Al Jazeera journalist Eki Rrahmani, a former refugee from Kosovo, reflects on his years as an asylum seeker. He looks back at his escape from his country 30 years ago and compares his experience with the plight of the thousands of refugees and migrants seeking sanctuary in Europe today. He travels to the Greek island of Lesbos which hosts the largest refugee camp in Europe. Many there live in makeshift tents in unsanitary, overcrowded conditions, with access to substandard food. Physical ailments and psychological problems are rife among them. The refugees and migrants in Lesbos who have crossed through the Turkey-Greece border have complained about human rights abuses and say masked men in uniform robbed and beat them as they travelled through. - Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera - Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/

A look at how Soviet rule has shaped present-day Georgia while exploring if it was a union of equals or a military and cultural occupation by Russia. Journalist Tamila Varshalomidze grew up in Georgia after the downfall of the Soviet Union, but she is very aware of how the USSR's influence has affected her life, her family and community and her country. In 1937, during Stalin's "Great Terror," her great great grandfather, a wealthy peasant, was purged. In the middle of the night, someone knocked on his door; he was told to get dressed and leave with the authorities. His family never saw him again. "It has been 80 years ... but I think that finding the truth still matters. I feel it helps us to understand why and how we were controlled as a country," says Tamila. "After almost 30 years of independence, the USSR is still with us and I believe we cannot have a future before we have dealt with this past." Tamila sets out to explore her family's history and how Soviet rule has shaped present-day Georgia. Was it a union of equals or a military and cultural occupation by Russia? And how does the existence of Soviet-era monuments and buildings continue to dominate life in the former Soviet republic? She also examines the impact of this legacy on the psyche of those who live in their shadows, and asks why her fellow Georgians actively avoid dealing with their Soviet past? "One of the means to show the power of the state has always been architecture, be it pyramids or baroque palaces," Georgian architect and urban planner, Irakli Zhvania says. "It was always the means to show your own people how powerful you are, to show them that they are small, they are little and they should be afraid of the state." These structures, which Tamila refers to as the "Soviet scar", are a constant reminder of Georgia's long, painful struggle for independence. For others, they are simply a fact of daily life. While some buildings reveal a kind of Soviet grandeur, many, like the "Khrushchev" residence blocks, named after the Soviet leader's promise of housing for the masses, are an outward symbol of hard times and oppression. Poorly made, limited in functionality and lacking in design, the buildings are nonetheless home to many Georgians, including Tamila's parents. "I think we actively avoid dealing with our past," she says. "This has always been the mindset of my parents' generation. They were born into a Soviet Union which was against people asking questions and curiosity got you into trouble." In The Soviet Scar, Tamila looks into Georgia's complex past to find out if there might be a way to heal the collective memory of pain. - Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera - Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/

Every summer, Amira Abujbara boards a nine-seater plane at a tiny air taxi office. It is the same plane, with the same pilot, that she has flown in almost every year of her childhood. The 50-minute flight will take her over a snowy mountain range, a volcano and an elaborate tundra of blueberries and mushrooms, tea leaves and caribou moss, wildflowers and spider webs. She is heading to her mother’s childhood home and the place where she spends her summers – the remote Alaskan village of Iliamna. Without any roads connecting it to the outside world, this is her only way of going ‘home’. Iliamna, which is an Athabascan word meaning “big ice” or “big lake” sits on the shore of the lake that shares its name. The largest in Alaska, it spans more than 2,500 square kilometres, is pure enough to drink from and is home to the biggest sockeye salmon run in the world. Iliamna shares a post office, school, airport, medical clinic and two small stores with the neighbouring village, Newhalen. Together, they have fewer than 300 residents. It is a far cry from her father’s home country, Qatar, where Amira spends the rest of the year. Her father is Qatari and her mother is Dena’ina - a subset of the Athabascan Alaska Natives. Amira was born in Alaska and is registered as an Alaska Native. When her father married her mother he promised her parents that they would return regularly and so Amira and her sister spent their summers in Iliamna. Their grandmother ran a bed and breakfast for fishermen, so she would help make the beds, clean and prepare the meals for her guests. She learned how to subsistence fish – catching, smoking, brining and canning salmon during the summer months to store for the rest of the year. For the villagers, their home is a beautiful and fruitful land, but it is also a place of incredible hardships. Tiny villages are dwarfed by the vast wilderness that surrounds them, and while the region is rich in natural resources, many Alaska Natives struggle to remain above the poverty line. According to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, over any five-year period between 1993 and 2013, an average of 11 percent of the state’s rural population moved into urban areas. Those aged 18 to 24 are the most likely to leave. But life in the city can be overwhelming for those used to the safety net of a tight-knit rural community. Then there are the alcohol and substance abuse rates: in Alaska, age-adjusted rates of alcohol-induced deaths are 71.4 per 100,000 for Alaska Natives and 12.1 for whites. Suicide rates for Alaska Natives are almost four times the national average, and Alaska Natives are far more likely to succumb to each of the state’s leading causes of death – cancer, heart disease and unintentional injury – than their white counterparts. In Alaska, Native children are nearly three times as likely as white children to die before their fifth birthday. The situation Alaska Natives face can, perhaps, best be summarised by a note in the minutes of a meeting of Newhalen residents. In a list of wishes for the community’s future, one states simply: “To still be here.” But why is this community so at risk and will a proposed gold and copper mine, located close to the villages, endanger it further still? Residents know it offers the promise of jobs, but there are fears it could ruin the salmon run, and with it, their way of life. We Are Still Here tells the story of a community fighting to preserve its culture and its connection to the land.

Journalist James Gannon has inherited a controversial family legacy - that of a clear descendancy from General Robert E Lee, who led the Confederate Army against the Union during the American Civil war in the mid-19th century. Gannon grew up in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, where an 18-metre high statue of his ancestor dominates the landscape in Monument Avenue, the city's grandest street. For over 100 years, Richmond has honoured Lee as one of its greatest heroes. Until recently. In 2015, 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof shot nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, North Carolina. Photographs of Roof draped in and posing with the Confederate flag emerged on a now defunct white supremacist website. Soon after, the city council in New Orleans voted for their Confederate monuments to be removed. Public consultations over Confederate memorials took place in Virginia, which once had the largest enslaved population in the United States. When a "Unite the Right" rally to protest against the removal of a Robert E Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned into violent clashes in August 2017, it accelerated the national debate about what to do with the country's more than 1,500 monuments and publically-installed symbols memorialising the American Civil War. What happened that weekend in Charlottesville made Gannon consider the true legacy of his slave-owning ancestors. On a journey into his family's legacy, Gannon explores why people across the US are so divided on the subject of Confederate monuments and whether the oppression of enslaved people by his ancestors still has an effect on black lives in the US today. Travelling across Virginia and Maryland to meet key actors in the ongoing moral dilemma the US finds itself in regards to the Civil War and glorification of Confederate monuments, Gannon finds himself face to face with the debate for justice, reparations and the fight to tear these statues down. - Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera - Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/

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Gautam Singh grew up in a remote village in the Indian state of Jharkhand. He was fascinated by the art of movies and wanted to become a filmmaker ever since a travelling cinema group passed through his isolated village when he was 10 years old. The nearest movie theatre was 50km away from his village and there were no buses around, so Singh would skip school and walk almost a day to watch a film and then come back. Like every aspiring Indian filmmaker before him, he eventually moved to Mumbai to try to make a name for himself. After sleeping in cramped rooms with seven other people and getting small gigs as a video editor, he finally decided that documentary filmmaking was his preferred style of storytelling. However, the people of his village didn't really consider documentary films to be "real films" because they were not run on the big screens. So after years of making documentaries, Singh decided to make a Bollywood-style movie that the people of his village would be able to see and be proud of. The story he picked for his Bollywood film "Gaon" which means "The Village," is one extremely close to his heart - a tale of the village he grew up in and its transformation. My Own Private Bollywood traces one filmmaker's passionate dream to make a Bollywood movie that will be loved and accepted by the people from his home village of Asarhia. - Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera - Check our website: http://www.aljazeera.com/

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For Guy Martin the danger of the TT race is part of the allure that keeps people coming back for more.