Frontiers - Season 1

In this film, South African novelist Nadine Gordimer returns to Mozambique where, 25 years ago, she went for her honeymoon. Then it was a Portuguese colony, rundown but glamorous compared to the dourness of apartheid in her own country. Independence brought a Marxist government under Samora Machel and a devastating civil war in which the opposition were supported by South Africa.

The island of Cyprus is divided by a line drawn 16 years ago to separate warring Greeks and Turks. Both sides are now stranded: Cypriots living ten metres apart cannot telephone each other. Districts where thousands of people once lived are deserted; memories of the killings are fresh and emotions run high. Christopher Hitchens travels on both sides, aghast at what he finds. One person he meets is equally surprised. Andrew Constantinides , with a broad London accent, stayed too long on holiday and found himself conscripted into the Greek National Guard. Now he faces the guns of Turkish Cypriots with whom, back in London, he might have been happy to go drinking.

The 2,000-mile line that separates Mexico from the United States is a frontier between the Third World and the First.

Richard Rodriguez, Californian-born son of Mexican parents, watches as would-be immigrants hide in the shadows for a chance to cross illegally. But they'll find a deeper frontier to cross as well, he says: between a culture of night and leisure and a culture of daylight and work.

This time last year, John Wells was travelling along what was then called the Iron Curtain. Author, actor and satirist, he has had a long love affair with most things German. This journey turned out to be a final, unrepeatable glimpse of life under the cold warriors.

Crossing into the east, John Wells met communists who thought change was impossible. They believed in the fence because it protected them, they said. What will protect them now that their certainties have crumbled?

In 1939, when Stalin began swallowing the Baltic States, Finland stood and fought. Biographer Nigel Hamilton is married to a Finn and on this trip along the Soviet Union's longest land frontier with the west he reveals the hidden price which the Finns still pay for freedom.

For centuries the Pyrenees have been one of the greatest natural frontiers in the world: a refuge for the persecuted, a massive obstacle to invaders. But as border fences are dismantled all over Europe, novelist Frederic Raphael wonders what will become of the mountain people. In tonight's film, he finds independent Pyrenean communities whose first loyalties lie neither with France nor with Spain.

Theatre director and writer Ronald Eyre, who comes from Yorkshire, follows the route of the United Kingdom's own land frontier with the Republic of Ireland. The line which winds its way through beautiful lakes and fields is also the graveyard of people and hope. He seeks out people who are trying to make normal lives out of an abnormal situation: the farmer who has to travel ten miles to reach a field 100 yards away; the vicar whose congregation has been decimated by violence; the smuggler who lived in the south in a house owned by the British government. His verdict: what a waste.

Fifteen years ago, prize-winning journalist Jon Swain was trapped in Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, when the Khmer Rouge took the city. A bone-crunching journey by truck eventually took him to the Thai frontier and freedom, but millions of Cambodians died in the bloodbath that followed.

Thousands of those who escaped still live in crowded camps just inside Thailand, waiting for a chance to build a new life. In tonight's film, Jon Swain returns to both sides of the frontier that has seen so much tragedy.