The BEST episodes of Storyville season 2011
Every episode of Storyville season 2011, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Storyville season 2011!
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 - The Man Who Fooled the Nazis
Season 2011 - Episode 7 - Aired 2/22/2011
Documentary which catalogues how a Spanish farmer named Juan Pujol became 'Garbo', one of the most successful double agents in history. The British code-named him Garbo for being the 'greatest actor in the world', because of his ability to gain the Third Reich's trust and make possible the successful D-Day landings that turned the course of history.
#2 - Amnesty! When They Are All Free
Season 2011 - Episode 16 - Aired 5/31/2011
To celebrate its 50th anniversary in May 2011, this probing documentary brings together an extraordinary cast of interviewees, from Sting to former home secretary Jack Straw, to shed light on how, as a 'letter-writing organisation, Amnesty International has changed the world and how the world has changed Amnesty International. It poses the fundamental question: has the human rights movement been able to hold back mankind's capacity for atrocity? Part of BBC4's Justice season.
#3 - Inside Job
Season 2011 - Episode 31 - Aired 12/7/2011
Charles Ferguson's Academy Award-winning forensic analysis of the 2008 global financial crisis. The film traces the emergence of a rogue culture within the finance industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia. At a cost over $20 trillion, the crisis caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly caused global financial collapse.
#4 - The Interrupters: How to Stop a Riot
Season 2011 - Episode 30 - Aired 12/4/2011
Documentary which tells the surprising story of three dedicated individuals who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they themselves once perpetrated. These 'interrupters' intervene in conflicts before the incidents explode into violence. Their work and their insights are closely entwined with their own personal journeys, which, as each of them points out, defy easy characterisation. Shot over the course of a year by acclaimed filmmaker Steve James, it is a vivid portrayal of a city under siege from spiralling violence, including the brutal murder of Derrion Albert, a Chicago high-school student whose death was caught on videotape.
#5 - Bobby Fischer: Genius and Madman
Season 2011 - Episode 29 - Aired 11/30/2011
Considered by many to be the world's greatest chess player, Bobby Fischer personified the link between genius and madness. His trajectory propelled him from child prodigy to world chess champion at the age of 29 and then into a nosedive of delusions and paranoia. Fischer was a recluse for decades before resurfacing for a bizarre final chapter as a fugitive. Veteran filmmaker Liz Garbus's documentary exposes the disturbingly high price Fischer paid to achieve his legendary success and the resulting toll it took on his psyche. Rare archival footage and insightful interviews with those closest to him expand this captivating story of a mastermind's tumultuous rise and precipitous fall.
#6 - Riding Giants
Season 2011 - Episode 28 - Aired 11/27/2011
The history of surfing culture is told through the exploits of the pioneers and contemporary heroes of big-wave surfing in Stacy Peralta's documentary, which features the likes of Greg Noll and Jeff Clark. Riding Giants makes palpable the magnitude and terrifying power of the waves they seek to conquer and captures the unfathomable combination of adrenaline and fear that the surfers experience each time they take on a monster swell.
#7 - Deadline: The New York Times
Season 2011 - Episode 27 - Aired 11/22/2011
Documentary which goes inside the newsroom at one of the most venerable publishing institutions in the world, the New York Times. Director Andrew Rossi gained unprecedented access to America's pre-eminent news factory during one of its most tumultuous years, as the film follows its struggle to survive in a year where Wikileaks emerged as a household name and other newspapers folded. Led by people such as David Carr - a firebrand journalist and former crack addict - can the foot soldiers of this bastion of old media keep up with the torrent of information that is the world wide web?
#8 - Client 9: The Call Girl and the Governor
Season 2011 - Episode 26 - Aired 11/15/2011
Dubbed the Sheriff of Wall Street, Eliot Spitzer made his name as New York's attorney general, prosecuting criminal activity by America's largest financial institutions and some of the most powerful businessmen in the country. When he was then elected New York governor with the largest margin in the state's history, many believed Spitzer was on his way to becoming the nation's first Jewish president. Then, shockingly, his meteoric rise turned into a precipitous fall when the New York Times revealed that Spitzer - a paragon of rectitude - had been seeing prostitutes. With unprecedented access to the escort world as well as friends, colleagues and enemies of the ex-governor, Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney explores the hidden contours of this tale of hubris, sex and power.
#9 - The Billion Dollar Art Heist
Season 2011 - Episode 25 - Aired 11/14/2011
Documentary which chronicles the long and dramatic struggle for control of the Barnes Foundation, a private art collection valued at more than $25bn. In 1922, Dr Albert C Barnes formed a remarkable educational institution around his priceless collection of art, located just five miles outside of Philadelphia. Now, more than 50 years after Barnes's death, a powerful group of moneyed interests have gone to court for control of the art, intending to bring it to a new museum in Philadelphia. Standing in their way is a group of Barnes's former students and his will, which contains strict instructions stating the foundation should always be an educational institution and that the paintings may never be removed. Will politics prevail over a man's dying wishes?
#10 - The Thin Blue Line
Season 2011 - Episode 24 - Aired 11/9/2011
Errol Morris broke cinematic ground with The Thin Blue Line, establishing a new genre in the non-fiction feature by creating a fascinating reconstruction and investigation of a brutal and senseless murder. The case in question is centred on the 1976 murder of a Dallas policeman. The murder remained unsolved for over a month until the Dallas police department received word that 16-year-old David Harris had been arrested in Vidor, Texas, after having bragged to friends that he killed a Dallas cop. Although the murder weapon was found in a nearby swamp, Harris later insisted that his boasting was meant only to impress his friends and insisted the real murderer was a hitchhiker he had picked up earlier that day named Randall Adams. Morris assembles diverse interviews, photo montages, film clips and reenactments of the crime to make a strong case for Adams's innocence, leading to a shocking finale.
#11 - Murder on a Sunday Morning
Season 2011 - Episode 23 - Aired 11/6/2011
Jacksonville, Florida, May 2000. Mary Ann Stephens is shot in the head at point blank range in front of her husband. Two hours later, a 15-year-old black American, Brenton Butler, is arrested walking down a nearby street. Jean-Xavier De Lestrade's Academy Award-winning film follows his trial. Everyone involved with the case, from investigators to journalists, is ready to condemn Butler, except his lawyer Patrick McGuiness. A dazzling and magnetic presence of Hollywood proportions, McGuiness reopens the inquiry, and in a dramatic and spine-tingling sequence of events, he and his team discover a slew of shocking and troubling elements about the case. Murder on a Sunday Morning is gripping and heart-wrenching - the stuff suspense novelists only dream of writing.
#12 - Law of the Dragon: Mother and Son (4)
Season 2011 - Episode 22 - Aired 9/28/2011
In this final episode, Judge Chen listens to complaints of a mother who is suing her son for maintenance.
#13 - Law of the Dragon: Death of an Only Child (3)
Season 2011 - Episode 21 - Aired 9/21/2011
Judge Chen travels to another area of the Xuan'en region of China and hears the case of two parents who are trying to hold a school responsible for the suicide of their only son.
#14 - Law of the Dragon: Love Thy Neighbour (2)
Season 2011 - Episode 20 - Aired 9/14/2011
Judge Chen continues to bring justice to the Xuan'en region of China, and encounters neighbours disputing the ownership of a vital bridge in their village.
#15 - Law of the Dragon: Husband and Wife (1)
Season 2011 - Episode 19 - Aired 9/7/2011
Judge Chen journeys across the Xuan'en region to ensure that justice is served, even in the remotest corners of China. The hearings take place wherever he hangs the national emblem, be it nailed up in a barn or a field. In this first episode, Judge Chen presides over the case of a woman, Lin, who has filed for divorce from her husband Wang.
#16 - Prosecutor
Season 2011 - Episode 18 - Aired 6/2/2011
Critics say Luis Moreno-Ocampo's justice threatens peace, while champions of justice criticise his weaknesses. The world's first permanent International Criminal Court is making headlines - issuing an arrest warrant for a sitting head of state for war crimes, Sudanese President Al-Bashir in July 2008 and now seeking the arrest of Colonel Gaddafi, his son Saif and his brother-in-law, the intelligence chief Abdullah Sanussi. Cameras follow the prosecutor in New York as he defends the Al-Bashir warrant at the UN Security Council; in The Hague, as he opens the Court's first trial of alleged Congolese war criminal Thomas Lubanga; and in the Congo as he meets citizens affected by the trial. The prosecutor must keep one step ahead of them all. Part of BBC 4's Justice season.
#17 - Fight to Save the World: Sergio
Season 2011 - Episode 17 - Aired 6/1/2011
As part of BBC 4's Justice season, this documentary which chronicles the brilliant life and tragic fate of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the former head of the UN mission to Baghdad. Colleagues and loved ones recount how his extraordinary career was cut short when a bomb exploded below his office in August 2003, and the film tracks the painstaking attempts to rescue him from the debris.
Watch Now:Amazon
#18 - Pol Pot's Executioner: Welcome to Hell
Season 2011 - Episode 15 - Aired 5/30/2011
On 28 February 2009 Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, appeared in the ECCC courtroom and made a two-hour speech where he asked for forgiveness for the appalling torture and execution of at least 13,000 prisoners at Tuol Sleng and probably more in the security camps of M-13 and M-99. Until this date, with the exception of a handful of judges, lawyers and a priest, he had not been seen or heard of for the last thirty years. How did a man, known to be kind and generous to fellow students, possibly transform himself into Comrade Duch, the Khmer Rouge's infamous executioner? This documentary revisits and searches for clues.
Watch Now:Amazon
#19 - Last Days of the Arctic: Capturing the Faces of the North
Season 2011 - Episode 14 - Aired 5/9/2011
Ragnar Axelsson, known as Rax, is a photograher for Iceland's largest newspaper. This documentary follows him on his life's mission, to capture the human faces of climate change by photographing the vanishing lifestyles of the people of the north. Rax is among the most celebrated photographers in the world and his series of photographs, Faces of the North, is a living document of the dying cultures of the far northern reaches of the planet, mainly Icelandic farmers, fishermen and the great hunters of Greenland. 'It was really only one photograph that started me off,' he says. 'An old man in a rowing boat and his dog on a skerry. I thought to myself, these men are vanishing. If I don't photograph them now, no one will remember them and no one will know that they ever existed.' Rax spent his childhood summers on an isolated farm on the southern coast of Iceland, where the farmers lived off of the land as countless generations had before them. As a child he was enraptured by the landscape and the interactions between man and nature. Twenty-five years ago, his fascination with people who try to survive in extreme circumstances took him from Iceland to Greenland - a place which has continually inspired him to return. His photo essays of the hunters of Greenland are legendary. Rax could well have been a hunter himself - and we watch him as he stalks his images and strikes at the opportune moment. Fascinated by stories of half-forgotten people who have adapted to unspeakably harsh conditions, Rax is now documenting them as they cope with extreme changes to those conditions as the result of climate change. Last Days of the Arctic is a celebration of the photographer and his subjects, an elegy for a disappearing landscape and the people who inhabit it.
#20 - Knocking on Heaven's Door
Season 2011 - Episode 13 - Aired 4/10/2011
Yuri Gagarin's flight into space was hailed by the Soviet Union as a triumph for socialist science over capitalism. But the true story is much stranger.
#21 - Innocent! Paco & the Struggle for Justice
Season 2011 - Episode 12 - Aired 4/6/2011
As a tropical storm beats down on the Philippine island of Cebu, two sisters leave work but never make it home. That same night, hundreds of miles away on a different island, 19-year-old Paco Larranaga is at a party in Manila, surrounded by dozens of reliable witnesses. The missing women, Marijoy, 23, and Jacqueline Chiong, 21, are pretty and innocent Chinese-Filipinos from a working class community. Paco, accused of their rapes and murders, comes from a prominent political family. An awkward adolescent with a past of petty offences, he is easily cast in the role of privileged thug by the hysterical media frenzy that surrounds the case. Populated by flamboyantly corrupt public officials, drug dealers, cops on the take and journalists both in thrall to and taking a lonely stance against the system, the documentary is a compelling account of the decade-long struggle to convict or free Paco.
#22 - China's Bleak House
Season 2011 - Episode 11 - Aired 4/5/2011
Thousands of poor Chinese workers wait years to petition against injustices suffered in their home districts with the court of the plaintiffs in Beijing - often the last resort for those seeking redress for dismissals, land confiscations, beatings and arrests. Filmed over a decade, director Zhao Liang gives an insight into the shared disenchantment of those who search for justice from a system that pays little to no significance to their individual suffering.
#23 - Kidult: Cuban Punch-Up: The Boys who Fought for Castro
Season 2011 - Episode 10 - Aired 3/30/2011
Documentary which follows the stories of three young hopefuls through eight dramatic months of training and education as they prepare for the biggest event of their lives so far, Cuba's National Boxing Championship for Under-12s. But during the season, crisis strikes - Fidel Castro is taken ill and all of Cuba's Olympic boxing champions defect to the USA. As the championship draws closer, the Cuba that the boys have been taught to believe in is at a historic crossroads.
#24 - Kidult: P-Star Rising
Season 2011 - Episode 9 - Aired 3/23/2011
Single father Jesse Diaz pins his hopes for the family's fortunes and redemption for his own failed music career on his nine-year-old daughter Priscilla when he discovers that she can rap and perform. This documentary follows Priscilla, aka P-Star, and her father through the grit and glamour of the music industry, capturing the struggles of Jesse in raising his two children and the sacrifices of his daughter to make her dad proud.
#25 - Kidult: Marathon Boy
Season 2011 - Episode 8 - Aired 3/16/2011
Documentary telling the story of the youngest marathon runner ever. At the age of four, he is plucked from the poverty of an Indian slum by his coach. Extraordinary drama and tragedy ensue. What starts as a simple inspirational story - the hope of a small boy and his trainer who unite to pursue a dream in a ruthless world - goes on to reveal the darker side of humanity and the complexities of Indian society as it struggles to come to grips with the realities of the slums, crippling poverty, organised crime and state-sanctioned corruption. Over a period of five years a compelling human story emerges, full of moral dilemma, dramatic twists and ethical and legal debate.