The Best TV Shows on ARTE

Words, rituals, objects, references... Karambolage offers an amused comparative anthropology of the locals on both sides of the Rhine.

What would we be without mucus? Can we live on water? How much does life weigh? Finding out the answers is the aim of ARTE's new science show. In a nod to Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", where the figure 42 is the ultimate answer to all questions, 42 tries to provide the answers.

Then complex world of geopolitics broken down into ten minute, bite-sized chunks. You'll never sound uninformed at the dinner table ever again.

Durch die Nacht mit … is a German documentary film television series produced by ZDF for Franco-German television channel ARTE. Locations are mainly in France or Germany. The title of the French version is Au cœur de la nuit. Two Celebrities spend an filmed evening together. One of them is the host who sets the location and the program. There is no moderator.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao Tsetung established a system of labor camps for systematic repression, known as Laogai, an abbreviation for "Reform Through Labor". In such camps, forced labor and physical and mental torture were used to bring about a so-called mental reform, re-education in the spirit of the Chinese Communist Party. Millions of Chinese were affected. Many were executed. In hundreds of camps, the Party took advantage of the prisoners' free labor to build the economy. Self-criticism and denunciation were often the only way to escape martyrdom. Successive waves of purges culminated in the Cultural Revolution, which saw massive human rights abuses, political assassinations, massacres, and exiles in remote parts of the country. Using unreleased archive footage, the documentary tells the story of the invention, development and improvement of China's totalitarian system of surveillance and repression up to the present day, never told before.

At the height of the Cold War in 1960, André Merlaux joins the French Secret Service and contends with enemies both foreign and bureaucratic.

Stories of extraordinary lives and extraordinary lands across the globe.

Berlin, 1888. After penniless Ida’s life is saved at the Charité Hospital she must work off the treatment costs. While she becomes acquainted with the most brilliant physicians of this era at the world-famous hospital, the self-determined young woman discovers her passion for medicine.

Ambitious Jana is confronted with the unscrupulous machinations of the world of finance. Her working life is determined by egotism, the pressure to succeed and machismo. She soon has to decide how far she is prepared to go for her career.

Those who knew them best describe the sensational lives and premature deaths of iconic actors and musicians whose passing left a void in pop culture.

In Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, twenty-seven-year-old Jewish Etty Hillesum begins therapy. What starts as personal exploration becomes a spiritual awakening, documented in her diaries. Guided by psycho-chirologist Julius Spier, her mentor and lover, she undergoes a radical inner transformation. She’ll discover that even when all is taken, one can remain free within.

Dramatic events unfold in Croatia and Ukraine. The first girl drowned, the second one died from a drug overdose. The main suspect in these deaths, however, soon turns out to be innocent - and dead too. While detective Vladimir and reporter Stribor struggle to solve these murders in Croatia, the niece of Olga, an Ukrainian philanthropist, goes missing in Kyiv.

Discover Europe in all its diversity of viewpoints

Twenty-four short films by 24 female writers, performed by 24 women actors, all based on women’s real life experiences of sexism, harassment, and violence. A diversity of female voices and talent from across Europe come together for a series that tackles head-on the everyday brutality experienced by women.

Recounts the largest migration movement in history in which 55 million Europeans left their home countries and set off to America.