The Documentary Podcast: Archive 2014

One boat, two families; trying to escape war in Syria, desperate to start a new life in Europe. In October 2013, dozens of migrants aboard that boat died, as it travelled across the Mediterranean Sea. But some eventually made it to Malta. What happened next?

A startling 300-year journey of a Stradivarius violin through the lives of geniuses, dictators, refugees, and the Milwaukee thieves who stole it from violinist Frank Almond.

Assignment follows Abdi Nor, a winner of the annual US green card lottery, as he attempts to escape from a life of poverty in Kenya and realise the American dream.

Tupac Shakur trained as an actor, posed as a street thug and became a best selling rapper, but he died in 1996. Mythologised and revered, is Tupac a modern Black American folk hero?

Music pulsates in Lisbon, from the traditional and dramatic Fado to the contemporary Kuduro – a strain of Angolan dance music that combines electronic music with Caribbean inflections, born in the late 1980s. Musicians, such as the modern fadist and guitar player Lula Pena, the post-bossa nova Antonio Zambujo, and the incandescent Buraka Som Sistema, echo this rich musical landscape.

Tim Whewell gains rare access to the shadowy world of Russia's radical nationalists fighting in eastern Ukraine for Novorossiya, or New Russia, and a dream of empires past.

For 100 years, an intriguing mix of people have been criss-crossing the US by Greyhound bus. To mark the company's centenary, Laura Barton sets off on an unplanned journey ‘to look for America’. She is conscious of the discrepancy between what the bus line represents in the collective imagination – an idea of freedom, adventure and possibility – and the realities of cross-country coach travel.

For most people in the West, the swastika remains inextricably linked to the atrocities committed by the Nazis. But there have been calls to reclaim the symbol from its Nazi links and restore its origin as an ancient symbol for good luck. For many, such a suggestion is an outrageous affront to good taste. Can these two views ever be reconciled?

For Assignment, Chris Rogers goes undercover to reveal the hidden shame of Guatemala’s hospital for the mentally ill.

Two decades after the death of notorious drug baron Pablo Escobar in 1993, he still looms large in the Colombian psyche. In some quarters, there is an ambivalence towards this ruthless killer, an admiration for the man who made an estimated US $20 billion and built homes for the poor. But many reject the Robin Hood image, and see his legacy as deeply corrosive. Linda Pressly meets victims, a cartel-insider, and Pablo Escobar’s sister as she finds out how the story of this most notorious drug baron still resonates in the city of Medellin.

Gabriel Gatehouse and his team go in search of Annie and along the way meet the medics and families on the front line of the Ebola crisis.

The story of Canadian-born Aimee Semple McPherson and how she went from farm girl to invent broadcast evangelism, becoming among the most famous and glamorous women in America in the 1920s and 30s.

How Ebola is affecting not just health services in West Africa, but tourism, agriculture and investment across the entire continent. Paul Moss travels to Ghana and Senegal to assess the wider impact of Ebola in Africa.