The Front Man

With extraordinary access, BLAST exposes a world of risky, hardcore, scientific adventure. The story follows an international team of astrophysicists trying to launch a multi-million dollar telescope on a NASA high-altitude balloon. Their journey to discover thousands of early galaxies takes them from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Revealing frustrations, inevitable failures and ultimate triumph, BLAST puts a human face on the quest to answer our most basic question - How did we get here?

From neighborhood ciphers to the most notorious MC battles, "Freestyle: the Art of Rhyme" captures the electrifying energy of improvisational hip-hop--the rarely recorded art form of rhyming spontaneously. Like preachers and jazz solos, freestyles exist only in the moment, a modern-day incarnation of the African-American storytelling tradition. Shot over a period of more than seven years, it is already an underground cult film in the hip-hop world. The film systematically debunks the false image put out by record companies that hip-hop culture is violent or money-obsessed. Instead, it lets real hip-hop artists, known and unknown, weave their story out of a passionate mix of language, politics, and spirituality.

The story of one of New York's darkest secrets: An island where one million American souls are buried. Those who fell through the cracks of the American dream buried by prisoners from Rikers Island.

Corruption, assassination and street rioting surround the story of the award-winning film, Power Trip, which follows an American multi-national trying to solve the electricity crisis in Tbilisi, capital of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Power Trip provides insight into today's headlines, with a graphic, on-the-ground depiction of the challenges facing globalization in an environment of culture clash, electricity disconnections and blackouts.

Paul Devlin’s fictional short stars James McCaffrey (co-star of Rescue Me) as Tony O’Neil, a talented, but very distracted neon artist. Tony loses everything he touches. And if he's not careful, that includes his girlfriend Corrin. Desperate, Tony seeks the help of Shah, a strange and powerful mystic who has learned to use science to achieve spiritual goals. Shah's newest invention is a pair of extraordinary glasses. Try them on, think of an object that's lost and in a moment, it can be seen. The glasses need field-testing and Tony is the perfect subject. At first, Tony is back in control, finding all the things he's lost. But the glasses are more complex than he ever imagined. Tony is about to discover that sometimes, the worst part of losing things, is finding them...

Series combining human stories, expert interviews, book illustrations and historic archive to reveal the beauty of books.