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Through the neighborhoods of Paris, love is veiled, revealed, imitated, sucked dry, reinvented, and awakened.

The theory that it was in fact Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, who penned Shakespeare's plays. Set against the backdrop of the succession of Queen Elizabeth I and the Essex rebellion against her.

Adrian Blake, an early 20th century archaeologist, comes down with a high fever during one of his excavations in Armenia at the time of the First World War. In his delirium, he dreams of a seductive vision of the goddess Ishtar. He manages to return to England, ultimately finding his fiancee Sophia gone, just before their wedding. He realizes she has been cursed by Ishtar, who feels spurned by Adrian, upon which he is transported through the ages to Pompeii in 79 CE, just four days before the eruption of Vesuvius. Ishtar tells him Sophia now lives in Pompeii as an emancipated slave, and he must trace and rescue her in time. To his astonishment, Adrian finds himself reincarnated as a Gaul specializing in wine trade, and as a friend of magistrate Popidius' son Secundus. He must make the most of all his shrewd bartering and negotiating talents to forge political and economic alliances, outwit opponents and overcome various obstacles.

At first glance Brazil appears to be an alluring playground of exciting carnivals, sultry samba, divine football and a vibrantly diverse people. But behind this dazzling facade lies a disturbing story of history's largest-ever slave population. Astonishingly Brazil, a Portuguese colony, received ten-times more African slaves than the numbers transported to North America. This programme looks at those estimated 4 million people with whose blood, sweat and tears Brazil was built. Without them none of Brazil's present-day success and appeal would exist. Using contemporary testimonies, this film takes a hard look at Brazil's dark history through the eyes of those slaves. They lived in squalid conditions on remote plantations or in teeming cities harboring fatal diseases. Most Africans survived only seven years in this 'New World'. Some, however, did survive to create a new culture a fusion of African and European. This new ethnicity permeates and explains the modern Brazilian way of life. This outstanding film, winner of the Houston Film Festival Gold Award, is directed by Phil Grabsky. His film throws light on Brazil's inconvenient history.

Documentary about English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, the pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology. Ancient Egypt was vandalised by tomb raiders and treasure hunters until this Victorian adventurer took them on. Most people have never heard of him, but this maverick undertook a scientific survey of the pyramids, discovered the oldest portraits in the world, unearthed Egypt's prehistoric roots - and in the process invented modern field archaeology, giving meaning to a whole civilisation.

From ancient times to the present, humans have always loved to do one thing - party! From history to the present, they're the biggest bashes ever, and you're on the guest list.

It is from the emblematic figure of the shaman, also called "the bird man", that François Fronty's approach is built.

Using a thermo-camera to reveal long-lost artworks and never-before-seen architectural layers in some of the city's most famous landmarks, Art detective Maurizio Seracini reveals an unsavory history.

Director Jean-Noël Cristiani wanted to make a film about how light transforms objects throughout the day. Unexpectedly, he entered an art gallery to see an exhibition of paintings by Pierre Soulages, the master of black and light.

RMN and ARTE have selected 12 short films about the artists, sculptors and photographers featured in some of the major exhibitions of 2010 that caused a stir in the French capital, Paris.

With the help of an abundant iconography, engravings, newspaper front pages, old documents, the series tells in eight parts the History of France from 1848 to 1914, or the years covered in the art exhibition spaces of the Musée d'Orsay.

To cover the life of captivating Jewish artist Chaïm Soutine, Murielle Lévy and Valérie Firla conducted a tight investigation, meeting the last witnesses of the early 20th Century, inserting archive footage, seizing the slightest clues.

At the end of the 18th century, the Netherlands fell under the spell of revolution. Inspired by the American Revolution and even before the French, the so-called patriots want to get rid of the corrupt administration of the House of Orange and pave the way for reforms. Their most powerful representative is Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck (1761-1825). His great legal and political talent is recognized by the man who decided the fate of Europe at that time: Napoleon.

NOVA meets a new breed of experts who are approaching "cold case" art mysteries as if they were crime scenes, determined to discover "who committed the art," and follows art sleuths as they deploy new techniques to combat the multi-billion dollar criminal market in stolen and fraudulent art.