Cobra Gypsies offers a contemporary and colorful window to the amazing ancient culture of the nomadic Kalbeliya tribe, living in rural Rajasthan, Northern India. Their name means 'those who love snakes'. The film explores their culture of eternal dance, syncopated music, snake charming, colorful fashion and the nomadic way of life of these exotic looking castoffs, ancestors to the modern Roma Gypsies living in Europe today.
Humans are so clever they’ve built their own habitat, designed to keep wild nature out. Yet as we discover the urban environment is totally dependant on the natural world. Over the three years of filming for Human Planet, the teams have spent time with over seventy different communities in countries across the planet. Despite seeing many different ways of living, there are some aspects of family life that remain the same whether you live in a tree house in West Papua, or a brick house in Bolton. These similarities became very clear when the urban team went to film on a rubbish dump in Kenya. Here on the Kibarani dump on the outskirts of Mombasa, Ali, Ashe and their family live and survive amongst the rubbish, and even here, just like anywhere on the planet, everything stops for a nice cup of tea!
From lush cloud forests to bare summits that take your breath away, the higher you climb the tougher life gets on a mountain. Human Planet explores the extraordinary ways in which people survive at extreme altitudes where nature becomes utterly unforgiving. In the Altai Mountains in Western Mongolia the vast open spaces make hunting for animals almost impossible, so the locals have forged an astonishing partnership with golden eagles which can do the hunting for them. On the precipitous cliffs of the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia we join a young boy locked in a dramatic battle with fearsome gelada monkeys which are hell-bent on raiding his family's meagre grain harvest. In the Himalayan state of Nepal - the roof of the world - we witness a rarely seen ceremony: a sky burial. In a land where there is little wood to burn for cremation, and where burying the dead is virtually impossible, the dead are fed to vultures in the ultimate reverence of nature.
A travel across Armenia, one of the most fascinating places in Europe.
The marvelous adaptation of the Armenian people, their exemplary spiritual strength and the establishment of enduring culture have made possible the consolidation of a lineage that for millennia, has kept alive the legacy of one of the world's oldest civilizations.
Through the mountains and jungles of Colombia, Cooper goes in search of the truth behind one of the greatest stories ever told - the legend of El Dorado. His journey takes him from Bogota to the Caribbean coast, through territories once dominated by two cultures, the Muisca and the Tairona, who flourished for centuries before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century. Cooper reveals forgotten peoples who valued gold in a way the Western world still struggles to understand, travelling to an astonishing lost city and meeting the last survivors of an ancient civilisation.
