Free Current Events Documentaries

The PBS Frontline series are some of the best documentaries available on public television, but it's often difficult to carve out time to sit down and watch them. Now Frontline has released over 100 of their documentaries as audio podcasts and they actually work really well as just audio.

Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street is a 1999 documentary directed by Steven Okazaki. Filmed from 1995 to 1998 in the Tenderloin, San Francisco, California, the documentary describes the lives of heroin addicts.

The documentary unit of APM Reports (formerly American RadioWorks) has produced more than 140 programs on topics such as health, history, education and justice.

FRONTLINE has produced over 500 documentary films on contemporary social and political issues in the past 20 years. And you can not only watch most of them online for free through the PBS FRONTLINE website, but you can also listen to over 100 of them on the Frontline Audiocast Podcast.

Explained, is Vox's show on Netflix. Every episode is a dive into a topic that drives our lives or our world.

In this hour long audio documentary from American Public Media, Chris Farrell and John Biewen jump all over the world to see how the latest wave of globalization is affecting people from Pittsburgh to Bangladesh to India to China.

This documentary looks at prison gangs and the resilience of gang leaders who seek to conduct gang activity from behind bars.

This is the first time that anybody has sued an American corporation in an American court on the grounds that the company's violating human rights in another country.

In rural India, where the stigma of menstruation persists, women make low-cost sanitary pads on a new machine and stride toward financial independence.

This documentary looks at life for the 600,000 inmates that are released from prison each year in America. It follows how life after prison affects the ability to get a job, the toll prison has taken on family life, and many other aspects of life after prison.