Vir die Liefde van die Land
Channel: VIA (DStv 147)
TX Time: 18h00
Genre: Documentary Series, Advertiser-Funded, Afrikaans
Based on the non-fiction book For the Love of the Land by Ivor Price and Kobus Louwrens, this series introduces South Africans to a diverse crop of farmers from across the country who share complex, layered stories about heritage and land.
Journalist Ivor Price travels right across South Africa and knocks on the doors of some of our country's most inspiring emerging farmers.
He hears of their setbacks and disappointments, but also of their stories of cooperation and reconciliation. They discuss surviving trauma like land dispossession and forced labour, and the more current spectre of violent farm crimes.
In the series premiere: farmer Piet Potgieter introduces Ivor to farmer Samson Mahlaba, near Reitz in the Free State.
There they find out how Samson, who worked all his life as a farm worker, now farms for himself.
Disasters Engineered
Channel: Da Vinci (DStv 318)
TX Time: 22h00
Genre: Documentary Series, Science, Technology
Progress sometimes comes at a price, and this series looks at what we can learn from manmade disasters to counteract the underlying issues behind why our machines and structures fail.
Using real-life footage, computer models and expert interviews, Disaster Engineered will take us through events like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Challenger space shuttle disaster to reveal how catastrophic structural failures happened.
Not to mention the bureaucratic tangles, mismanagement and financial decision-making that led to expert engineers' warnings being ignored.
It'll also examine the consequences and human and financial costs of disasters like the Bhopal gas tragedy, the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown and the Aberfan mine disaster in Wales.
Historical cases from the sinking of Titanic and the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge, all the way to more modern disasters like the high-speed train crash in Ankara, Turkey in 2018 will come under the spotlight.