BBC Arena

A group of gay friends try to live with dignity and self-respect while events build to the opening battle in the major gay rights movement.

This British documentary is more than an analysis of John Lennon's song "Imagine" and its ramifications for the world we live in, it's a tentative documentary on John (and Yoko)'s art and songs' influence on a lot of people in all parts of the world and from all walks of life. As such, it should be better known and considered part of the Beatles "canon". The footage shows everything from a John Lennon Museum in Japan to a John Lennon elementary school in Liverpool to his influence on the thinking of a former Communist from Georgia (of the former USSR). It is provocative and very well made with a serious contribution from Yoko.

Arena documentary investigating the history and influence of iconic song 'My Way'

Arena cameras were on hand to film the return of Dire Straits from their triumphant 1980 Brothers in Arms world tour. The film features a superb concert they played at The Rainbow, and band members talk about their music and the pressures and the consequences of success.

Detailed interview with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger looking back at their long career as influential British film-makers and their unusual partnership. Includes clips from many of their films.

Rob Lemkin’s harrowing yet urgent documentary shines a lens on the trauma and legacy of colonialism in one of Africa’s poorest nations, Niger.

Based on the true story of Valerie Solanas who was a 1960s radical preaching hatred toward men in her "Scum" manifesto. She wrote a screenplay for a film that she wanted Andy Warhol to produce, but he continued to ignore her. So she shot him. This is Valerie's story.

Profile celebrating the centenary of the famous author Agatha Christie’s birth. Looking at her life, her character and the key moments in her childhood that influenced her writing.

With the beginnings of Hollywood, the star system was born with an archetypal bad girl - the vampish Theda Bara - and the good girl - the blazingly sincere Lillian Gish. From the 1920s, vivacious Clara Bow and seductive siren Louise Brooks are most remembered, but none made the impact of Marlene Dietrich, an icon of mystery, or Greta Garbo, with her perfect features and gloomy introspection. From the power of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis to the seductiveness of Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, Hollywood studios produced their own brand of beautiful, sassy and confident women. But it wasn't to last. The era drew to a close with the supreme fame of Elizabeth Taylor and the tragic death of Marilyn Monroe.

Documentary exploration of Dirk Bogarde's private life and long-term affair with manager, Anthony Forwood, seen through home movies and excerpts from Bogarde's memoirs.

Writer and Director Mike Leigh discusses the techniques used to create his plays.

In June 2009, a group Britain's leading actors gathered for one night only to perform a celebration of the work of Harold Pinter at the National Theatre, directed by Ian Rickson. The team who made the acclaimed Harold Pinter documentaries for BBC's Arena was there to record this unique performance.

Inspired by the book of the same name, film-maker James Marsh relays a tale of tragedy, murder and mayhem that erupted behind the respectable facade of Black River Falls, Wisconsin in the 19th century.

Nelson Mandela and his fellow ex-prisoners recall their incarceration on South Africa's Robben Island. For three decades, the island housed not only political prisoners but convicts, lepers and the mentally ill. Yet amidst the hopelessness, Nelson Mandela and his comrades devised strategies and subterfuges with which they transformed life on the island, while the vision of a new South Africa began to take shape.

Follows the waves of literary, political, and cultural history as charted by the The New York Review of Books, America’s leading journal of ideas for over 50 years. Provocative, idiosyncratic and incendiary, the film weaves rarely seen archival material, contributor interviews, excerpts from writings by such icons as James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, and Joan Didion along with original verité footage filmed in the Review’s West Village offices.

The Velvet Underground's John Cale tells the story behind Andy Warhol's famous LP cover, Auberon Waugh and John Walters recall their first encounters with the fruit after the war, and footballer Brendan Batson considers how they became a symbol of racism hurled from the terraces

A documentary about and an interview with Hollywood actress Bette Davis about her life and career from the late 1920s to the 1980s on stage and mostly before the camera.

A profile of British painter, Francis Bacon.

To celebrate Arena's 40th anniversary, a new film made entirely from its own archive, evoking the one experience common to all - the 24-hour cycle from dawn to dusk to dawn again.

A ski run in Italy, a supermarket manager in Luton, a sandwich bar in London EC2, Arena opens the bonnet of the Ford Cortina, Britain's most popular, most stolen, and most misunderstood car. 'Dagenham dustbin'? 'Poor man's Rolls-Royce'? In the year that may well see the end of a legend, some of the motoring public, including Sir John Betjeman, Tom Robinson, Alexei Sayle, Sir Terence Beckett and Magnus Magnusson take apart the Ford Cortina: Life and Works 1962-1982.