An Arctic Space Odyssey

At the dawn of the Space Race, seven test pilots set out to become the first American astronauts to enter space. However, the road to making history brings momentous challenges.

The true story of technical troubles that scuttle the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, risking the lives of astronaut Jim Lovell and his crew, with the failed journey turning into a thrilling saga of heroism. Drifting more than 200,000 miles from Earth, the astronauts work furiously with the ground crew to avert tragedy.

When Russia's first nuclear submarine malfunctions on its maiden voyage, the crew must race to save the ship and prevent a nuclear disaster.

The film features amazing scenes of places never before seen gathered by key space missions that culminated with groundbreaking discoveries in 2015. It features a spectacular flight though the great cliffs on comet 67P, a close look at the fascinating bright "lights" on Ceres, and the first ever close ups of dwarf binary planet Pluto/Charon and its moons.

Gravitation - Urkraft des Universums

The 1960s was an extraordinary time for the United States. Unburdened by post-war reparations, Americans were preoccupied with other developments like NASA, the game-changing space programme that put Neil Armstrong on the moon. Yet it was astronauts like Eugene Cernan who paved the uneven, perilous path to lunar exploration. A test pilot who lived to court danger, he was recruited along with 14 other men in a secretive process that saw them become the closest of friends and adversaries. In this intensely competitive environment, Cernan was one of only three men who was sent twice to the moon, with his second trip also being NASA’s final lunar mission. As he looks back at what he loved and lost during the eight years in Houston, an incomparably eventful life emerges into view. Director Mark Craig crafts a quietly epic biography that combines the rare insight of the surviving former astronauts with archival footage and otherworldly moonscapes.

Every winter for decades, the Northwest Territories, in the Canadian Far North, changes its face. While the landscape is covered with snow and lakes of a thick layer of ice, blocking land transport, ice roads are converted to frozen expanses as far as the eye can see.

19 years after the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan, the Olympic Games of 1964 took place in Tokyo. In the midst of the cold war, the games are supposed to become a symbol for a peaceful world. Especially the divided Germany is expected to prove this: By order of the IOC, both German states must participate in Tokyo with a joint team despite deep ideological rifts. The fact that athletes from both German states still had to compete against each other in order to form a joint team for the 1964 Olympic Games in Innsbruck and in Tokyo is all but forgotten. The film tells the story of the East-West German team of 1964 for the first time and is simultaneously a current document about the relation of sports and politics in international relations.

The adventures and exploits of Jean-Baptiste Charcot (1867-1936), an intrepid scientist and explorer who laid the foundations of modern oceanography.

It was November 12, 2014, at 5:03pm. Humanity had just accomplished a feat that will forever mark its history. Philae, the miniature laboratory integrated into the Rosetta probe, landed softly on comet 67P Chourioumov-Guérassimenko, better known as Tchouri. The culmination of a project decided twenty-one years earlier, in 1993, by the European Space Agency - the first to display the immense ambition of landing on one of these bodies made of ice and dust, archives of the solar system's infancy. To achieve this, it took years of preparation, a decade-long flight, six billion kilometers flown, thousands of scientists and engineers involved... Astrophysicist Anny-Chantal Levasseur-Regourd sums it all up: "From this mission, we hope - and can reasonably expect - to understand the origin of the solar system and how life appeared on Earth.

Dark fears over the North Pole. Long sheltered from large-scale industrial exploitation, the Arctic is now at risk of becoming the last El Dorado for major oil companies. This, combined with the melting of ice caused by global warming, poses enormous ecological risks: the impact of an oil spill, for example, would be incomparably more serious in this extreme climate than in any other part of the world.

Deng Xiaoping's economic and political opening in China. Margaret Thatcher's extreme economic measures in the United Kingdom. Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran. Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland. Saddam Hussein's rise to power in Iraq. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The nuclear accident at the Harrisburg power plant and the birth of ecological activism. The year 1979, the beginning of the future.

This documentary follows various migratory bird species on their long journeys from their summer homes to the equator and back, covering thousands of miles and navigating by the stars. These arduous treks are crucial for survival, seeking hospitable climates and food sources. Birds face numerous challenges, including crossing oceans and evading predators, illness, and injury. Although migrations are undertaken as a community, birds disperse into family units once they reach their destinations, and every continent is affected by these migrations, hosting migratory bird species at least part of the year.

This feature-length documentary is a portrait of eclipse chasers, people for whom solar eclipses - among nature's more spectacular phenomena – are a veritable obsession. The film follows 4 of them as they travel incredible distances to witness the last total eclipse of the millennium as it sweeps eastward across Europe to India. At various points along the way enthusiasts Alain Cirou in France, Paul Houde in Austria, Olivier Staiger in Germany and Debasis Sarkar in India offer their impressions of the historic event.

Wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan travels to the frozen north, deep inside the Arctic Circle, to meet the ancient Sami people and the animals they hold so close - reindeer.

In 1896, three survivors of a whaling ship-wreck in the Canadian Arctic are saved and adopted by an Eskimo tribe but frictions arise when the three start misbehaving.

Did Mars ever have life on it? To answer this question, Europe and Russia have launched a unique and ambitious 2-stage project: ExoMars 2016-2018. This documentary is a thrilling look behind the scenes of a magnificent human and scientific adventure. We will uncover the most fascinating aspects of this mission and the search for signs of life on Mars.

Edward Wilson, the only witness to his father's suicide and member of the Skull and Bones Society while a student at Yale, is a morally upright young man who values honor and discretion, qualities that help him to be recruited for a career in the newly founded OSS. His dedication to his work does not come without a price though, leading him to sacrifice his ideals and eventually his family.

Tensions between the USSR and the United States were high in 1959, with the seemingly constant threat of nuclear war. Then some unlikely ambassadors stepped forward to clear all that away: the Harlem Globetrotters. From Harlem With Love is the story of how a group of barnstorming basketball players traveled to the heart of the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War and bridged a cultural gap many thought would stand forever.

The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962—the nuclear standoff with the USSR sparked by the discovery by the Americans of missile bases established on the Soviet-allied island of Cuba.