The Documentary Podcast

Tropicalia was a musical revolution in Brazil. Singer and journalist Monica Vasconcelos meets the key artists and contemporary champions of Tropicalia - from Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil to Marcos Valle and Talking Heads' David Byrne - and explores its enduring musical and political force. Burning brightly for only few years in the late 1960s, and politically inspired by the uprisings in Paris in May 1968, the Tropicalia movement electrified Brazilian music, combining the sophistication of bossa nova, samba and baiao with psychedelia, new Beatles-inspired electric sounds and orchestral experimentation.

It was a deliberately subversive mix that provoked the country’s military regime and led to the exile and imprisonment of some of Brazil’s star musicians. Tropicalia brought a new wave of liberation and energy into Brazilian music. Earlier in the decade, bossa nova had captured a mood of national optimism but, as the 1960s wore on, the national mood darkened.

Amy Zayed, follows the lives of five Syrians as they attempt to settle into their new home. While many are keen to learn their new language, they are quickly diverted by preoccupations about access to money, securing permanent residency status and health.

Chris Bowlby explores how Germany found itself at the centre of Europe's migration crisis, and learns how the country has received successive waves of refugees since the 1940's.

What happens when your Dad's an African-American soul star and your Mum's a music-loving girl from a Sheffield council estate in the north of England? Are your roots on the terraces at a Sheffield United Football match, or in the stylings of a Spike Lee film? For writer and photographer Johny Pitts, whose parents met in the heyday of Northern Soul on the dance floor of the legendary King Mojo club, how he navigates his black roots has always been an issue.

Not being directly connected to the Caribbean or West African diaspora culture, all he was told at school was that his ancestors were slaves. In this programme, Johny heads off to the USA, to trace his father's musical migration and to tell an alternative story of Black British identity. From Pittsmore in Sheffield, to Bedford Stuyvesant in New York, and all the way down to South Carolina where his grandmother picked cotton, Johny Pitts makes a journey of self-discovery.

Gregoire is an ex garage mechanic whose mission in life is to help people in Benin, West Africa, with mental health problems who may otherwise be chained up in the spare room. With family approval he takes patients to his treatment centres, he cuts off their chains allowing them space and giving them help.

Gregoire's story and the attitudes that coalesce around it unfold against a backdrop of traditional healers, Western trained psychiatrists, ethnopsychiatry, Evangelical missionary work, Western attitudes to Africa and African attitudes to the West, and government ministries for whom mental health is a low and cash strapped priority.

Simon Maybin spends time with daters in New York, Delhi and Nairobi trying to understand how dating apps technology is changing the way people find romance across the world.

There’s an American saying: “Anyone can become president.” And in the 2016 election they've been trying to prove it. PJ O’Rourke is on the campaign trail in New Hampshire.

Cassandro is no ordinary Mexican wrestler. He is an exotico - or drag queen - who wears long Liberace gowns, sequins and flamboyant make-up. Over an extraordinary 27-year-career, Cassandro has won two championship belts and pioneered the idea that a Mexican wrestler can be openly gay.

Gabriel Gatehouse returns to Libya in search of Colonel Gaddafi’s golden gun, which was seized by rebels when the dictator was captured and killed more than four years ago.

The road to the White House requires stamina and plenty of money. Economist and US Citizen, Linda Yueh, makes a hypothetical run for Congress in the 5th district of Virgina, to find out why it costs so much money to run for office and the increasing importance of the internet in a campaign. On the way she gathers a campaign team, meets her voters and learns about the importance of pizza in politics.