Vikram Jayanti

BBC series exploring cultures around the world.

According to recent science the Neanderthals are not the knuckle-dragging apemen of popular imagination. In fact they are our distant ancestors. About 2% of the DNA of most people is of Neanderthal origin—and it continues to affect us today. Ella Al-Shamahi enlists the skills of Andy Serkis, the master of performance capture, and a group of experts to investigate Neanderthals.

It's 1974. Muhammad Ali is 32 and thought by many to be past his prime. George Foreman is ten years younger and the heavyweight champion of the world. Promoter Don King wants to make a name for himself and offers both fighters five million dollars apiece to fight one another, and when they accept, King has only to come up with the money. He finds a willing backer in Mobutu Sese Suko, the dictator of Zaire, and the "Rumble in the Jungle" is set, including a musical festival featuring some of America's top black performers, like James Brown and B.B. King.

Explore the country legend's hard-fought road to stardom. From her Appalachian roots to the Oscar-winning biopic of her life, Coal Miner's Daughter, Loretta Lynn struggled to balance family and her music career and is still going strong after more than 50 years. The documentary premieres the same day Lynn's first new studio album in over 10 years is released.

Garry Kasparov is possibly the greatest chess player who has ever lived. In 1997, he played a match against the greatest chess computer: IBM's Deep Blue. He lost. This film depicts the drama that happened away from the chess board from Kasparov's perspective. It explores the psychological aspects of the game and the paranoia surrounding IBM's ultimate chess machine.

This documentary tells two stories simultaneously: it's a profile of Bernard Tapie, a wealthy man who rises and falls spectacularly in French society and may be on the rise again; and, it's a look at Marina Zenovich's fascination with Tapie, behaving oddly in spite of her awareness that she's being irrational. Politicians, athletes, friends, companions, and journalists comment on Bernard's charm, his rise to prominence in sports and politics, and his subsequent trouble with the law. Zenovich becomes fixated on her need to interview Tapie, becoming virtually a stalker in her quest.

One of the traditions peculiar to Europe is the annual Eurovision Song Contest, in which hopeful singers from across the continent - from Slovenia to Sweden and Cyprus to Croatia - attempt to prove their nation's dominance in the field of pop music. Filmmaker Marina Zenovich took her cameras to host country Estonia - the winner in 2001 - to document preparations for the 2002 contest, and found a hotbed of jealous rivalries, national outrage and soap-opera-style scandals. Why did winning duo Tanel and Dave break up just weeks after their win? Why is handsome actor Mart Sander passed over for the presenter job? How does Tanel's sister react when she fails to make the cut for the 2002 contest? Through interviews and observation, Zenovich creates what the London Guardian described as "A Star is Born with extra snow."

World War I began in August 1914, and by December all thoughts of quick victory had faded. Fighting was most fierce in a thin strip of land called the Western Front. A system of trenches separated Allies from Germans, with the area in between known as No Man's Land. On Christmas Eve, an astonishing event began--up and down the Western Front, Allied and German soldiers met peacefully in No Man's Land. Actor Ioan Gruffud narrates a feature-length look at the fabled Christmas truce, filled with eyewitness accounts.

Less than 100 film critics wield enormous power in deciding the financial success of Hollywood's major motion pictures. The film takes a humorous look at one of the industry's most important award shows.

Filmed as if through the president's own eyes, Lincoln goes deeper than any documentary has before to reveal the troubled depths behind the man known as the Great Emancipator.

A look at the life and influence of acclaimed sixties writer Ken Kesey. Features archive footage of his 1964 Magic Bus Tour with The Merry Pranksters.

Filmmaker Vikram Jayanti offers this gripping documentary that follows legally blind dogsled musher Rachael Scdoris as she competes in her third Iditarod, the punishing 1,161-mile dogsled race through the treacherous Alaskan wilderness. Accompanied by helper and Iditarod veteran Joe Runyan, Scdoris calls upon a remarkable well of courage and determination to contend with the dangerous race course, unusually vocal critics and her disability.

Lord Glenconner, a Scot, once owned Mustique, a verdant island in the Caribbean. He lives in St. Lucia with wife Lady Anne Coke (herself an Earl's daughter and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret) and their sole surviving son, Christopher, disabled by an accident. Glenconner visits Mustique, explores old haunts, and prepares an outdoor lunch for the Princess. He gets on with his wife; he's charming, irritable, waspish, a snob. With Margaret, he's unctuous and outrageously ribald. It's up close and personal with this aging, white-robed, old-moneyed European amongst Black workers and nouveau riche Americans. A portrait emerges of the rich against the backdrop of third-world paradise.

Loosely based on Franz Kafka’s short story, 'GIVE IT UP!' is a live-action animation odyssey through the confusion of life in the modern world. The narrative follows a lone salesman trapped in a timeless city, increasingly lost in his feverish dreams. Desperate, he races towards a train station as his last hope of escaping the city, encountering divine light, winding roads and the forces of bureaucracy. This deeply personal and referential work preserves Kafka’s absurd humour and pays homage to Weimar cinema of the 1920s, but also elevates the text to an existential meditation on authority, purpose and human helplessness.

An examination of the claims made for Uri Geller's career in espionage.

A documentary about James Ellroy and his fascination with unsolved murder cases, especially those of his mother, and the similar, infamous, Black Dahlia murder.

Phil Spector is a pioneer of American music, a legendary producer to John Lennon and Tina Turner, and, as of April 13th 2009, a convicted murderer. Yet the Spector who appears in Vikram Jayanti's documentary is not the severe, outlandishly coiffed defendant seen in sensationalistic accounts of his trial, but a charming, savvy music executive with a generous, but arguably accurate, estimation of his place in the history of popular music.

A warmly amusing look at a bus-full of American tourists on a whirlwind tour of Europe. The eclectic soundtrack includes Mozart, Bob Dylan, Sandy Denny, Jonathan Richman, others.

Jokes born of tragedy and/or current events (9/11, the Columbia space shuttle crash, the holocaust, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Rhode Island night club fire) are often tasteless, horrible - and funny. Sick Humor will tell you some of the most offensive jokes ever and then tell you where they come from and why most people can't resist passing them on.

The peculiarly American delight in talking about oneself is taken to extremes as a series of self-confessed sex addicts bravely discuss this dominant aspect of their lives. Intellectual weight is provided by the author Hubert Selby Jr , who achieved fame and notoriety with Last Exit to Brooklyn. He justifies an obsession with sex as an escape fromunhappiness: "Life becomes unbearable and people are always looking to get out of that pain." Among the nymphomaniacs and sado-masochists, the most touching contributions come from a hugely overweight woman who calmly recalls multiple rape - "They called me the Viking because I had such endurance" - before she became the star of such movie epics as Tons of Buns. The film is occasionally lightened by humour, as when the bondage enthusiast pulls an item from his bag of equipment: "That's my dog's collar- I don't know why it's in there!"