Bandung Productions

A dramatization, in modern theatrical style, of the life and thought of the Viennese-born, Cambridge-educated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose principal interest was the nature and limits of language. A series of sketches depict the unfolding of his life from boyhood, through the era of the first World War, to his eventual Cambridge professorship and association with Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. The emphasis in these sketches is on the exposition of the ideas of Wittgenstein, a homosexual, and an intuitive, moody, proud, and perfectionistic thinker generally regarded as a genius.

Christopher Hitchens investigates whether Mother Teresa of Calcutta deserves her saintly image. He probes her campaigns against contraception and abortion and her questionable relationships with right-wing political leaders.

The tumultuous events surrounding the sub-continent's partition in 1947 into India and Pakistan are re-imagined in Ken McMullen's complex and visually striking film. A lunatic asylum in the city of Lahore becomes a mirror image of events in the outside political world, with the same actors playing both inmates and rulers. Adapted by Tariq Ali and McMullen from famous Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto's short story 'Toba Tek Singh', Partition speaks for the countless millions that the usual British Raj films sweep out of sight. Released to mark the 60th anniversary of the partition of the Indian sub-continent, this is the film's first-ever release on DVD.

A Channel Four special presentation of the Royal Court Theatre 1989 production, London. with Paul Bhattacharjee, Nabil Shaban and Fiona Victory. "Iranian Nights" was a play written and produced as a direct response by writers and artists to the notorious Feb 14 1989 Fatwa (a sentence of death) from Iran's leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, placed on Salman Rushdie for his novel "The Satanic Verses", regarded by fundamentalist Muslims as blasphemous.

Presented by the late literary critic Edward Said, this thirty-seven minute 1992 documentary reflects on director Gillo Pontecorvo's youth and politics in an attempt to understand his approach to filmmaking.

Story of John Locke...

Drama based on the life and thought of Spinoza, who was born in sixteenth century Amsterdam to a family of Jewish refugees from Portugal. He lived in an age of turmoil, when the Dutch Republic and the English Commonwealth had polarised the entire continent. His scepticism enraged the Jewish elders and led to his excommunication.

E. P. Thompson, a British historian, poet, novelist and activist, was a voice of dissent in the dogmatic political environment of 20th century Europe. As a member of the New Left, his work and activism sought to bridge the gap between Marxist theory and practice, and to heal the fracture of the Cold War divide

The deep North-South divide in Italy is explored through the eyes of northern anti-fascist writer and painter, Carlo Levi, who is exiled by Mussolini to a remote village in Southern Italy. Levi falls in love with the ancient traditions of Southern peasant culture and becomes a passionate advocate, fighting for justice for the impoverished South.

Milton Rogovin is an 82-year-old photographer in Buffalo, New York, who began taking photographs in the ‘50s. In this programme, Rogovin discusses his work, whilst the subjects of his photographs talk about their lives and attitudes to being photographed.

Gerard Sekoto was a pioneer of 20th century urban black art. Self taught as a painter, he was the first to reflect South African township life in all its colour, richness and struggle, before travelling to Paris to study and enhance his unique reputation as an artist.

Theo Angelopoulos recalls the defining moment in 1964 that led to him to live his entire life in Greece, and explores the concept of borders in his work - as the limits of existence, of life and death, of language and communication. “Narrowing down the borders narrows the communication, stretches the differences, magnifies oppositions, magnifies reasons for war, magnifies the refugees, magnifies the internal exile... In reality a civil war leaves behind wounds which cannot easily be healed and they revive, like ghosts, or like recurrent nightmares, during the long nights which have dogged Greek society for years.”