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The Fifth Floor

Factual: Life Stories

Global stories from the BBC’s 40 Language Services, with Faranak Amidi

Faranak Amidi presents global stories from the Fifth Floor, home to the BBC’s 40 Language Services.

Faranak Amidi presents global stories from the Fifth Floor, home to the BBC’s 40 Language Services

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The Fifth Floor: "I saw their silhouettes with the guns"

Documentaries

Man writes in sand 'I say no to terrorism' in Grand-Bassam 40 kms east of Abidjan on March 16, 2016

08/04/2016 GMT

"I saw their silhouettes with the guns"

BBC World Service - The Fifth Floor, "I saw their silhouettes with the guns"

The BBC Afrique reporter caught up in the terror attack on an Ivory Coast beach

Surviving the Grand Bassam attack; nostalgia for a shared identity; Punjab's epic poem; Libya governments and militias; and tales from a Beirut hair salon. With David Amanor.

On Sunday 13th March, as people gathered to enjoy the beach at the Grand Bassam resort in Ivory Coast, militants opened fire causing chaos and killing at least 19 people.  BBC Ivory Coast reporter Valerie Bony was at the resort that day and she shares her memories of the attack.

Nostalgia for a shared identity
Tatyana Movshevich grew up in Soviet Russia at a time when a shared culture was encouraged, from Kazakhstan to Latvia.  But since the dismantling of the Soviet Union that shared identity has been eroding.  And for Tatyana, the contest for Ukraine to choose its entry for this year's Eurovision Song Contest brought that change home.

Punjab's centuries-old epic poem
The epic poem Heer Ranjha is a love story which goes back centuries in Punjabi folklore. It was popularised in the 18th century by Waris Shah, who took it from town to town and village to village. We hear from BBC Urdu's Asad Ali Chaudhry and Sana Gulzar how the tradition lives on today.

How much unity can we expect from Libya's Unity Government?
In the past week, Libya has gone from having three governments to two, and then back to three.  It's evidence of the challenges the United Nations faces in trying to bring to an end five years of conflict and promote the new Unity Government. We ask Libyan Muhammad Hussein of BBC Monitoring what the prospects for unity are, in a country with three governments and nearly two thousand militias.

Stories from the salon
How important is it to be well groomed in the Arabic-speaking world? BBC Arabic's Marwa Al-Nagar shares the stories she discovered for the BBC documentary The Salon, including  encounters with a Lebanese refusenik who won't straighten her hair - to the despair of her family - and an Iraqi refugee who can no longer afford the salon and relies on her ex-policeman husband to cut her hair.

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