientist, attracting the attention of the news cameras and tabloid gossip. They were fascinated because she was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and is still the only person to have won two Nobels in two different sciences. But while the bare bones of her scientific life, the obstacles she had to overcome, the years of painstaking research, and the penalty she ultimately paid for her discovery of radium have become one of the iconic stories of scientific heroism, there is another side to Marie Curie: her human story. This multi-layered film reveals the real Marie Curie, an extraordinary woman who fell in love three times, had to survive the pain of loss, and the public humiliation of a doomed love affair. It is a riveting portrait of a tenacious mother and scientist, who opened the door on a whole new realm of physics, which she discovered and named: radioactivity. Full title - The Genius of Marie Curie: The Woman Who Lit Up the World

2013 • People

53:07

The first world power goes to war against drugs: the United States strikes hard. But the drug trade never dies. It moves, transforms, adapts. As the war on drugs progresses around the world, a new generation of drug lords emerged at the end of the 1970s, more powerful than ever. These criminals were not only in it for the money; they also wanted power. Pablo Escobar was the most notorious, but there was also Toto Riina in Sicily, Khun Sa in the Golden Triangle, and Felix Gallardo in Mexico, all of whom changed the destinies of their respective territories by taking drug trafficking to a global scale. They defied states and threatened the powers-that-be. It took almost 20 years for states to get organized and come up with strategies to bring down the drug barons.

S1E2 • The Story of Drug Trafficking • 2020 • People

477:54

(All 6 parts are merged into one) Love, power, money, ghosts of empire, conspiracies, artificial intelligence – and You.An emotional history of the modern world by Adam Curtis. Chapter 1 - Bloodshed on Wolf MountainWe are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe and America societies have become split and polarised. There is anger at the inequality and the ever growing corruption - and a widespread distrust of the elites. Into this has come the pandemic that has brutally dramatised those divisions. But despite the chaos, there is a paralysis - a sense that no one knows how to escape from this.Can't Get You Out of My Head tells how we got to this place. And why both those in power - and we - find it so difficult to move on. At its heart is the strange story of what happened when people's inner feelings got mixed up with power in the age of individualism. How the hopes and dreams and uncertainties inside people's minds met the decaying forces of old power in Britain, America, Russia and China. What resulted was a block not just in the society - but also inside our own heads - that stops us imagining anything else than this. Chapter 2 - Shooting and F**king are the Same ThingThe story of what tore the revolutions in the 1960s apart. Jiang Qing in China, Michael X in London, Afeni Shakur in New York believed that millions of people's minds were haunted by the corruption and the violence of the past. They wanted to show people how to escape those ghosts.But they hadn't reckoned with the fact that the old structures of power still haunted their minds too. They too had been scarred by the past - and some of them wanted violent revenge. While psychologists and neuroscientists were starting to discover what they said were hidden forces inside the human brain that really controlled what they did. But the people weren't aware. Chapter 3 - Money Changes EverythingThe story of how in the 1970s those in power set out to create a world free of the dangerous big ideas of the past. They banished the grand dreams of changing the world. And replaced them with money. People would live from now on in their own heads - in their own dreams. And the banks would lend them the money to create those dreams. While China would supply a wave of cheap consumer goods on a scale never seen before in the world.But then money broke free across the world. And people started to get frightened that things were out of control. Not just money - but the world's climate too seemed to be behaving in a strange, unpredictable way. The systems seemed to have a life of their own. Beyond the ability of anyone to shape and predict. Chapter 4 - But What If the People Are Stupid?No one trusted politics or politicians any longer. Instead we were all one world of free individuals. And we could intervene to save other individuals around the world without bothering with old politics and power. And people became what they as individuals truly were - emotionally and sexually. But power was mutating and finding ways to work its way back into our heads.The politicians realised that they no longer had the support or the trust of the people. So they switched sides and gave up being our representatives who would challenge the powerful on our behalf. Instead they began to tell us what to do on behalf of the powerful. And they made new alliances - with the psychologists who said that human beings were irrational and needed to be managed. But we didn't notice because we were too busy shopping. Chapter 5 - The Lordly OnesIt wasn't just the Slave Trade. 150 years ago Britain had wrecked China by forcing opium on the country. It made Britain the richest and most powerful country in the world. But it enslaved the minds of millions of the Chinese and helped destroy the society. But then the British got frightened of what they had done and created a dream image of a Britain that had never existed. To hide from the fear.This film tells the story of how from the end of the 19th century a magical vision of Britain's feudal past was created by artists and writers. How folk music and folk dancing was invented to create a kind of safe dream of the nation that could hide the violence and the horrors. The dream persisted under the surface of the 20th century. But as the fears and uncertainties and the chaos of the last few years rose up millions of people started to believe that dream. That it was real. Chapter 6 - Are We Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer?The final episode tells how the strange paralysis that grips us today was created. How all the different forces of our age - that started out as separate have come together to create what is a block against imagining another kind of future than this.How, money and debt, melancholy over the loss of empire, the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opioids, Artificial Intelligence - and love and power have all fed into creating the present time of anxiety and fearfulness about the future.And whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really also part of the rigid system - in the West and in Russia and China - where those in power have run out of all ideas. The film also lays out what are the different possible roads from here into the future, and the choices we will have to make about the very different futures we will have to choose very soon.

2021 • People

5:41

We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day. And although we’ve spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect these lies by tracking physiological changes in their tellers, these methods have proved unreliable. Is there a more direct approach?

TED-Ed • People

52:01

A language that can be spoken, hummed, or whistled? A language with no unique words for colour or numbers? Linguistics professor Daniel Everett claims that the unique language of the Piraha people of the Amazon is exactly that. More than 30 years ago, he travelled as a missionary into the Amazon rainforest to teach the tribe, but they ended up teaching him. Their way of life and unique form of communication have profoundly changed Everett, and inspired a theory that could undermine the most powerful theory (or theorist) of linguistics.

2012 • People