eqhd Documentaries

This is the story of science's latest frontier: a global scientific investigation into DNA sequencing and bio-molecular cloning, to understand how scientists around the world are competing to be the first to rewrite the history of our planet and resurrect creatures from the past.

Eugenics is the science of “good births” which aims to create the perfect human being and tries to achieve this by preventing reproduction of those perceived as weak, sick, disabled, or otherwise “degenerate.” Before being employed by the Nazis in what remains the most deadly program of “racial purification”, eugenics was a very popular concept among scientists in the United States and Europe. As early as 1907, the United States applied the first eugenics laws, which continued to be in force until the 1970s. More than 60,000 people were denied children under widespread campaigns of forced sterilization. See the explanation of historians and the testimony of victims who continue to struggle for recognition of the harm they have suffered, which has been erased from the collective memory

How do you grasp an event as enormous as September 11? At the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, you start small: A briefcase, a Blackberry, a victim's sweatshirt, and a hero's nametag. Simple objects that tell personal stories, recounted in the donors' own words. Stories from New York, the Pentagon and Shanksville, PA remind us that the legacy of 9/11 is not fear -- it's friendship, courage, and ordinary people pushed by extraordinary circumstances. Their stories deserve to be remembered across decades and generations. By telling them, we triumph over tragedy.

Australian scientist Michael Alpers dedicated over 50 years to researching Kuru, an obscure and incurable brain disease unique to the Fore people of New Guinea. Kuru was once thought to be a psychosomatic illness, an infection, a genetic disorder, even a sorcerer's curse, but Alpers' findings pointed to cannibalism as the culprit. Yet a recent discovery has proven to be even more disturbing: the malady is linked to mad cow disease and its human equivalent, variant CJD. With a decades-long incubation period, could a larger outbreak be on its way?

See the extraordinary tale of a 14 year old Polish girl, Rutka Laskier, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. In 2005, the school notebook in which Rutka recorded her last months in the ghetto of Bedzin was made public, six decades after she hid it under the floorboards of her home there. Rutka was immediately dubbed the ‘Polish Anne Frank’. In her diary, Rutka details her life in the ghetto in 1943 – not just the Nazi atrocities and physical hardship but also how she was developing as a young woman, and her first steps towards relationships with boys. She also tells of how she made a daring escape from one of the early ‘aktions’ - Nazi round-ups of Jews for transportation. The documentary reveals Rutka’s story through the eyes of her half-sister, Israeli academic Zahava Scherz, on a journey to discover the life Rutka led in Bedzin before the Holocaust.

STEAL A PENCIL FOR ME is a compelling documentary feature film by Academy Award® nominee Michèle Ohayon about the power of love and the ability of humankind to rise above unimaginable suffering. 1943: Holland is under total Nazi occupation. In Amsterdam, Jack, an unassuming accountant, first meets Ina at a birthday party – a 20-year-old beauty from a wealthy diamond manufacturing family who instantly steals his heart. But Jack’s pursuit of love will be complicated; he is poor and married to Manja, a flirtatious and mercurial spouse. When the Jews are being deported, the husband, the wife and the lover find themselves at the same concentration camp, actually living in the same barracks. When Jack's wife objects to the relationship in spite of their unhappy marriage, Jack and Ina resort to writing secret love letters, which sustain them throughout the horrible circumstances of the war. Jack: “I’m a very special Holocaust survivor. I was in the camps with my wife and my girlfriend; and believe me, it wasn’t easy.”