This documentary looks at the rise of Vladimir Putin using video material never shown before. The film begins its examination with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the year 2000. On December 31, 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation. At the time, filmmaker Vitali Manski was working for a state broadcaster and had unlimited access to the outgoing president, his successor and the inner circles of the Russian leadership. Manski recorded video as a cameraman, but also used his own portable camera to film events. He was with Yeltsin and his family as they followed the results of the election on March 26, 2000, when 53 percent of the voters confirmed Putin as President of the Russian Federation. Manski recorded other milestones as well, including confidential chats in the Kremlin that reveal Putin’s attitudes towards power and leadership. Manski now lives in exile in Riga, Latvia. Watch the documentary to see the film’s central characters, Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Vladimir Putin, and other influential politicians and businessmen as they witness their country in transition.

Igor Pavlovets is an eight-year-old boy who was one of the first children conceived after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. His tiny body bears the cruel legacy of radiation. He’s the size of a three-year-old, his legs have no main bone, his feet are turned out in permanent fishtail and he has just one arm. The programme follows the fight to keep him in England and his adaptation to his new life, a new school and coming to terms with his artificial limbs.

Electricity is the physical flow of electrons, referred to as an electrical current. Electricity is an energy carrier that efficiently delivers the energy found in primary sources to end users, who in turn convert it into energy services. Electricity is all around us–powering technology like our cell phones, computers, lights, soldering irons, and air conditioners. It’s tough to escape it in our modern world. Even when you try to escape electricity, it’s still at work throughout nature, from the lightning in a thunderstorm to the synapses inside our body. But what exactly is electricity? This is a very complicated question, and as you dig deeper and ask more questions, there really is not a definitive answer, only abstract representations of how electricity interacts with our surroundings.

In this video we explore the unsolved enigma that is the Voynich Manuscript, and its often equally bizarre history.