A group of abducted Africans break free from their shackles aboard a Spanish slave ship, the Amistad, so setting the scene for a lengthy courtroom drama played out against a backdrop of 19th Century slavery. Matthew McConaughy is the noble young lawyer fighting for the slaves' freedom, while Anthony Hopkins is mesmerising as decrepit former President John Quincy Adams. Superb sets and an authentic atmosphere, and it's pretty gruesome at times too. Typically Spielberg-esque epic. find out more...

In 1996 the Workers' Educational Association set up classes for sacked Liverpool dock workers in order to help them set down the history of their battle. Channel 4 decided to commission a work on the event and so began a three year process, involving both Jimmy McGovern and Irvine Welsh, in a labour of love by the Dockers that saw their work becoming a film in the summer of 1999. Dockers is a fascinating story, in both the history it tells and its realisation. find out more...

On the sun-drenched palm-fringed paradise island of Haiti at the end of the 1970s, Brenda, Ellen and Sue, three North American women, look for flirtation, relaxation and respite from their mundane jobs and marriages. They find exactly what they are looking for in Legba, an enigmatic local Adonis, whose beauty and passion captivates them all. But Legba decides to show the women not just a world of pleasure but also a Haiti beyond the gilded cage of tourism, a poor and fearful society under the br find out more...

400 years after the Republic's birth Rome has become the wealthiest city in the world, home to over 1 million people and the epicentre of one of the greatest empires history has ever known; but with this phenomenal success has come corruption and excess, the very principles of Rome's founding fathers are under threat and its time as a Republic is drawing to a close. Rome is a magnificent and full blooded dramatisation of the Empire's rebirth. find out more...

A little known passage of British history - the fate of the black men who volunteered for the King's Men in the American War of Independence. At least the Empire didn't abandon them to the slaver George Washington and his thugs, instead dumping them on the desolate Novia Scotia coastline. But where there's life there's hope and enter the radical Thomas Clarkson's brother, a young naval officer named John, who, energised by their living conditions, collected the remnants and shipped them to Freet find out more...

After the 11th September 2001 the War Against Terror is preparing to move on to Iraq. The UN have sent in the weapons inspectors to find if Saddam has indeed Weapons of Mass Destruction and the political machines in both the UK and US are working to present the strongest possible case for war in the face of (in the UK) very vocal opposition from the public. With the dossiers released and the threat established the "need for war" is set and, on the 19th March 2003, th find out more...