The Documentary Podcast

China's Belt and Road Initiative stretches physically with infrastructure projects across the globe, but there is one initiative that is the most ambitious yet - The Space Silk Road. The space race is heating up with new entrants like India and private companies like SpaceX, but it is the Chinese who are set to dominate by 2045. Central to the Space Silk Road is a controversial station in Patagonia, Argentina. The Espacio Lejano G...

The Iranian government is not coy about its silence tactics. Since Iran's Woman Life Freedom Movement began on 16 September 2022, unlawful executions, imprisonment, physical and sexual abuse has dominated headlines across the globe. It is estimated that tens of thousands of people have received some form of government retribution – and at the heart of it is a complex surveillance system that aids security forces in its endeavours. ...

Johnny, Rocky and Rambo were performers in the world’s last travelling dolphin circus and inside a Bali hotel swimming pool. This is the story of the fight to shut the circus down and the long journey to try to return the performing dolphins to the ocean. We hear why the world’s most famous dolphin trainer changed sides - playing a role instead in the fight for their freedom. It is the story of how Femke Den Haas, the Indonesian ca...

Industrialisation, modern cityscapes and strong economic growth promote an image of a youthful, vigorous Malaysia. But the country is now ageing rapidly, and this sudden transformation seems to have caught many - including the government - by surprise: Despite their country’s development, millions have little or no retirement income and face destitution or dependence in their golden years. What little provision is available was com...

Peruvian singer Lenin Tamayo has been dubbed the founder of ‘Q-pop’. He combines traditional Andean folk music with K-pop inspired instrumentation and dance. His songs mix Quechua – one of Peru’s indigenous languages, and the official tongue of the Inca Empire – and Spanish. Lenin first launched his career when his videos went viral on TikTok. Now, he’s working on his second EP. Presenter Martin Riepl follows Lenin for five months ...

Africa is home to around one-third of the world's languages, but only a smattering of them are available online and in translation software. So when young Beninese computer scientist Bonaventure Dossou, who was fluent in French, experienced difficulties communicating with his mother, who spoke the local language Fon, he came up with an idea.

Bonaventure and a friend developed a French to Fon translation app, with speech recognition...

Why are exams so stressful? Chinese journalists Wanqing Zhang and Eric Junzhe share personal memories about the infamous Gaokao exam in China, which this year reached a record of 13.42 million applicants; and India correspondent Soutik Biswas reports on the exam scandals threatening the future of millions of young people in India. Plus: why do we have recurring nightmares about exams? Caroline Steel from CrowdScience has the answer...

For millions of us, our phones or computers are the first place we go to look for romance. Dating apps are a multi-billion dollar business, and for a good few years it’s been booming. But recently there’s been discussion about whether they’re in decline, with fewer downloads and some regular users saying they feel burned out by their experiences on them. For some, the novelty has just worn off. Others have been put off by interacti...

Ibiza is an island of contrasts. A place which triggers thoughts of raucous partying, superstar DJs and excess. But it's also an area of raw natural beauty, rugged hills, with a rich spiritual history. No-one knows this duality better than Kim Booth - she's experienced both faces of the Balearic paradise island. Kim first visited as a party go-er tourist and 30 years on, she’s now a resident offering an alternative side to Ibiza. T...

The Peregrine Falcon is not only the fastest animal on our planet, but also the most widely distributed bird of prey, found on every continent apart from Antarctica.

In the 1960s Falco Peregrinus was close to extinction, but it has since made a remarkable comeback, hailed as a global success story of conservation.

Recent decades have also seen the trend of this speedy raptor notably settling, nesting and flourishing alongside us, in ...

For the last thirty years Indian journalist Amitabh Parashar has been investigating why a group of midwives in his home state of Bihar were routinely forced to kill baby girls. In a series of shocking interviews, the midwives explain what happened and how a remarkable social worker brought change. Together they began to save baby girls destined to be killed. Decades later BBC Eye finds a woman, who was possibly one of the girls. Wh...

From the journey from cocoa to chocolate in Ivory Coast. The price of cocoa - the essential ingredient in chocolate - has more than quadrupled on the international market in the last two years. Yet many of those growing it have not benefitted. In fact, drought, disease and a lack of investment have led to catastrophic harvests and, therefore, a drop in income for many small producers of cocoa, especially in Ivory Coast. This West A...

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam in 1976, was only two years old when his family were made refugees by the war. They ended up in Texas, in the US and in his early twenties, he decided to return to the city his parents had once fled. Here in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, Tuan has become an artist of many mediums. Telling stories through film, sculpture and installations, his work often explores how memories ...

A bonus episode from the Lives Less Ordinary podcast.

In 1982 Mississippi, two boys, Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala, aged 10 and 11, embarked on a crazy mission: to remake Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot-for-shot in their back garden - and the long-forgotten tape that resulted would decades later end up bringing them face-to-face with one of their heroes.

For more extraordinary personal stories from around the world, go t...

Mpox causes a headache, fever and a blistering rash all over the body. There have been more than 1,200 cases in parts of Central and West Africa since the start of this year. The milder version is now circulating in other parts of the world but the much stronger, possibly deadlier strain, called Clade 1b is also on the rise. A few weeks ago, the World Health Organisation announced that mpox constituted a public health emergency of ...

Dr Aleksandra Janus is a Polish Cultural Anthropologist with a Jewish background from Warsaw, Poland. Living in the capital flattened by Nazi bombs and then recreated by Communism, her multi-layered identity has always conjured mixed feelings about former Jewish memory and cultural spaces. As President of the organisation, Zapomniane Foundation (which means forgotten in English), one of her jobs is to trace mass graves in forests, ...

In a bonus episode from CrowdScience - How do fish survive in the deep ocean?

When listener Watum heard about the Titan submersible implosion in the news in 2023, a question popped up in his mind: if a machine that we specifically built for this purpose cannot sustain the water pressure of the deep ocean, how do fish survive down there?

In this episode, we travel with marine biologist Alan Jamieson to the second deepest place in our...