Unreported World - Season 40 (2021)

A report from Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, as young protestors risk everything to defy the military junta's coup. As the death toll in the city mounts, cameras witness the early optimism and hope of a protest movement disintegrate as the security services launch a brutal crackdown on unarmed civilians. The Myanmar government says it is responding to protests that harm the stability of the nation, using non-lethal force. However, as pressure to release political prisoners and journalists intensifies, so does the bloody crackdown.

Violent hurricanes and severe drought have decimated once fertile areas of Central America, with the region's rural poor worst affected. Hunger and child malnourishment is widespread, prompting an exodus of migrants to the United States. Reporter Guillermo Galdos tracks the journey of Gonzalo, who desperate to give his family a better life, risks his own by employing a network of people smugglers to illegally enter the US. The film reveals how climate migrants have become a valuable commodity in a booming trade and in a region controlled by crime cartels, some are paying the ultimate price.

The battle to save Thailand's wild tigers from poachers and smugglers, who have made millions from their sinister and sometimes deadly trade. Reporter Jonathan Miller travels to the last safe haven of the near-extinct Indochinese tiger and meets the rangers and conservationists fighting to protect the endangered tiger. Thai wildlife enforcement agencies are determined to crack down on the illegal trade in both live and dead tigers. However, they are struggling against a lucrative and murky industry that supplies an insatiable demand from Vietnam and China for trophies and quack medicine.

In the city that never sleeps, the documentary discovers a homelessness epidemic in New York's shelter system, made worse by the Covid crisis. Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy witnesses the harsh reality of addiction, fear, violence and intimidation in a system meant to be helping the city's most vulnerable men, women and children. With one epidemic feeding another, there is now more homelessness in New York than at any time since the Great Depression, and it's disproportionately affecting black and brown people.

In Maiduguri in Nigeria, Yousra Elbagir meets some of the thousands of couples getting married post-lockdown, despite the terrorist group Boko Haram laying siege to the city.

Seyi Rhodes reports on the migrants being beaten back from the European Union by border guards on the notorious Balkan Route. A once-welcoming Europe is now closing its doors, and Serbia has become a bottleneck for thousands of people trying to get through the increasingly hostile route. Rhodes meets beaten and bruised men trying to leave Serbia, and witnesses the families living in government camps too frightened to make the journey. He also hears how the animosity is fuelling a small but growing right-wing political movement.