Utopia (2013)

Utopia is a feature-length documentary created by John Pilger. He takes a look at the story of the first Australians, the Aboriginal people, against a background of the country’s economic boom built significantly on a wealth of natural minerals.

Illegal Immigrants And Proud (2014)

Every day, hundreds of immigrants risk a potentially fatal journey in order to enter the UK illegally. Following on from the Channel 5 programme ‘Gypsies on Benefits’, this documentary film follows some of the 800,000 illegal immigrants who are thought to have settled in the UK and who have managed to live their lives largely below the authorities’ radar.

* Coming Home (2013)

In 1944, Stalin deported 218,000 Crimean Tatars to Central Asia - we tell the story of their struggle to return home. Using personal testimonies, this film tells the story of the Tatars' expulsion from their homeland and their long struggle to return. It was only in 1989, with the opening up of the Soviet Union, that they were able to come back in large numbers. Most, finding Russians living in their former homes, built shacks in which to live. Today, 300,000 Tatars live in Crimea - 5,000 of them still in shacks. Even those with houses suffer because they only have minority status. Despite this, 150,000 more are still hoping to return home. An Al Jazeera production.

* We Were Here: The AIDS Years in San Francisco (2011)

Filmmakers David Weissman and Bill Weber co-directed the 2001 documentary, The Cockettes, chronicling San Francisco's legendary theater troupe of hippies and drag queens, 1969 -1972. We Were Here revisits San Francisco a decade later, as its flourishing gay community is hit with an unimaginable disaster. We Were Here is the first documentary to take a deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco. It explores how the City's inhabitants were affected by, and how they responded to, that calamitous epidemic. Though a San Francisco-based story, We Were Here extends beyond San Francisco and beyond AIDS itself. It speaks to our capacity as individuals to rise to the occasion, and to the incredible power of a community coming together with love, compassion, and determination.

* Pencils and Bullets (2013)

Having the chance to attend school, two Turkmen girls in Afghanistan reveal their hopes and fears for the future. Considerably improved access to education, especially for girls, is perhaps one of the most dramatic social changes in Afghanistan in the last 12 years. Since 2001, when the Taliban were toppled from power by US-backed Afghan forces, three million girls have returned to school. Women were previously banned from work and education under Taliban rule. But periodic attacks against female students, their teachers and their school buildings, continue. Produced by Al Jazeera.

* Afghanistan's Hunted Women (2013)

Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Wael Dabbous travel to Afghanistan, gaining rare access to the secret houses that shelter women hiding from violent husbands or from families who have tried to kill them for refusing to take part in arranged marriages. Improving women's rights was supposed to be one of the great legacies of Britain's involvement in Afghanistan, but Unreported World reveals that, as international forces start to pull out, powerful religious hardliners are trying to roll back new laws that protect women.

* Winter of Discontent (2013)

Circassians are protesting at the holding of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games 150 years after being expelled from their land. An excited Russia gears up to host the 2014 Winter Olympics but outside the country, its chosen site is stirring powerful memories and strong emotions. For most Russians, the town of Sochi represents one of the country's finest ski resorts in an area of outstanding natural beauty. But for exiled Circassians, the same land harbours a devastating secret. It was the place their ancestors endured terrible atrocities in the late 1800's in a series of military campaigns by tsarist forces. Campaigners believe one million Circassians were driven out and 1.5 million killed in what they want the world to recognise as a genocide that lasted 100 years, or by other calculations 200 years. What is known and documented is that within a generation, only 10 percent of the Circassian population remained on the land. Sochi was the last territory conquered by the Russian Empire through force of arms. After massacring a population already weakened by starvation and war, the land was occupied. Winter of Discontent examines a protest 150 years in the making as Circassians object to the holding of the 2014 Winter Olympic games in the city of Sochi.

* Utopia (2013)

Utopia is a feature-length documentary created by John Pilger. He takes a look at the story of the first Australians, the Aboriginal people, against a background of the country's economic boom built significantly on a wealth of natural minerals.

* The English Defence League - When Tommy Met Mo (2013)

When Tommy Robinson, then leader of the EDL, met Mo Ansar, the Muslim who campaigned to ban the EDL, on BBC One's The Big Questions, it turned out to be the encounter that changed everything.

* Secrets of the Dead: Slave Ship Mutiny (2010)

When the Meermin set sail from Madagascar for South Africa on a hot summer's day in 1766, the Dutch crew had no idea they were about to make history. The ship was filled to capacity with human cargo, slaves bound for hard labor building the Dutch West India Company's colony at Cape Town. But the Meermin with its crew and cargo would never make it to Cape Town. Instead, in a dramatic altercation, the slaves mutinied and managed to overpower the Dutch crew, ordering the ship be sailed back to Madagascar and freedom. But the crew of experience sailors deceived the slaves and turned the boat around each evening to make for Cape Town. And so the circumstances for a dramatic climax – and shipwreck – were laid when the ship and its desperate passengers finally spied land.

* Latino Americans (2013)

Latino Americans is the first major documentary series for television to chronicle the rich and varied history and experiences of Latinos, who have for the past 500-plus years helped shape what is today the United States and have become, with more than 50 million people, the largest minority group in the U.S.

The series chronicles Latinos in the United States from the 1500's to present day. It is a story of people, politics, and culture, intersecting with much that is central to the history of the United States while also going to places where standard U.S. histories do not tend to tread. Latino Americans relies on historical accounts and personal experiences to vividly tell the stories of early settlement, conquest and immigration; of tradition and reinvention; and of anguish and celebration, from the millions of people who come to the U.S. from Mexico, Spain, Puerto Rico, and countries in Central and South America.

Latino Americans is driven by the human dramas of individuals' struggles and triumphs, successes and disappointments, featuring interviews with close to 100 Latinos from the worlds of politics, business, military, academia, literature, and pop culture, as well as deeply personal portraits of Latinos who lived through key chapters in American history. LATINO AMERICANS is the story of the gradual construction of a new American identity that connects and empowers millions of people today.

Foreigners in their Own Land (1565-1880)

One hundred years after Columbus' arrival in the Caribbean, Spanish Conquistadors and Priests, push into North America in search of gold and to spread Catholicism. With the arrival of the British in North America, the two colonial systems produce contrasting societies that come in conflict as Manifest Destiny pushes the U.S into the Mexican territories of the South West. As the Gold Rush floods California with settlers, complex and vital communities are overwhelmed. The elites, including Mariano Vallejo and Apolinaria Lorenzana lose their land. Mexicans and Mexican Americans are treated as second-class citizens, facing discrimination and racial violence. Resistance to this injustice appears in New Mexico as Las Gorras Blancas (The White Caps), burn Anglo ranches and cut through barbed wire to prevent Anglo encroachment. At the same time, New Mexicans manage to transform themselves through education, managing to preserve Hispano culture in New Mexico and their standing in the midst of an era of conquest and dispossession. 

Empire of Dreams (1880-1942)

Widespread immigration to the U.S. from Latin countries begins – first with a small group from Cuba, then a larger one from Mexico. Both flee chaos and violence in their home country and are attracted by opportunities in the United States. In 1898, the U.S. helps liberate Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain but then seizes Puerto Rico as its colony. The first Puerto Rican arrivals (now U.S. citizens) establish a network in New York. 

War and Peace (1942-1954)

World War II is a watershed event for Latino Americans with hundreds of thousands of men and women serving in the armed forces, most fighting side by side with Anglos. In the Pacific, East L.A.'s Guy Gabaldon becomes a Marine Corp legend when he singlehandedly captures more enemy soldiers than anyone in US military history. But on the home front, discrimination is not dead: in 1943, Anglo servicemen battle hip young "Zoot suitors" in racially charged riots in southern California. 

The New Latinos (1946-1965)

Until World War II, Latino immigration to the United States was overwhelmingly Mexican-American. Now three new waves bring large-scale immigration from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. As the Puerto Rican government implements a historic overhaul over a million Puerto Ricans are encouraged to leave for the US mainland, to alleviate the economic pressure. A young Juanita Sanabria arrives in New York, works hard in the garment district, but encounters hostility and discrimination. Ethnic tensions explode in youth gang warfare depicted in films like West Side Story, etching the stereotype of the knife wielding Puerto Rican in the American consciousness. 

Prejudice and Pride (1965-1980)

In the 1960s and 1970s a generation of Mexican Americans, frustrated by persistent discrimination and poverty, find a new way forward, through social action and the building of a new "Chicano" identity. The movement is ignited when farm workers in the fields of California, led by C財r Chavez and Dolores Huerta, march on Sacramento for equal pay and humane working conditions. Through plays, poetry and film, Luis Valdez and activist Corky Gonzalez create a new appreciation of the long history of Mexicans in the South West and the Mestizo roots of Mexican Americans. In Los Angeles, Sal Castro, a schoolteacher, leads the largest high school student walkout in American history, demanding that Chicano students be given the same educational opportunities as Anglos. In Texas, activists such as Jos硁ngel Guti豲ez, create a new political party and change the rules of the electoral game. By the end of the 1970s Chicanos activism and identity have transformed what it means to be an American. Chicano and Latino studies are incorporated into school curriculum; Latinos are included in the political process. 

Peril and Promise (1980-2000)

In the 80s the nature of the Latino Diaspora changes again. From Cuba a second wave of refugees to United States – the Mariel exodus – floods Miami . The same decade sees the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of Central Americans (Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans) fleeing death squads and mass murders at home like activist, Carlos Vaquerano. By the early 1990s, a political debate over illegal immigration – has begun. Globalization, empowered by NAFTA, means that as U.S. manufacturers move south, Mexican workers head north in record numbers. A backlash ensues: tightened borders, anti-bilingualism, state laws to declare all illegal immigrants felons. But a sea change is underway: the coalescence of a new phenomenon called Latino American culture-as Latinos spread geographically and make their mark in music, sports, politics, business, and education. 

* Hue: A Matter of Colour (2013)

Giant steps have been taken world-wide to eliminate racism, yet an ancient and widespread form of discrimination called colourism -- when people from one race discriminate against others of that race based on their skin tone -- has been largely ignored. Hue, the latest documentary from acclaimed Canadian filmmaker, Vic Sarin, brings us face to face with the effects of this insidious form of intolerance. Light skin preference is alive and well in communities of colour around the globe. In Hue, international notables of the entertainment and political realm weigh in on this multi-cultural phenomenon: one that affects the selection of orphans in India, fuels a billion dollar skin-whitening fashion industry in China, and is sparking a trend at fertility clinics in the United States where, increasingly, African American women are requesting light-skinned donors. Hue is a personal point-of-view documentary tracing one man's provocative exploration of colour hierarchy within a variety of cultures worldwide. Director Vic Sarin plays the part of both student and provocateur as he seeks answers to his own questions while sparking debate on colourism. Hue will take you from continent to continent to share the raw and personal stories of those most affected by colourism, while exposing just how prevalent it is in the 21st century.

* Black France (2013)

Black France looks at the history of France's black community and their long struggle for recognition. In May 2013, France's National Assembly successfully voted on a bill to remove the words 'race' and 'racial' from the country's penal code.French President Francois Hollande ran on a platform promising to eliminate the word 'race' from France's constitution. But critics were quick to point out the disparity between constitutional reform and actual practice. Between one and five million French citizens claim African or Caribbean heritage. These numbers are, however, estimates, as population censuses do not recognise race. For over a century, black immigrants, though never officially identified as different, were treated as 'others'. Even today, of France's 577 members of parliament, only five are black. This three-part series tells the story of blacks in France - a long history of segregation, racism, protest, violence, culture and community building - from the turn of the 20th century until the present day.

Episode 1
Conflicting Identities Looks back on what it meant to be both black and French in the decades before France's African colonies achieved independence.

Episode 2
The Battle for Social Justice Reveals the ongoing struggles of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean to achieve rights, form communities and have their contributions to French society recognised.

Episode 3
The Immigration Problem Focuses on the extreme racism and discrimination black immigrants faced during times of economic hardship and through political shifts in post-World War II France. Produced by Phares and Balises for Al Jazeera.