In the last 30 years, the wages of the top 1 percent have grown by 154 percent, while the wages of the bottom 90 percent have grown by only 17 percent. As the rungs of the economic ladder move further apart, some argue that opportunities to achieve the American dream of upward mobility could disappear, they assert, as the rich grow richer and the wages of the middle class and the poor hardly grow at all. But others consider income inequality a positive...

From children playing at the sandlot to the Olympics, the one thing athletic competitions have in common is that they all center around a game. This program scrutinizes athletics today through its evolution from a sport played for fun into a multibillion-dollar industry that can symbolize the problem of greed and the attitude of winning at all costs. Featured on the program are: sports broadcaster Dick Vitale; Tom McMillen, former basketball star...

There's a saying here in Cuba, says Carlos. "It's better to put up with the bad guy you know, because you don't know what the next guy will be like." Is Havana a charming refuge set apart from the capitalist world, or a failed political experiment? This lyrical documentary offers a glimpse of Havana's vibrant street life, where Castro's idealism meets consumer reality. Backed by a powerful soundtrack featuring Latin Grammy nominee X Alfonso, the film...

Kidnapping and selling children is big business in China, where every year more than 20,000 are stolen. In the majority of cases, the birth parents lack the resources or connections to find their missing children, while police investigations drag on for years and are rarely resolved. China's Stolen Children focuses on the cases of two young girls: 3-year-old Wamping, who was abducted two years ago, and Dai-kidnapped at 10 and who, 22 years later,...

Bilal, a 16-year-old slave in Mauritania, runs away from his master in order to find his mother, who had to give him up when he was only 2 years old. Tracking the reunion of Bilal and his mother, this documentary reports on the problem of slavery in Mauritania and the maltreatment suffered by its legions of unpaid, captive workers. Attempts to abolish slavery in the West African country have been made since 1901, but the practice is culturally entrenched;...

Allie Hamilton and Noah Calhoun meet one evening at a carnival. But they are separated by Allie's parents who dissaprove of Noah's unwealthy family, and move Allie away. When Allie doesn't hear from Noah after several years, she meets and becomes engaged to a handsome young soldier named Lon. Allie, with her love still alive for Noah, stops by Noah's home to check on him. Seeing that their reunion has rekindled a passionate romance, Allie must now...

Almost half a century of American economic and commercial sanctions have left Cuba impoverished, but far from being crushed, the Cuban people embrace the opportunity to improvise. "You can't just buy things," a woman explains. "You have to invent them." One entrepreneur fashioned a motorbike from parts of a Chinese bicycle and the front of a Soviet rig; and with no cosmetics available, women concoct homemade alternatives using shoe polish and crayons....

We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.

In the shadow of an increasingly interconnected and globalized economy, many of the world's poor are worse off than ever before. This classic documentary travels to Tanzania, Mali, India, Brazil, and Bosnia to present some practical solutions offered by poor people themselves as they face the challenge of improving their living conditions. Slum residents who have formed community activist groups explain why having sewage systems and permanent housing...

Being careful: this is a long-running motto among L.A. inhabitants when they refer to inner-city ghettos, a no-law zone as huge as Paris where two communities are hemmed in and violently coexist: Hispanics and blacks. Beginning in Los Angeles, this program sheds light on America's ghettos to reveal a very different side of the United States-a country where gang warfare is on the rise and gun crime is out of control. As more and more people sink into...