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Super Telescope: Mission to the Edge of the Universe

   2022    Technology
As NASA releases the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, this film tells the inside story of the telescope's construction and the astronomers taking its first picture of distant stars and galaxies. Will it be the deepest image of our universe ever taken? The successor to Hubble, and 100 times more powerful, the James Webb is the most technically advanced telescope ever built. It will look further back in time than Hubble to an era around 200 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies appeared. Webb's primary mission is to capture the faint light from these objects on the edge of our visible universe so that scientists can learn how they formed, but its instruments are so sensitive it could also be the first telescope to detect signs of life on a distant planet.
The James Webb Telescope is an £8 billion gamble on the skills of its engineering team. It’s the first telescope designed to unfold in space – a complicated two-week operation in which 178 release devices must all work - 107 of them on the telescope's sun shield alone. If just one fails, the expensive telescope could become a giant piece of space junk.
From its conception in the late 1980s, the construction of Webb has posed a huge technical challenge. The team must build a mirror six times larger than Hubble’s and construct a vast sun shield the size of a tennis court, fold them up so they fit into an Ariane 5 rocket, then find a way to unfold them in space. This film tells the inside story of the James Webb Space Telescope in the words of the engineers who built it and the astronomers who will use it.

Delay

   2022    Culture
The last chapter explains how the 2010s became another lost decade in the fight against climate change – as the move to natural gas delayed a transition to more renewable sources of energy.
Engineer Tony Ingraffea, in the 1980s, helped develop a new technique for extracting gas and oil from shale rock, which ultimately became known as 'Fracking'. It was to unleash vast new reserves of fossil fuels and was promoted as a cleaner energy source. But Ingraffea explains how he later came to regret his work when he realized that gas could be even worse for climate change than coal and oil.
Dar-Lon Chang, a former ExxonMobil engineer, speaks for the first time on camera alleging that as the company increased its natural gas operations, it was not sufficiently monitoring methane leaks that were contributing to climate change. Now, after a year of unprecedented wildfires, drought and other climate-related disasters, multiple lawsuits are being brought in US courts in efforts to hold Big Oil legally accountable for the climate crisis.
Series: Big Oil vs The World

The Homeless

   2022    History
The Chicago Tribune in late June of '42 reports the mass killing of Jews. Like many other newspapers, the Tribune puts it on page 6 or 7 in a tiny, little article. You either missed it, or if you saw it, you would say the editors don't think this is true. If they thought this was true, this would be on the front pages. Only a few of papers did put the story on the front page, including the Pittsburgh Courier.
The dominant idea in the American government is any act of rescue will be a diversion from the war effort. Both could've been done at the same time. In spite of that, a group of government officials supports and finances rescue operations. Allied soldiers begin to liberate concentration camps and find mass graves. The public sees the sheer scale of the Holocaust.
Series: The U.S. and the Holocaust

God Forbid

   2022    History
In this revealing documentary, Giancarlo Granda, former pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Hotel, shares the intimate details of his 7-year relationship with a charming older woman, Becki Falwell, and her husband, the Evangelical Trump stalwart Jerry Falwell Jr. Directed by Billy Corben, the film outlines Granda's entanglement with the Falwell's seemingly perfect lives and the overarching influence this affair had on a presidential election.
The life of Jerry Falwell — the late Moral Majority televangelist who for decades helped catalyze the rightward shift of American evangelicals before his death in 2007 — is a quintessentially American story. But it’s in the next generation that the Falwell narrative becomes at once soap opera and morality tale. The film covers the graceless fall of Jerry Falwell Jr., who after the death of his father was placed in the presidency of the family’s conservative organ Liberty University. There, he seemed to remain painfully in thrall to his appetites. We hear testimony about his alleged tendency to drink on the job and discomfiting, slurry interviews between him and sympathetic media — but most crucially, we receive the testimony of Giancarlo Granda.
Granda was a pool attendant at a Miami hotel when he met Falwell and his wife, Becki, in 2012. Today, he alleges that he was persuaded to have sex with Becki while Falwell watched, and that the pair engaged in an ongoing campaign of communication with him that could be described as coercive. His energies were consumed with managing their tempers and occasionally threatening behavior, and he blames the swirl of scandal around them for derailing his professional future. Plainspoken and only occasionally visibly emotional, Granda is his own best advocate as he describes a couple who, he says, craved his body and were willing to discard the rest of him.

Strange Relations

   2022    Nature
Witness the secret powers of extraordinary animals, experience the world as they do and see the SUPER/NATURAL side of nature as never before. Executive produced by James Cameron and narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, this series uses the scientific innovations and leading-edge filmmaking technology to reveal the secret powers and super-senses of the world’s extraordinary animals. See flowers in bee-vision to eavesdropping on conversations between elephant seals to soaring the length of a football field with glow-in-the-dark squirrels.
They say in nature that only the strongest survive. But when cooperation and communication bring animals and plants together and superpowers combine even the most vulnerable can become unstoppable. If you think you know nature, think again.
Series: Super/Natural

Catastrophe and Annihilation

   2021    History
After more than a century of civil war, Toyotomi Hideyoshi has united Japan. His rivals have either sworn their allegiance, or they have been destroyed. Despite this fledgling peace, Hideyoshi now dreams of a bold and outlandish plan to make himself the most powerful man in Asia. He plans to expand his reign to China. Logistical challenges and fierce operation in Korea prove to be costly.
Series: Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan
Tiger

Tiger

2020  History
The Jinx

The Jinx

  History
Leaving Neverland

Leaving Neverland

2019  Culture
The Human Body

The Human Body

1998  Medicine