The Documentary Podcast

Nidale Abou Mrad reports from her native Lebanon on a crisis of stinking household waste and how citizen activists are stepping in to do the authorities’ job in cleaning up.

When London was attacked by terrorists in the final days of the British general election campaign, it was the second attack to take place during the campaign.

Susan Glasser, the chief international columnist for Politico, has followed politics in Washington DC for over 20 years – in late May she travelled to the UK to bring an American perspective to the election and to present a documentary about it. The assumption was it would focus on the scale of Theresa May’s anticipated landslide for her Conservative Party.

But on May 22nd, as she was packing her bags to fly to London, news began to break of a terrorist attack in the UK that would change all of that. By the time the overnight flight had landed, the campaign had been suspended.

(Photo: People pass a mock ballot box erected to encourage people to vote, Bristol, 2012. Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

6 years of war and crippling sanctions, yet Syria’s footballers are still dreaming of World Cup glory in Russia. Richard Conway follows the team’s extraordinary story.

The American Dream is back, or at least President Donald Trump says so. Once again every American, regardless of background, race, gender or education, can, through sheer hard work, make it to the very top and become rich. Did the idea of the America Dream, in which nothing is impossible as long as you work hard, evolve with the ‘founding fathers’ of the nation? Is it intrinsic to the country’s identity?

Farmers taking their own lives in India has been in the news for quite some time and this story is about how it has impacted on the mental health of communities. As too much rain or droughts continue to destroy crops making farmers unable to pay debts, families fear that their breadwinners could be the next to kill themselves. Navin Singh Khadka follows families in Marathwada, the worst hit district in the state that saw more than 400 farmers kill themselves last year.

On 28 January 1986, people watched in horror as Challenger, one of America's four space shuttles, erupted into a ball of flames just over a minute after lift off, killing everyone on board. Sue MacGregor looks back on one of Nasa's darkest tragedies with Scobee Rodgers, the widow of Challenger space shuttle commander Richard "Dick" Scobee; Steve Nesbitt, Nasa chief commentator; astronaut Norman Thagard; and Allan McDonald, former Morton Thiokol director of the Space Shuttle Rocket Booster Project.

In an exclusive investigation for the BBC, Anne Soy discovers that Kenyan women are being abducted and trafficked to Somalia to become sex slaves for the militant group al-Shabaab

Johannesburg-based poet Thabiso Mohare explores the music of Soweto from the 1970s onwards, through the unrest that led to democracy in 1994, and takes a look at the music scene today. Featuring interviews with Sipho 'Hotstix' Mabuse, Mandla Mlangeni, BCUC and The Soil.

Tim Samuels spends 24 hours immersed in an extraordinary medical scene - Israeli doctors tending to Syrians who have been smuggled over the border for life-saving treatment into a country Syria is technically still at war with. In the Ziv hospital in the northern Israeli town of Safed, Tim follows two doctors on their rounds as they treat Syrians - both civilians and fighters - who have been seriously wounded in their country's civil war.

Bollywood, the world's biggest film industry had, until recently, largely avoided the inter-faith tensions that surface repeatedly elsewhere in India. Many leading men are Muslims - a fact that has been no apparent impediment to their success. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown explores the history of Muslims in Bollywood through the prism of the number of powerful leading male actors who share the same Muslim surname - Khan. The Khans have quite literally taken over Bollywood. Aamir, Salman, Shah Rukh, Aamer, Saif Ali and Irfan - to name but a few - currently dominate the industry. Almost all are Muslim or of Muslim descent, hugely successful and able to navigate two of the most powerful forces working against them - the puritanism of Islam and the ever-increasing grip of Hindu fundamentalism in India. They are some of the nation's best-loved and most successful actors, brand ambassadors of the official "Incredible India" tourism campaign - and Muslims in a majority-Hindu nation. And many of them are married to Hindus. Prominent actors, writers, directors, producers, composers, film historians, politicians and critics explain how the Khans have managed to successfully carve out their careers as Muslims in a Hindu world, about how they see the future unfolding under the growing Hindu fundamentalist culture of India, as well as against the national and international backdrop of Islamic fundamentalism.