The BEST episodes of Storyville season 2009
Every episode of Storyville season 2009, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Storyville season 2009!
Storyville has developed an enviable reputation since it was launched by the BBC in 1997 as a showcase for the best in international documentaries. Screening over 340 films, from some 70 different countries, the strand has garnered a staggering array of awards: five Oscars, 15 Griersons, three Peabodys and two International Emmys.
#1 - Ghosts of the 7th Cavalry
Season 2009 - Episode 4 - Aired 2/16/2009
Powerful documentary from Emmy award-winning director Tom Roberts which explores the profound human consequences of America's frontier wars through the moving personal journey of retired US Major Robert 'Snuffy' Gray, who fought with the controversial 7th Cavalry Regiment.
#2 - Bulletproof Salesman
Season 2009 - Episode 6 - Aired 3/2/2009
Documentary about self-confessed war profiteer Fidelis Cloer, who, in a career spanning two decades of global turmoil, has supplied kings, presidents and the occasional dictator with the finest luxury armoured vehicles money can buy. In his world, where security is a commodity that can be bought and sold, violence is to sales as the weather is to wheat futures. Always with an on eye on growth opportunities, Fidelis found himself the perfect war when the US invaded Iraq.
#3 - Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Season 2009 - Episode 18 - Aired 7/26/2009
The definitive film biography of a mythic American figure, a man that Tom Wolfe called 'our greatest comic writer', whose suicide led Rolling Stone magazine, where Thompson began his career, to devote an entire issue to the man that launched a brash, irreverent, fearless style of journalism - named 'gonzo' after an anarchic blues riff by James Booker. Borrowing from Kris Kristofferson, Thompson was a 'walking contradiction, partly truth, mostly fiction'. While his pen dripped with venom for dishonest politicians, he surprised nervous visitors with the courtly manners and soft-spoken delivery of a Southern gentleman. By many, he is considered an iconic crusader for truth, justice and a fiercely idealistic American way. Like Jack Kerouac's On the Road, his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has been a wanderlust myth for generation after generation of American youth. And for America's esteemed journalists - from Tom Wolfe, and Walter Isaacson to the NY Times' Frank Rich - he remains an iconic freelance who believed that writing could make a difference. The film focuses on Thompson's work, particularly his most provocative and productive period from 1965 to 1975. Gonzo is directed by Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-nominated director of Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room and the director of the Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. While Gibney shaped the screen story, every narrated word in the film springs from the typewriters of Thompson himself, given life by Johnny Depp. The film is distinguished by its unprecedented cooperation of Thompson's friends, family and estate. The filmmakers had access to hundreds of photographs and over 200 hours of audiotapes, home movies and documentary footage.
#4 - Robert Capa - In Love and War
Season 2009 - Episode 7 - Aired 3/7/2009
Profile of iconic war photographer Robert Capa, whose career spanned five epic conflicts across three continents before his untimely death at the age of 40. The film traces Endre Freidman's transformation from a young Jewish boy in Budapest to his becoming Robert Capa, the most famous war photographer in the world.
#5 - Blast!
Season 2009 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/7/2009
Documentary which follows the story of Mark Devlin and his team of scientists as they try to figure out how all the galaxies formed by launching a revolutionary new telescope under a NASA high-altitude balloon. Their adventure takes them from Arctic Sweden to Inuit Canada, where failure forces the team to try again on the desolate ice of Antarctica. The obsessions, personal and family sacrifices, and philosophical and religious questioning of a professional scientist are all laid bare.
#6 - Man on Wire
Season 2009 - Episode 19 - Aired 8/2/2009
Documentary based on Philippe Petit's autobiographical book To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers. In August 1974, French wire-walker Philippe Petit spent nearly an hour walking, dancing, kneeling and lying on a wire which he and his friends had strung in secret between the rooftops of New York's Twin Towers. Six years of intense planning, dreaming and physical training fell into place that morning. Already an accomplished wire-walker, Petit had caught sight of an article about the planned construction of the Twin Towers while in a dentist's waiting room in 1968, and at that moment an obsession was born. He spent every waking moment since that day plotting the details of his walk (which he called 'le coup') and gathered a team of people around him to assist in the planning. Petit's preparation was expert, thorough and top secret: he took precise measurements and even aerial photographs to help him construct models of the rigging; learned about the physical effects of the wind on the swaying of the buildings; even created fake ID cards and spied on office workers to plan how best to gain access to the towers without arousing suspicion. On that August morning, his dream was realised. Using contemporary interviews, archival footage and dramatic reconstructions, the film tells the story of this extraordinary feat, and also of Petit's previous walks between the towers of Notre Dame in Paris, and of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
#7 - The Jazz Baroness
Season 2009 - Episode 9 - Aired 4/17/2009
Documentary, made by her great niece, about the British Jewish baroness who fell in love with the jazz genius Thelonious Monk. Pannonica Rothschild was born with everything, got married and had five children, but one track by a man she had never met inspired her to leave and start a new life in America. Helen Mirren is the voice of 'Nica', while Sonny Rollins, TS Monk Jr, the Duchess of Devonshire, Quincy Jones, Lord Rothschild, Roy Haynes, Chico Hamilton and others appear as themselves.
#8 - Up for Debate: Team Qatar
Season 2009 - Episode 10 - Aired 5/11/2009
Qatar is said to be the world's richest country, while competitive debating is said to be a training ground for future world leaders. So when the Qatari Emiress charged two recent Oxford graduates with creating the country's first national debate team and taking them to the world championships, the stakes were high. This documentary follows the journey of five ambitious teenagers as they are initiated into the cut-throat subculture of competitive high school debate. Training in London, Doha and New York, they learn more about the world as they hone their debating skills.
#9 - The Baby and the Buddha
Season 2009 - Episode 11 - Aired 5/18/2009
Nati Baratz's documentary chronicles a former disciple's search for his reincarnated Tibetan master. After 26 years of isolated meditation in a mountain cave, Lama Konchog became one of the greatest Tibetan masters of our time. When he passed away in 2001 at 84, the Dalai Lama instructed his shy, devoted disciple Tenzin Zopa to search for his master's reincarnation. This 'unmistaken child' must be found within four years, before it becomes too difficult to remove him from his parents' care.
#10 - The Jew who Dealt with Nazis: Killing Kasztner
Season 2009 - Episode 12 - Aired 5/25/2009
After 50 years, will the Jew accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the Holocaust be exonerated? How much should you negotiate with the enemy? In Israel, the debate over that question evoked fury to the point of assassination. Such was the case of Kasztner. Dr Israel (Rezso) Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew who tried to rescue the last million Jews of Europe by negotiating face to face with Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, was gunned down by another Jew who never set foot in Nazi Europe. After 50 years, his assassin Ze'ev Eckstein breaks his silence on the fateful night he shot and killed Kasztner.
#11 - The Genius and the Boys
Season 2009 - Episode 13 - Aired 6/1/2009
D Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Prions - the particles that would emerge as the cause of Mad Cow disease - while working with a cannibal tribe on New Guinea. He was a star of the scientific world. Over his years working amongst the tribes of the South Seas, he adopted 57 kids, bringing them to a new life in Washington DC. His adoptions were hailed as wonderful fatherly beneficence. But, at the height of his career, rumours began to spread he was a paedophile. Gajdusek would argue that if sex with children was okay in their own cultures, he wasn't wrong to join in. How could a great mind like Gajdusek's lose insight so totally, and why would the scientific community to which he was a hero be so quick to leap to his defence and dismiss the allegations?
#12 - The Age of Stupid
Season 2009 - Episode 27 - Aired 12/14/2009
Drama-documentary-animation hybrid starring Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, watching archive footage from 2008 and asking why climate change wasn't stopped before it was too late.
#13 - The Trials of Oppenheimer
Season 2009 - Episode 16 - Aired 7/15/2009
J Robert Oppenheimer was one of the most celebrated scientists of his generation. Shy, arrogant and brilliant, he is best known as the man that led the Manhattan Project to spectacular success. As the years progressed he also grew into a scientific statesman, leading a government agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, which was trying to develop ways to avoid a nuclear arms race. His attempts at politics, though, were a lot less successful than his scientific endeavours. As he grew more powerful, he started to make serious enemies amongst the establishment, particularly a friend of President Truman's - Lewis Strauss.
#14 - How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin
Season 2009 - Episode 20 - Aired 9/6/2009
Documentary which tells the extraordinary unknown story of how the Beatles helped to destroy the USSR. In August 1962, director Leslie Woodhead made a two-minute film in Liverpool's Cavern Club with a raw and unrecorded group of rockers called the Beatles. He arranged their first live TV appearances on a local show in Manchester and watched as the Fab Four phenomenon swept the world. Twenty-five years later while making films in Russia, Woodhead became aware of how, even though they were never able to play in the Soviet Union, the Beatles' legend had soaked into the lives of a generation of kids. This film meets the Soviet Beatles generation and hears their stories about how the Fab Four changed their lives, including Putin's deputy premier Sergei Ivanov, who explains how the Beatles helped him learn English and showed him another life.
#15 - The Time of their Lives
Season 2009 - Episode 17 - Aired 7/20/2009
Set in a north London residential home for the active elderly, this documentary paints a portrait of life at the Mary Feilding Guild and of three of its oldest residents. With a combined age of almost 300, Rose, Hetty and Alison continue to be powerfully engaged in their individual brands of activism - from journalism to anti-war demonstrations - whilst quietly negotiating the final years of their lives. Rose, Hetty and Alison are fervently concerned about the state of the wider world and work energetically to make it a better place, but their private lives and loves are equally important. Through their intimate and surprising revelations, we learn the truth about how very old people experience life and how they deal with the intense challenges, and the indignities, that old age brings.
#16 - The Horse Boy
Season 2009 - Episode 25 - Aired 11/24/2009
Filmmaker Michel Orion Scott captures a magical journey into a little-known world, in a documentary which chronicles Rupert Isaacson and Kristin Neff's personal odyssey to make sense of their child's autism, and find healing for him and themselves in the unlikeliest of places.
#17 - Hi Society: The Wonderful World of Nicky Haslam
Season 2009 - Episode 24 - Aired 11/17/2009
Nicky Haslam, renowned socialite, bon viveur, wit and best friend to all is also one of the world's most respected and highly paid interior designers, whose clients include royalty, rock stars and Russians. This documentary takes the viewer into a world to which few have access and most could hardly imagine, where apartments cost over 30 million pounds and people think nothing of spending four million to do up a house.
#18 - War Heroes: Section 60 Arlington Cemetery
Season 2009 - Episode 23 - Aired 11/9/2009
Documentary focusing on Section 60 of the historic Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia - the 'saddest acre in America' - where US service men and women from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are buried. An intimate look at the impact of lives lost too soon, the film bears witness to the rituals and traditions of the family and friends who come from around the country to visit the graves.
#19 - Men of the City
Season 2009 - Episode 22 - Aired 10/24/2009
People who work in the city either make money out of money, or from the proximity of money. But what do they feel about their jobs? In Men of the City, filmmaker Marc Isaacs goes behind the headlines to examine the state of mind and motivation of men in the city.
#20 - Simon Mann's African Coup: Black Beach
Season 2009 - Episode 26 - Aired 12/1/2009
A failed coup attempt ... a British mercenary in a grim African prison ... a dictator accused by the West of torture ... and beneath it all, a spectacular underwater oil reserve that the world's major powers would love to get their hands on. It may sound like the latest John LeCarre bestseller, but it's the real-life intrigue behind Simon Mann's African Coup, Storyville's penetrating look at mysterious goings on in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny West African nation newly rich from oil and infamous for corruption. Filmed over eighteen months, with access to key players, the film offers a unique look inside a country that rarely allows in the foreign press.
#21 - Napoli: City of the Damned
Season 2009 - Episode 21 - Aired 9/14/2009
When thinking of devastated cities in the Second World War, Naples is often forgotten, but when it was liberated by the Allies it was on its last legs, with 200,000 homeless and no power, transport, food or running water. The Allies quickly brought food to the starving population and medicine to the sick, but the introduction of many troops and lots of supplies led to the creation of a huge black market involving almost the entire population. One third of women became prostitutes as Naples became a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah, a city of vice, crime and chaos where everything that could be sold and stolen was sold and stolen. Perplexingly, the Americans decided to introduce Italo-American criminals into positions of power in southern Italy, such as Vito Genovese, a gangster escaping a murder rap in New York. Genovese began setting up a crime empire in Naples - after Mussolini had effectively suppressed organised crime in Italy, the Allies brought it back. When World War II ended, alarmed and surprised by Soviet support for the Italian communist parties, the Allies responded with their own propaganda. Combined with the Marshall Plan, this became a massive covert effort by the Americans to swing the elections towards the parties of the right. The Catholic Church helped them, with priests telling congregations that they would go to hell if they didn't vote Christian Democrat. After great political and ideological struggle in which the Cold War was waged by proxy for the first time, the 1948 elections were won by the Christian Democrats, a result that may not have been truly fair. The CIA were pleased with the result and partially credited it to their own operations. They recommended that the US should continue with the covert manipulation of political outcomes in fore
#22 - Angels of Rio
Season 2009 - Episode 15 - Aired 6/8/2009
Detective Bechara Jahlk is the most famous private eye in Brazil, specialising in 'corporate crime' and employing a team of young female agents. This documentary follows the case brought to Jahlk's attention by a 68-year-old import-export entrepreneur, a divorced workaholic who suspects a link between his company and drug-trafficking in Rio's harbour and fears that his son Luiz might be involved. At 26 and loaded with cash, Luiz is a junior executive in his father's business and lives life in Rio's fast lane. Discretion is paramount, so Jahlk sends in his 'angels' Natasha, Julia and Tania, armed with sophisticated surveillance equipment, to infiltrate Luiz's social network and uncover any criminal activity. The agents quickly establish evidence of Luiz's drug use. In recorded conversations, some names pop up, giving the agents more leads to follow - Marcelo the drug courier, Claudio the drug dealer, former drug dealer-turned-agent Ze Carlos, right-wing extremist group the Integralistas and former torturer and policeman JC. The investigation takes the agents into the favelas, undercover in Rio's port, to nightclubs, restaurants, motels and Sao Paulo and back, giving insights into the case, Luiz's life and contemporary Brazilian society.
Watch Now:Amazon
#23 - Blind Sight: Everest the Hard Way
Season 2009 - Episode 14 - Aired 6/7/2009
Set against the breathtaking backdrop of the Himalayas, this documentary follows the gripping adventure of six Tibetan teenagers on a climbing expedition up the 23,000 foot Lhakpa Ri, on the north side of Everest. A dangerous journey soon becomes a seemingly impossible challenge made all the more remarkable by the fact that the teenagers are blind.
Watch Now:Amazon
#24 - The Children's Ward
Season 2009 - Episode 8 - Aired 3/9/2009
Documentary about two children who have been directly affected by wars in their respective countries.
#25 - Maradona: In the Hands of the Gods
Season 2009 - Episode 5 - Aired 2/23/2009
Documentary telling the true story of five young British freestyle footballers' journey across the Americas to Argentina in the hope of meeting their hero, Diego Maradona, a coming-of-age road movie about a group of young men in pursuit of a lifelong dream.