Nick Fraser

A portrait of the brilliant American writer Truman Capote (1924-84) and the New York high society of his time.

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Emmy-winning Sierra Leonean filmmaker Sorious Samura has grown tired telling negative stories about Africa. He embarks on a journey with his best friend, Sierra Leone’s most famous playwright, to create an epic work of national theatre – a play to reclaim their country from negative media narratives and the damaging legacy of colonial rule. It doesn’t go as planned.

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The documentary traces speculation on the commodities markets and its political, social and military consequences.

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This exploration of Japan's fascination with girl bands and their music follows an aspiring pop singer and her fans, delving into the cultural obsession with young female sexuality and the growing disconnect between men and women in hypermodern societies.

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Carne Ross was a government highflyer. A career diplomat who believed Western Democracy could save us all. But working inside the system he came to see its failures, deceits and ulterior motives. He felt at first hand the corruption of power. After the Iraq war Carne became disillusioned, quit his job and started searching for answers.

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The Real Story of Fake Democracy. Filmed over three years in five countries, FREEDOM FOR THE WOLF is an epic investigation into the new regime of illiberal democracy. From the young students of Hong Kong, to a rapper in post-Arab Spring Tunisia and the viral comedians of Bollywood, we discover how people from every corner of the globe are fighting the same struggle. They are fighting against elected leaders who trample on human rights, minorities, and their political opponents.

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Obsessed young lovers, heinous murders, a sensational trial, and a shocking miscarriage of justice. Killing for Love is a riveting dissection of the 1985 courtroom battle that played out on television, and its disturbing aftermath. Convicted of brutally murdering his girlfriend’s parents, Jens Soering has been in prison for over 30 years. The series reveals for the first time the mounting evidence of his innocence.

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Hong Kong, 1978. South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee is kidnapped by North Korean operatives following orders from dictator Kim Jong-il.

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After losing sight in 1983, John Hull began keeping an audio diary, a unique testimony of loss, rebirth and renewal, excavating the interior world of blindness. Following on from the Emmy Award-winning short film of the same name, Notes on Blindness is an ambitious and groundbreaking work, both affecting and innovative.

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The story of a famously lavish five-day party held by the Shah of Iran in 1971 to celebrate 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. The event was held at a specially constructed oasis surrounded by a city of tents and attended by 60 world leaders, who enjoyed a five-course banquet and a pageant featuring thousands of soldiers dressed in historical costume. However, the decadence on display had far-reaching consequences, breeding resentment of the Shah's regime among the Iranian people.

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Using only archive film and a new musical score by the band Mogwai, Mark Cousins presents an impressionistic kaleidoscope of our nuclear times – protest marches, Cold War sabre-rattling, Chernobyl and Fukishima – but also the sublime beauty of the atomic world, and how x-rays and MRI scans have improved human lives. The nuclear age has been a nightmare, but dreamlike too.

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Can you imagine what it means to grow up as the child of a mass murderer? Hans Frank and Otto von Wächter were indicted as war criminals for their roles in WWII. Nazi Governors and consultants to Hitler himself, the two are collectively responsible for thousands of deaths. But what stood out to Philippe Sands were the impressions they left on their sons. While researching the Nuremberg trials, the human rights lawyer came across two men who re-focused his studies: Niklas Frank and Horst von Wächter. The men hold polar opposite views on the men who raised them.

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In this funny and moving documentary, acclaimed film-maker Daisy Asquith tells the very personal story of her mother's conception after a dance in the 1940s on the remote west coast of Ireland. By exploring the repercussions of this act, Daisy and her mother embark on a fascinating and emotional adventure in social and sexual morality. Her grandmother, compelled to run away to have her baby in secret, handed the child over to 'the nuns'. Daisy's mum was eventually adopted by English Catholics from Stoke-on-Trent. Her grandmother returned to Ireland and told no-one. The father remained a mystery for another 60 years, until Daisy and her mum decided it was time to find out who he was. Their attempts to find the truth make raw the fear and shame that Catholicism has wrought on the Irish psyche for centuries. It leads Daisy and her mum to connect with a brand new family living an extraordinarily different life.

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Mike Epps, Richard Pryor Jr. and others recount the culture-defining influence of Richard Pryor - one of America's most brilliant, iconic comic minds.

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Documentary about Chinese higher education: the pressure to get into state-sponsored schools, and the marketing of private colleges that may not provide the education they promise.

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From the team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim's extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature - and indeed our own - is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

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This first story in a six part series covers almost twenty years of history. It is a story of escalating violence and repression, one nation on a collision course with the rest of the world. When the United Nations adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, South Africa marches in the opposite direction and begins to implement a series of laws segregating its people by race in every aspect of life, prompting the non-white majority led by the ANC to protest. The non-violent movement picks up supporters all over the world, starting first with a network of Gandhites in Britain, Sweden, and the United States. But Apartheid hardens in the face of this resistance. By the fateful year of 1964, Nelson Mandela is jailed for life, and the entire leadership is forced underground, imprisoned or killed. The movement is effectively shut down in South Africa as hundreds escape into exile.

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What happens when western anthropologists descend on the Amazon and make one of the last unacculturated tribes in existence, the Yanomami, the most exhaustively filmed and studied tribe on the planet? Despite their "do no harm" creed and scientific aims, the small army of anthropologists that has studied the Yanomami since the 1960s has wreaked havoc among the tribe – and sparked a war within the anthropology community itself.

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In August 1962, director Leslie Woodhead made a two-minute film in Liverpool's Cavern Club with a raw and unrecorded group of rockers called the Beatles. He arranged their first live TV appearances on a local show in Manchester and watched as the Fab Four phenomenon swept the world. Twenty-five years later while making films in Russia, Woodhead became aware of how, even though they were never able to play in the Soviet Union, the Beatles' legend had soaked into the lives of a generation of kids. This film meets the Soviet Beatles generation and hears their stories about how the Fab Four changed their lives, including Putin's deputy premier Sergei Ivanov, who explains how the Beatles helped him learn English and showed him another life. (Storyville)

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Filmmaker Kimberly Reed returns home for her high school reunion, ready to reintroduce herself to the small town as a transgender woman and hoping for reconciliation with her long-estranged adopted brother Marc. Things are complicated by the shocking revelation that Marc may be the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, forcing Kim and her family to explore questions of sexual orientation, identity, severe trauma and love.

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On August 7th 1974, French tightrope walker Philippe Petit stepped out on a high wire, illegally rigged between New York's World Trade Center twin towers, then the world's tallest buildings. After nearly an hour of performing on the wire, 1,350 feet above the sidewalks of Manhattan, he was arrested. This fun and spellbinding documentary chronicles Philippe Petit's "highest" achievement.

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J. Robert Oppenheimer was a national hero, the brilliant scientist who during WWII led the scientific team that created the atomic bomb. But after the bomb brought the war to an end, in spite of his renown and his enormous achievement, America turned on him - humiliated and cast him aside. The question the film asks is, "Why?"

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In the 1970s the North American Soccer League marked the first attempt to introduce soccer to American sports fans. While most teams had only limited success at best, one managed to break through to genuine mainstream popularity - the New York Cosmos. The brainchild of Steve Ross (Major executive at Warner Communications) and the Ertegun brothers (Founders of Atlantic Records), the Cosmos got off to a rocky start in 1971, but things changed in 1975 when the world's most celebrated soccer star, the Brazilian champion Pele, signed with the Cosmos for a five-million-dollar payday. With the arrival of Pele, the Cosmos became a hit and the players became the toast of the town, earning their own private table at Studio 54. A number of other international soccer stars were soon lured to the Cosmos, including Franz Beckenbauer, Rodney Marsh, and Carlos Alberto, but with the turn of the decade, the team began losing favor with fans and folded in 1985.

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Join filmmaking duo Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob as their cameras follow Franken to book signings, campaign rallies and the launch of Air America Radio, documenting his transformation from irreverent funnyman to political pundit.

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Director Don Boyd's portrayal of the extraordinary love story between a retired bus driver from Croydon and a retired teacher from Chelsea. One took to cruising public toilets and succumbed to drug addiction, crime and prison before personal rehabilitation. The other moved in a social sphere of dinner parties and T S Eliot readings at the seaside, yet had struggles of a different kind. (Storyville)

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Held up in a heavily fortified Baghdad hotel, Iraq's most famous pianist Samir Peter tries to survive the "peace" of post-war Iraq as he waits for his visa that will grant him a new life in America.

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Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life? Jarecki's shrewd and intelligent polemic would seem to give an affirmative answer to each of these questions.

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What happens when a group of hairdressers from America travel to Kabul with the intention of telling Afghan women how to do hair and makeup? This engaging, optimistic documentary tracks a unique development project: a shiny new beauty school, funded in part by beauty-industry mainstays, which sets out to teach the latest cutting, coloring, and perming techniques to practicing and aspiring Afghan hairdressers and beauticians. The American teachers, all volunteers, include three Afghan-Americans returning home for the first time in over twenty years. The Beauty Academy of Kabul offers a rare glimpse into Afghan women’s lives, and documents the poignant and often humorous process through which women with very different experiences of life come to learn about one another.

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A chronicle which provides a rare window into the international perception of the Iraq War, courtesy of Al Jazeera, the Arab world's most popular news outlet. Roundly criticized by Cabinet members and Pentagon officials for reporting with a pro-Iraqi bias, and strongly condemned for frequently airing civilian causalities as well as footage of American POWs, the station has revealed (and continues to show the world) everything about the Iraq War that the Bush administration did not want it to see.

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After rocker Kurt Cobain's death, ruled a suicide, a film crew arrives in Seattle to make a documentary. Director Nick Broomfield talks to lots of people. Portraits emerge: a shy, slight Kurt, weary of touring, embarrassed by fame, hooked on heroin; an out-going Courtney, dramatic, controlling, moving from groupie to star.

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TV's most-watched history series brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today.

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