The Documentary Podcast

What does it take for someone to turn their back on their religious upbringing? What effect does that decision ultimately have on them and those around them? We explore the personal journeys of three people who walked away from their faiths and redefined their morality in a world without God.

The United States is in the throes of a heroin and opiate epidemic. For Crossing Continents, India Rakusen travels to Lorain County, in the state of Ohio, where addiction has become part of everyday life. West of the city of Cleveland, Avon Lake is a wealthy suburb – its large, expensive properties back onto the shores of Lake Eerie, and wild deer frolic on neat lawns. But behind this façade, there is a crisis. Many families have felt the damaging impact of addiction. And across Lorain County, opiates – pharmaceutical and street heroin - have killed twice as many people in the first six months of 2016 alone, as died in the whole of 2015.

Producer Linda Pressly.

Google dominates internet searching across most parts of the globe. The algorithm which produces its search results is highly secret and always changing. But however good the algorithm, however carefully crafted to give us what Google thinks we actually want, is it really healthy for one search engine, and one company, to have so much impact?

Catherine Carr travels to the refugee camps in northern France known as The Jungle. The journeys people have undertaken to get there are epic, and their onward passage is uncertain. Where are they going? Their answers to that simple question reveal the rhythms of life in limbo and describe past lives and future hopes.

Kanishk Tharoor goes on the murky trail of the missing Genie of Nimrud – a huge, 3,000-year-old carved figure that once protected a palace; the Winged-Bull of Nineveh, an Assyrian sculpture that guarded the gates of one of the most fabled cities in antiquity; and a looted Sumerian seal stolen in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

After the last elections in Russia, mass protests against vote-rigging led to clashes in the centre of Moscow. The events on Bolotnaya Square were the biggest challenge President Putin has ever faced to his rule. Four years on, several demonstrators are still serving long prison sentences, the laws on protesting have been tightened and the arrests continue. As Russia gears up for parliamentary elections in September, Sarah Rainsford talks to some of those caught up in the Bolotnaya protests, and asks what their stories tell us about Putin’s Russia today.

Producer: Mark Savage

When tanks rolled into Moscow on 19 August 1991 during a dramatic anti-Perestroika coup by Soviet hard-liners, the USSR’s state-controlled airwaves offered a curious response - a continuous loop of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. We trace the strange and elaborate pas de deux between Tchaikovsky’s ballet classic and the Russian psyche – revealing how a work, considered a flop upon its premiere, emerged as a powerful instrument of Soviet propaganda, and later – a soundtrack that failed to disguise impending political turmoil.

Philip Dodd looks at the impact that mass tourism on cruise liners can have. He talks to the people who benefit from the arrival of the huge new ships, and those who are unhappy about the environmental impact.

"Archaeology is supposed to be fun and interesting and apolitical and those are the reasons I love it, but none of this is now."

Archaeologists like Jesse Casana have lived and worked on sites throughout Syria for years. He describes his feelings about the fate of friends and colleagues left behind. The excavation at Tell Qarqur that he oversaw before the war has now been bulldozed, but he says, "It seems like a fairly small concern compared to the human tragedy unfolding before our eyes."

Tell Qarqur is not the only monument of archaeological interest that has been destroyed. The statue of an 11th Century Arabic poet, atheist and vegetarian, al-Ma'arri, was decapitated Islamic militants in 2013. And Aleppo, thought to be the oldest city in the world, is now in ruins. Its sights are remembered fondly by the people who lived there including the elegant, 1000 year old mineret of the Great Mosque destroyed in April 2013.

Picture: A Syrian rebel fighter points to destruction in the Great Mosque complex, Aleppo, Credit: AFP/Getty Images

In the Colombian capital of Bogota, Lucy Ash meets two people who fear they will never be able to return to their homes. They both come from Choco, which is one of the poorest provinces and most violent parts of the country. Maria, an Afro-Colombian mother of four, fled her town after she was abducted and brutally attacked by paramilitaries. Plinio was trying to help members of his indigenous community go back to their farms when he received death threats from a splinter group of left wing guerrilla (the ELN) and his friend was assassinated.

Their stories illustrate a nationwide trauma – the government may be on the brink of a historic peace deal with the FARC rebels, but Colombia has even more internally displaced people than Syria. More than 200,000 have been killed and seven million driven off their land during half a century of war. Lucy travels down the River Baudo to meet people uprooted from their jungle villages in violent clashes earlier this year and finds that Latin America’s longest insurgency is far from over.

Reported and produced by Lucy Ash.