A dramatization, in modern theatrical style, of the life and thought of the Viennese-born, Cambridge-educated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose principal interest was the nature and limits of language. A series of sketches depict the unfolding of his life from boyhood, through the era of the...
The tumultuous events surrounding the sub-continent's partition in 1947 into India and Pakistan are re-imagined in Ken McMullen's complex and visually striking film. A lunatic asylum in the city of Lahore becomes a mirror image of events in the outside political world, with the same actors playing...
E. P. Thompson, a British historian, poet, novelist and activist, was a voice of dissent in the dogmatic political environment of 20th century Europe. As a member of the New Left, his work and activism sought to bridge the gap between Marxist theory and practice, and to heal the fracture of the...
Christopher Hitchens investigates whether Mother Teresa of Calcutta deserves her saintly image. He probes her campaigns against contraception and abortion and her questionable relationships with right-wing political leaders.
Presented by the late literary critic Edward Said, this thirty-seven minute 1992 documentary reflects on director Gillo Pontecorvo's youth and politics in an attempt to understand his approach to filmmaking.
Images of Atlantis: The Photography of Milton Rogovin
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Milton Rogovin is an 82-year-old photographer in Buffalo, New York, who began taking photographs in the ‘50s. In this programme, Rogovin discusses his work, whilst the subjects of his photographs talk about their lives and attitudes to being photographed.
Gerard Sekoto was a pioneer of 20th century urban black art. Self taught as a painter, he was the first to reflect South African township life in all its colour, richness and struggle, before travelling to Paris to study and enhance his unique reputation as an artist.
The deep North-South divide in Italy is explored through the eyes of northern anti-fascist writer and painter, Carlo Levi, who is exiled by Mussolini to a remote village in Southern Italy. Levi falls in love with the ancient traditions of Southern peasant culture and becomes a passionate advocate,...
A Channel Four special presentation of the Royal Court Theatre 1989 production, London. with Paul Bhattacharjee, Nabil Shaban and Fiona Victory. "Iranian Nights" was a play written and produced as a direct response by writers and artists to the notorious Feb 14 1989 Fatwa (a sentence of death)...
Drama based on the life and thought of Spinoza, who was born in sixteenth century Amsterdam to a family of Jewish refugees from Portugal. He lived in an age of turmoil, when the Dutch Republic and the English Commonwealth had polarised the entire continent. His scepticism enraged the Jewish elders...
Theo Angelopoulos recalls the defining moment in 1964 that led to him to live his entire life in Greece, and explores the concept of borders in his work - as the limits of existence, of life and death, of language and communication. “Narrowing down the borders narrows the communication, stretches...
