The Documentary Podcast

Peruvian singer Lenin Tamayo has been dubbed the founder of ‘Q-pop’. He combines traditional Andean folk music with K-pop inspired instrumentation and dance. His songs mix Quechua – one of Peru’s indigenous languages, and the official tongue of the Inca Empire – and Spanish. Lenin first launched his career when his videos went viral on TikTok. Now, he’s working on his second EP. Presenter Martin R...

Africa is home to around one-third of the world's languages, but only a smattering of them are available online and in translation software. So when young Beninese computer scientist Bonaventure Dossou, who was fluent in French, experienced difficulties communicating with his mother, who spoke the local language Fon, he came up with an idea. Bonaventure and a friend developed a French to Fon trans...

Why are exams so stressful? Chinese journalists Wanqing Zhang and Eric Junzhe share personal memories about the infamous Gaokao exam in China, which this year reached a record of 13.42 million applicants; and India correspondent Soutik Biswas reports on the exam scandals threatening the future of millions of young people in India. Plus: why do we have recurring nightmares about exams? Caroline Ste...

For millions of us, our phones or computers are the first place we go to look for romance. Dating apps are a multi-billion dollar business, and for a good few years it’s been booming. But recently there’s been discussion about whether they’re in decline, with fewer downloads and some regular users saying they feel burned out by their experiences on them. For some, the novelty has just worn off. Ot...

Ibiza is an island of contrasts. A place which triggers thoughts of raucous partying, superstar DJs and excess. But it's also an area of raw natural beauty, rugged hills, with a rich spiritual history. No-one knows this duality better than Kim Booth - she's experienced both faces of the Balearic paradise island. Kim first visited as a party go-er tourist and 30 years on, she’s now a resident offer...

The BBC's Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent, Marianna Spring, speaks to parents, teenagers and social media company insiders to investigate whether the content pushed to their feeds is harming them. We hear what happens when two teens give up their phones for the week, and ask: should teenagers give up their smartphones?

The peregrine falcon is not only the fastest animal on our planet, but also the most widely distributed bird of prey, found on every continent apart from Antarctica. In the 1960s Falco Peregrinus was close to extinction, but it has since made a remarkable comeback, hailed as a global success story of conservation. Recent decades have also seen the trend of this speedy raptor notably settling, nest...

For the last thirty years Indian journalist Amitabh Parashar has been investigating why a group of midwives in his home state of Bihar were routinely forced to kill baby girls. In a series of shocking interviews, the midwives explain what happened and how a remarkable social worker brought change. Together they began to save baby girls destined to be killed. Decades later BBC Eye finds a woman, wh...

From the journey from cocoa to chocolate in Ivory Coast. The price of cocoa - the essential ingredient in chocolate - has more than quadrupled on the international market in the last two years. Yet many of those growing it have not benefitted. In fact, drought, disease and a lack of investment have led to catastrophic harvests and, therefore, a drop in income for many small producers of cocoa, esp...

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam in 1976, was only two years old when his family were made refugees by the war. They ended up in Texas, in the US and in his early twenties, he decided to return to the city his parents had once fled. Here in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, Tuan has become an artist of many mediums. Telling stories through film, sculpture and installations, hi...

A bonus episode from the Lives Less Ordinary podcast. In 1982 Mississippi, two boys, Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala, aged 10 and 11, embarked on a crazy mission: to remake Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot-for-shot in their back garden - and the long-forgotten tape that resulted would decades later end up bringing them face-to-face with one of their heroes. For more extraordinary persona...

Why are people in Pakistan struggling to use messaging apps and social media? BBC Urdu's editor Asif Farooqi explains why this might be more than just a simple internet glitch. Plus, we hear from colleagues who speak Spanish, Arabic and Bulgarian about their favourite filler words and sounds. Produced by Alice Gioia and Hannah Dean. (Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich.)

Mpox causes a headache, fever and a blistering rash all over the body. There have been more than 1,200 cases in parts of Central and West Africa since the start of this year. The milder version is now circulating in other parts of the world but the much stronger, possibly deadlier strain, called Clade 1b is also on the rise. A few weeks ago, the World Health Organisation announced that mpox consti...

Dr Aleksandra Janus is a Polish Cultural Anthropologist with a Jewish background from Warsaw, Poland. Living in the capital flattened by Nazi bombs and then recreated by Communism, her multi-layered identity has always conjured mixed feelings about former Jewish memory and cultural spaces. As President of the organisation, Zapomniane Foundation (which means forgotten in English), one of her jobs i...

In a bonus episode from CrowdScience - How do fish survive in the deep ocean? When listener Watum heard about the Titan submersible implosion in the news in 2023, a question popped up in his mind: if a machine that we specifically built for this purpose cannot sustain the water pressure of the deep ocean, how do fish survive down there? In this episode, we travel with marine biologist Alan Jamieso...

For more than six months, a BBC Eye team has been investigating extremist settlers establishing a new type of illegal settlement known as a “herding outpost”. Some have been sanctioned by the UK and US governments for forcing Palestinians from their homes as part of a “campaign of violence and intimidation”. We tell the story of the Palestinian communities living on the frontline of their outposts...

The once glamorous Cypriot beach resort of Varosha has stood empty and frozen in time since war divided the island 50 years ago, but it is now partially open to tourists and there are hotly contested plans for its renewal. Maria Margaronis speaks to Varosha's former inhabitants - mostly Greek Cypriots - who fled in 1974 when Turkish troops invaded the island and have been unable to return ever sin...

American artist Laurie Anderson is putting the finishing touches to her new album Amelia at Miraval Studios in southern France. This is Laurie's first record in six years, and she tells the story of renowned female aviator Amelia Earhart’s tragic last flight in 1937. Earhart’s plane disappeared without trace over the Pacific as she attempted to circumnavigate the globe. The fate of Amelia and her...

Frank McWeeny heads to Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, to meet the underground music community leading protests against government clampdown on freedom of expression and civil society groups. How vital is dancing in a country going through the biggest political and social crisis of its generation? We hear from the city most important techno club Bassiani, militant radio station and event space Mutant R...

Kavita Puri goes to India to meet the last survivors of the 1943 Bengal famine. She looks for traces of how war and famine impacted Kolkata and then travels from the city along the road to where the story of famine begins. Kavita goes deep into the countryside and the jungle in West Bengal to find people who lived through that devastating time more than 80 years ago. For the past year and a half K...

Could a cup of coffee become an act of love and remembrance? BBC Ukrainian's Ilona Hromliuk speaks to the relatives of fallen soldiers who have opened 'memory cafés' to pay tribute to their loved ones. Plus, Alfred Lasteck from BBC Africa tells us about a pioneering conservation project that helped restore the coral reef around the Mnemba island in Zanzibar, and sports journalist Emmanuel Akindubu...

The withdrawal of US troops in 2021 prompted the collapse of the Afghan military, an interim government and then a power grab by the hardline Islamist regime. Since then there have been increasingly harsh restrictions on everything from freedom of movement to clothing. Women and girls are now longer able to attend school after the age of 12 or university and must not speak in public. Host Luke Jon...

Twenty years ago, reporter Julia Paul was teaching media to young women in an Afghanistan where the Taliban were in retreat, if only temporarily. Now she has tracked down two of them again to find out how their lives have fared in the decades since. Some have fled abroad while others are still in Afghanistan, imprisoned in their homes. But even for those who have escaped, life is far from easy. As...

One of the highlights of the Paralympics is wheelchair tennis and one of its true champions is Kgothatso Montjane. KG, as she likes to be known, was born with amniotic band syndrome, a condition that prevents limbs from developing properly. It did not stop her from pursuing her dreams. In 2021 KG became the first black South African to compete at Wimbledon. She tells the story of her life and care...

Hezbollah has both political and military wings both of which are designated by several countries as terror organisations. It emerged several decades ago in Lebanon. Since Israel launched its war in Gaza in the wake of the Hamas attacks of October 7th, it has intensified its military activities along the border between Israel and Lebanon. The persistent question has been what is it trying to achie...