The Documentary Podcast

In 2019 a devastating fire ripped through the historic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Locals looked on in disbelief, and millions watched on television around the world, as the iconic wooden spire came crashing down into the flames. Many thought Notre Dame was lost forever, but the 860-year-old Cathedral was not for giving up and over the past four years a team of skilled workers, at a cost of 700 million Euros, have painstakingly reconstructed this medieval masterpiece. Colm Flynn meet five people who say the symbolism of this Cathedral's restoration has had a profound impact on their faith. From a young wheelchair user who constructed a wheelchair for Pope Francis from the Cathedral's burnt wood, to the firefighter who saved the sacred chalice from the flames, to the young female footballer involved in the Paris Olympics who is now inspired to see the cathedral's rebirth and a choir made up of the Cathedral's architects and carpenters.

The city of Florence is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. But are new technologies and hyper-tourism changing it forever? Writer Kamin Mohammadi tells the story of how one road - the Via Di San Niccolo - has changed. Kamin lived there when she first moved to the city 16 years ago, and she has seen the changes first-hand. She speaks to friends who still live on the street, business owners who have experienced the changes, about whether the character of the city has been forever altered. But Kamin’s story, like many she knows in Florence, is complicated. The book she wrote about the city’s lifestyle encouraged many of her readers to travel there and experience it for themselves. Many others – from bar owners to cookery writers – similarly depend on tourism. She asks all of them what the city can do to retain the character that residents – and tourists – love.

A special episode from the HARDTalk podcast. HARDtalk’s Stephen Sackur looks back on some of the most powerful moments from 2024 in his end of year review. For more in-depth, hard-hitting interviews with newsworthy personalities, go to bbcworldservice.com/HARDTalk or search for HARDTalk wherever you got this podcast.

Ukraine and Poland are neighbours and close allies in today’s conflict with Russia. But the ghosts of victims of an earlier war have returned to divide them. Tens of thousands of Poles were murdered by Ukrainians in Volhynia, in what's now western Ukraine, in 1943. Most of the victims still lie in unmarked graves, and Ukraine has only just lifted a ban on exhuming the bodies. That followed heavy diplomatic pressure by Poland, about to take over the presidency of the European Union. It threatened to block moves towards Ukrainian integration with the EU unless the ban were lifted. But Poland’s demand has stirred a controversy inside Ukraine about one of the darkest periods of its history. Ukrainian nationalists who were involved in the massacre - and their leader Stepan Bandera - are regarded by many Ukrainians as heroes. Reporter Tim Whewell travels through Poland and western Ukraine to try to find out what really happened in 1943, and ask whether Poland and Ukraine can ever lay a fiercely-contested history to rest. And can the record of Ukraine's Second World War nationalists be openly discussed without giving a propaganda victory to Russia, which has tried to use the subject to vilify Ukraine?

Mark Reid visits a school in Bulgaria where they are teaching their pupils how to make movies. They are making a short film about their local horse market. There are classes like this across the world, in Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, to name but a few. And it is all part of a project is called Le Cinema Cent Ans De Jeunesse.