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This acclaimed Emmy Award-winning anthology series features documentaries and a limited number of fiction films united by the creative freedom, artistic achievement and unflinching visions of their independent producers and featuring unforgettable stories about a unique individual, community or moment in history.
2000
1999
2001
2003
“Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story,” a wry exploration of the industry in which record producers set amateurs' poems to music and record them (for a fee, of course). Included are interviews with producers, performers, observers and people who have submitted their poems for musical adaptation. And there's a sampling of the results (examples include “Non-Violent Tae-kwon-do Trooper” and “I Am a Ginseng Digger”). Most songs are “in one ear and out the other,” says musician Ellery Eskelin (the son of a song-poem “auteur”). But, he adds, “There's the 10 or 20 percent that are from another planet.”
On an isolated Maine island of 350 people, a clash over arts education spins out of control into vandalism and death threats, tearing apart friends and neighbors. Sigourney Weaver narrates this program following a former Broadway producer as he creates a musical to help the community heal its wounds through songs about lobstering, loneliness and the beauty of the sea.
Since the 1980s, the rural working class town of North Adams, Massachusetts, has struggled to kick-start its economy following the mill closings. This program explores how, with the 1999 opening of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the town has united its blue collar base with visionaries from the art world to reinvent itself in the post-industrial economy.
Heart of the Sea is an hour-long documentary about Hawaiian legend Rell “Kapolioka'ehukai” Sunn who died in January 1998 of breast cancer at the age of 47. Known worldwide as a pioneer of women’s professional surfing, in the Islands Rell Sunn achieved the stature of an icon — not only for her physical power, grace and luminous beauty, but for her leadership in a community that loved her as much as she loved it. Named one of Hawai’i’s most influential women of the 20th century by ABC television, Sunn - whose Hawaiian name means Heart of the Sea - was eulogized in the New York Times for having “captured the heart of Hawai’i during a 14-year battle with cancer.”
Daddy & Papa is a one-hour documentary film made by producer/director Johnny Symons in 2002, it explores same-sex parenting as seen in the lives of four families headed by male couples. The film also examines the legal, social, and political challenges faced by gay parents and their children.
2005
“One Nation Under a Groove,” a profile of Parliament Funkadelic that features animation (including an “Afronaut” character voiced by Eddie Griffin) to explore P-Funk's unique mix of rock and R&B, and its rebellious vibe---tightly controlled by mastermind George Clinton, whose 50-year career links doo-wop and hip-hop. “It was just a party,” says singer Nona Hendryx
Identical twins Margarita and Ramona de Saa became acclaimed ballerinas with the National Ballet of Cuba. Once inseparable, their relationship disintegrated as one sister left for America while the other embraced the Cuban revolution. This program is the story of two women forever linked by birth and dance, but struggling to overcome rifts not only between sisters but also between nations.
This film explores the plight of North Korean refugees trying to escape their homeland and China, and tells the story of activists who put themselves in harm's way to save them via a clandestine underground railroad.
This documentary follows the lives of the women of St. Scholastica Monastery in Duluth, Minnesota. The story is told by the Sisters themselves -- at work, prayer and leisure -- as they pursue a balanced life based on the Rule of St. Benedict and face an uncertain future with spirit, conviction and wit.
July ’64 tells the story of a historic three-day race riot that erupted in two African American neighborhoods in the northern, mid-sized city of Rochester, New York. On the night of July 24, 1964, frustration and resentment brought on by institutional racism, overcrowding, lack of job opportunity and police dog attacks exploded in racial violence that brought Rochester to its knees. Directed by Carvin Eison and produced by Chris Christopher, JULY ’64 combines historic archival footage, news reports and interviews with witnesses and participants to dig deeply into the causes and effects of the historic disturbance.
Almost Home rescues from an exile of denial the real stories of aging that lie in the vast middle between the uber-heroic octogenarian marathoner and the feeble geriatric that most Americans fear becoming. A feature length, cinema-verité film shot on location in a continuing care community that boasts a nursing home transforming its medical (think hospital) model of care into a holistic one (think home), Almost Home is a stunningly intimate film that combines the institution’s struggle to shake the nursing home stigma with tender, sometimes difficult, stories of people who live, work and visit there.
In 1978, Oakley Hall was a promising playwright on the verge of national recognition when a mysterious fall violently transformed his life. This program is the haunting story of a young man's fall from grace, of the vibrant artists who surrounded him and what happens when, decades later, a theater company discovers the very play he was writing the night he fell.
The Real Dirt on Farmer John is a 2005 documentary film directed by Taggart Siegel about the life of Midwestern farmer John Peterson, operator of Angelic Organics. It tells the history of the eccentric farmer's family farm in rural Caledonia, Illinois.
Stanley Tucci
2003
Get the Fire: Young Mormon Missionaries Abroad is a United States PBS-sponsored documentary, by the independent filmmaker Nancy du Plessis. It examines the experiences of some Mormon missionaries who questioned their religious beliefs after serving their missions. It premiered in December 2003 and was 60 minutes long. Some Mormon missionaries, including those serving missions in a foreign culture, may begin to question their religious upbringing and belief system. Get the Fire follows three LDS missionaries during their two-year missions in Germany. The documentary opens with the three future missionaries at their respective homes prior to knowing where they will serve. Surrounded by their family, each boy opens a mission call informing them they will serve in the Munich, Germany mission. The documentary follows them along the full two years of their mission from the Missionary Training Center until they leave the mission and return home. The film shows missionaries proselyting in public squares, knocking door to door, struggling with a foreign language, congregating in zone and district meetings, and meeting with the mission president. Topics covered include missionary slang, leaving a girlfriend at home, missionary morale, and relationships with family at home. The three missionaries appear to remain dedicated and faithful to their mission in the film.
"Black Resort Communities and the African American Dream" Stanley Nelson is a third-generation, upper middle-class African American who spent the past 40 summers in Oak Bluffs, an affluent African-American resort community on Martha's Vineyard. Building on personal stories of summers past, this film explores the tightly-knit world of black professionals who created a refuge to call their own.
Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew is a film portrait of the now famous jazz vocalist who was "rediscovered" decades after he disappeared from the public eye. The documentary blends concert footage, rare photos and candid interviews with Jimmy Scott, his family and his colleagues.
"Hello. I'm going to read a declaration of a state of war... Within the next 14 days we will attack a symbol or institution of American injustice." -- Bernardine Dohrn Thirty years ago, with these words, a group of young American radicals called The Weathermen announced their intention to overthrow the U.S. government. Fueled by outrage over the Vietnam War and racism in America, they went undergound during the 1970s, bombing targets across the country that they felt symbolized "the real violence" that the U.S. government and capitalist power were wreaking throughout the world.From pitched battles with police on Chicago's city streets, to bombing the U.S. Capitol building, to breaking acid-guru Timothy Leary out of prison, this carefully organized clandestine network attempted to incite a national revolution, while successfully evading one of the largest FBI manhunts in history.One of the top documentaries of the year, this award-winning film interweaves extensive archival material with modern-day interviews to explore the incredible story of "The Weather Underground." As former members reflect candidly about the idealistic passion that drove them to "bring the war home," they paint a compelling portrait of troubled and revolutionary times, with unexpected and often striking connections to the current world situation.
In recent years, the ancient art of sumo has witnessed the rise of an increasing number of foreigners to the top of its professional ranks. From Hawaii to Atlantic City, the experiences of American wrestlers provide an entertaining glimpse at the past, present and future of sumo, revealing how this former bastion of Japanese tradition is grappling with globalizing Western forces.
2004
The Political Dr. Seuss is a 2004 documentary film written by Ron Lamothe, Eric Martin and Lois Vossen, and directed by Ron Lamothe.
Los Angeles Now is a 60 minute documentary by producer/director Phillip Rodriguez. It first aired in November 2004 on PBS’s Independent Lens series. The documentary investigates the city of Los Angeles as it comes of age and wrestles with its history and its future. The film includes conversations with a broad range of Los Angeles figures, from actress Salma Hayek and businessman/philanthropist Eli Broad to author and essayist Richard Rodriguez and Cardinal Roger Mahony.
Greg Smith and his family bare all in this unflinching portrait of a 65-pound man striving for the American dream. Fueled by discrimination, Smith created "On a Roll" talk radio from his wheelchair in 1992. The father of three travels the globe but finds his own nation's capital inaccessible - a minor challenge compared to living independently and having safe intimate relationships.
Sisters of '77 is a documentary film that chronicles an unprecedented event in women's history, the first National Women's Conference in Houston, Texas in November 1977. The purpose of the National Women's Conference was to end discrimination against women and promote their equal rights. The conference was the first federally funded women's conference, and brought together over 20,000 women and men from around the United States. Sisters of '77 provides a look at a pivotal weekend that changed the course of history and the lives of the women who attended. The film incorporates rare archival footage and interviews of leaders relating this history to the present. The conference attendees included former first ladies Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, and Rosalynn Carter. The women present included Republicans, Democrats, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinas, Native American, pro-choice, pro-life, straight, gay, liberal and conservative women. The most influential leaders attending the burgeoning women’s movement included Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Smeal, Ann Richards, Coretta Scott King, Billie Jean King, and Barbara Jordan.
A profile of seminal punk band the Ramones includes concert footage, interviews with group members and clips of bands that influenced them or were influenced by them. Bassist Dee Dee Ramone died shortly after filming, while guitarist Johnny Ramone died soon after the film's release. Both are interviewed. Susan Sarandon introduces the film. Also: a preview of a movie about Joe Strummer, who is shown performing.
How has Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, managed to court, coddle, use and abuse power for nearly four decades? News clips, propaganda films, home movies, verite footage and interviews with Marcos, her friends and her enemies reveal her methods.
2013
Part 1 of 2. The Latino dropout crisis is examined through the eyes of six students from across the U.S., beginning with three young women. One left school after becoming pregnant, but has since enrolled in a Tulsa program for at-risk students; another has enjoyed better grades and become more active in school activities since joining the innovative Voices of Youth in Chicago Education program; and the third was helped by the staff at her South Bronx high school after her family became homeless.
2012
Filmed in 10 countries, the series follows Nicholas Kristof and celebrity activists America Ferrera, Diane Lane, Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union and Olivia Wilde on a journey to tell the stories of inspiring, courageous individuals. Across the globe oppression is being confronted, and real meaningful solutions are being fashioned through health care, education, and economic empowerment for women and girls.
2014
The story of the children bullied at school and online. The film questions assumptions about bullying behaviour beyond cliches and stereotypes of the past. It also examines changes in how schools treat the perpetrators and victims.
Two sisters adopted in China as infants by Californian and Norwegian parents grow up knowing they have a twin living on the other side of the world. Although language is a barrier, their bond grows deeper and they arrange to finally meet.
Conclusion. The Latino dropout crisis is seen through the eyes of three young men. One, whose parents moved from Mexico to San Diego so that he and his siblings could have a better education, fell into gang life before turning his life around, due in large part to the Reality Changers organization; another, the son of undocumented workers, overcame barriers in order to attend college; and the third may well have quit school except for the performing arts, which helped boost his confidence.
Episode Synopsis: "Indian Relay" chronicles a season of Indian relay-horse races, which are popular within Native American communities across the Rocky Mountain West. Teams from the Shoshone-Bannock, Crow and Blackfeet nations in Idaho and Montana are featured. The races feature riders leaping from horse to horse after the first two laps of a three-lap race around a track, with each team's handlers catching the dismounted horse or risk being disqualified.
Three young people living in the Pine Ridge Reservation try to forge a better future. When the first female president of Oglala Lakota defies a South Dakota law criminalizing abortion by vowing to build a women’s clinic in their sovereign territory, the three young tribe members are faced with difficult choices.
The lives of two outstanding young playwrights — an African American from Miami’s inner city and an Indian American from Cleveland — are brought together inextricably in the process of creating a new language for the stage. By Robert Levi.
Eighty-five-year-old Jiro Ono, considered the world’s greatest sushi chef, is the proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station. Despite its humble appearance, it is the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a three-star Michelin Guide rating, and sushi lovers from around the globe make pilgrimages. “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is a thoughtful and elegant meditation on work, family and the art of perfection. By David Gelb.
This acclaimed film tells the story of ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), two groups whose activism and innovation turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition. Despite having no scientific training, these determined activists infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry to help identify promising new drugs and move them from experimental trials to patients. With unfettered access to a treasure trove of never-before-seen archival footage, the film reveals the controversial actions, heated meetings, heartbreaking failures and exultant breakthroughs of heroes in the making. By David France.
Legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman goes back to school for this intimate yet sprawling film about the University of California at Berkeley, the oldest and most prestigious member of a ten campus public education system.
An intimate portrait of Rocky Braat, who travels to India as a disillusioned tourist. When he meets a group of HIV-positive children living at an AIDS hostel, a place of unspeakable hardship, he decides to stay and devote his life to them.
The turbulent battle over illegal immigration in Arizona that came to a head with Senate Bill 1070 frames this riveting documentary that tracks multiple perspectives as America eyes the results.
The story of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a secret agency created by the state during the 1950s to spy on its citizens and maintain segregation. Included: remarks from author Rick Bowers ("Spies of Mississippi"); civil rights activists Margaret Block, Lawrence Guyot, Bob Moses and Hollis Watkins; Rev. Ed King, author Neil R. McMillen ("Dark Journey"); journalist Jerry Mitchell; Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.); and former Mississippi governor William Winter.
Dating from the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the annual debutante ball in Laredo, Texas is unlike any other. Las Marthas follows two Mexican American girls carrying this gilded tradition on their shoulders during a time of economic uncertainty and tension over immigration.
A group of women friends who met via the Austin chapter of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and have tried every diet and diet pill, go through weight-loss surgery in an effort to lose hundreds of pounds. The experience presents a host of issues and consequences, some they never could have imagined.
The story of a high school basketball team suffering from a long losing streak in a small town.
Eight brothers who were forged into a band as children by their father, Chicago jazz maverick Phil Cohran, now try to march to their own beat on the streets of New York and in the music business as the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble.
The story of the explosive crossroads of Muhammad Ali’s life, after the famed boxer’s conversion to Islam and refusal to serve in the Vietnam War left him banned from boxing and facing a five-year prison sentence.
How a small town in Alabama became influential in the music of Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Aretha Franklin.
A Fragile Trust tells the shocking story of Jayson Blair, the most infamous serial plagiarist of our time, and how he unleashed the massive scandal that rocked The New York Times and the entire world of journalism.
This documentary brings to life one of the most tumultuous clashes between government and citizens in modern U.S. history, as a longtime feud between Philadelphia police and radical urban group MOVE came to a tragic climax in 1985.
Inspired by his own African American Baptist roots, director Roger Ross Williams explores a place where religion and African culture intersect, as Ugandan and American pastors spread evangelical values to millions desperate for a better life.
How African-American churches and gays deal with the rise of the gay-rights movement.
Filmed in 10 countries, the series follows Nicholas Kristof and celebrity activists America Ferrera, Diane Lane, Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union and Olivia Wilde on a journey to tell the stories of inspiring, courageous individuals. Across the globe oppression is being confronted, and real meaningful solutions are being fashioned through health care, education, and economic empowerment for women and girls.
Food traditions are hard to change, especially when they're passed on from generation to generation. Baffled by his dad's unwillingness to change his traditional soul food diet in the face of a health crisis, filmmaker Byron Hurt sets out to learn more about this rich culinary tradition and its relevance to black cultural identity.
Raised in the Tennessee mountains, Wayne White started his career as a cartoonist in NYC. He quickly found success as one of the creators of the Pee-wee's Playhouse TV show which soon led to more work design some of the most arresting and iconic images in pop culture. Recently his word paintings featuring pithy and and often sarcastic text statements finely crafted onto vintage landscape paintings have made him a darling of the fine art world. The movie chronicles the vaulted highs and crushing lows of an artist struggling to find peace and balance between his professional work and his personal art. This is especially complicated for a man who struggles with the virtues he most often mocks in his art...Vanity, ego and fame.
The Texas State Board of Education rewrites teaching and textbook standards once every decade.
Profiling Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei, who helped design Beijing's iconic Bird's Nest Olympic stadium and later criticized the Games as party propaganda. His opposition to his country's autocratic rule, which he voices in his art and on social media, has caused him many difficulties, as filmmaker Alison Klayman witnesses during the making of this documentary: Government authorities shut down Ai's blog, beat him up, demolish his studio and hold him in secret detention for 81 days.
Wonder Women! explores the nation’s long-term love affair with comic book superheroes and raises questions about the possibilities and contradictions of heroines within the genre. The film goes behind the scenes with Lynda Carter, Lindsay Wagner, Gloria Steinem, Kathleen Hanna, comic writers and artists, and others who offer an enlightening and entertaining counterpoint to the male-dominated superhero genre.
Thousands of migrants have perished in recent years while trying to cross the unforgiving Sonora desert in search of a better life in the United States. The film gives a face to some of the dead, and follows them on their long journey home.
Two strangers — an aging white man and a young Chinese woman — pursue a marriage brokered by the Internet. They get more than they bargained for when she moves to America to be his bride in this quirky, appealing documentary.
The most shameful and best-kept secret in the U.S. Military? The epidemic of rape and sexual assault within the ranks. An American female soldier in a combat zone is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire.
Can the Motor City rise from its ashes? A dynamic cluster of local innovators, entrepreneurs, and proud, self-proclaimed "hustlers” are poised to resurrect Detroit. The result could be a radically new city for the postindustrial age.
Amlan Ganguly, a lawyer-turned social entrepreneur, has sown hope in the poorest neighborhoods of Calcutta by empowering children to become leaders in improving health, health, transforming their communities for the better.
In April, 2005 a Japanese train engineer accelerated beyond permissible speeds in order to make up an 80-second delay. Brakeless examines the aftermath and questions if Japan is cutting back in the wrong places after a decade of economic stagnation.
Powerless tracks the battle between an Indian electric company and a renegade electrician who illegally connects poor families to the grid.
A nine-year-old child in Burma is spurred to leave his village for the first time in his life when his village gets electricity. He walks for over three days to in search of a seeing his first television.
Rich Hill, winner of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, goes inside the homes and lives of small town America, where kids confront heartbreaking choices, marginalized parents struggle to survive, and families cling to the promise of equal opportunity and a better life — someday. The film follows three teenage boys, Andrew, Harley, and Appachey, as they struggle with isolation, broken families, and lack of opportunity, providing an immersive and realistic picture of growing up poor in America. The boys include Appachey, 13, who is vulnerable, intelligent and prone to acting out; Harley, 15, who lives with his grandmother because his mother is in prison; and Andrew, 14, whose family frequently moves due to money problems.
Tens years after robbing a Bank of America, filmmaker Darius Monroe explores what led him to pull a heist as a teenager in Texas, and returns to the scene of the crime. In this gripping blend of documentary, true crime, and personal essay, a filmmaker confronts his past, dissecting the circumstances that led him to commit a bank robbery as a young man, and his journey of reflection and forgiveness.
Winner of the Best Documentary Feature award at the Tribeca Film Festival, The Kill Team tells the harrowing story of Specialist Adam Winfield, a 21-year-old infantryman in Afghanistan who, with the help of his father Chris, attempted to alert the Army to the heinous murders of unarmed civilians being committed by his platoon. Their pleas for help went unheeded and once Adam’s fellow soldiers got wind of what he'd done, they threatened to silence him — permanently. With extraordinary access to the key individuals involved in the case including Adam, his parents, his not-always-reassuring defense attorney, and his startlingly forthright compatriots, The Kill Team is an intimate look at the personal stories often lost inside larger coverage of what became the longest war in U.S. history. Confusion Through Sand is an animated short film about a teenage military recruit alone in the desert.
For the last 170 years, pioneering African American photographers — men and women, celebrated and anonymous — have recorded the dramas and aspirations of generations. Through a Lens Darkly traces their spiritual transformation from slavery to economic mobility and social stability, and shows how these photographers helped their communities reclaim self-worth and humanity.
In the wake of recent events that have sparked a national dialogue, American Denial explores the power of unconscious biases around race and class. Using Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 investigation of Jim Crow racism as a springboard, the film shows how unrecognized, unconscious attitudes continue to dominate racial dynamics in American life.
Lacey Schwartz grew up in an upper-middle-class household with two loving Jewish parents. When she discovers that the man she's always assumed was her father is not her biological parent, she unlocks a powerful family secret.
The investigation into a spate of church burnings that occured in East Texas during January and February 2010 is chronicled.
Three homeless Chicago teens strive to graduate from high school despite the difficulties inherent in their situations.
First hand accounts of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and its impact on the Gulf of Mexico.
A Hawaiian transgender woman finds acceptance, but still is searching for love.
Examining daredevil choreographer Elizabeth Streb and her STREB Extreme Action Company. Included: the evolution of her philosophy, which challenges assumptions about art, aging, injury, gender and human possibility.
The story of the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, which broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pa., on the night of March 8, 1971, and stole hundreds of secret files that they then shared with members of Congress and the news media. Among the finds: evidence that the FBI spied on dissident political groups. The documentary includes remarks from members of the Citizens' Commission.
Married in 1975, Richard and Tony lead a 40-year fight for legal immigration status for same sex spouses.
An African family’s tense experience during West African Ebola outbreak. This intimate film brings us on Emmanuel’s journey as he battles to keep his wife and children safe while the Liberian government struggles to contain a devastating virus amidst a suspicious public.
2007
Fifty million Americans do crossword puzzles each week, many in the venerable New York Times , where Will Shortz has been editor for 12 years. "Wordplay" presents an entertaining and informative look at Shortz' work and that of the puzzle constructors with whom he collaborates, as well as coverage of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, an annual competition founded by Shortz, that profiles a number of intelligent and ingratiating contestants.
This film follows eight-year-old students in an elementary school in China as they campaign for school monitor. This is the first election for a class leader to be held in a school in China. The three candidates campaign, holding debates and showing their intellectual and artistic skills, until one is voted the winner.
This is a film explores the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip and efforts to achieve democracy amidst great social and political turmoil. Told from the perspective of the Israeli police force, this film explores how these individuals try to balance their emotions, beliefs and conscience while attempting to maintain civil order and a democratic outcome.
U.S. soldiers who fought on the island of Attu in Alaska during WWII journey back to the location.
Chronicles the pressure of a year in the life of Pennsylvania State University's Daily Collegian.
This program offers an unsparing look at Ralph Nader, one of the most important and controversial political figures of our time.
Dr. Jack Kessler, a prominent neurologist, shifts his diabetes research to stem cell research when his daughter is paralyzed from the waist down. The program brings the stem cell debate to the forefront and examines the constantly evolving interplay between the promise of new discoveries, the controversy of modern science and the courage of people living with devastating disease and injury.
While working on his latest screenplay in Beijing, Hui Rao experiences writer's block and begins to live the life of the character he is trying to create.
Banished is a documentary film about four U.S. cities, which were part of many communities that violently forced African American families to flee in post-reconstruction America. In incidents which took place in Texas, Missouri, Georgia and Indiana between 1886 and 1923.
Follows two former felons in different stages of life "on the outside." / Examines the challenges faced by ex-convicts as they adjust to life after incarceration. The film focuses on the Exodus Transitional Community, a New York City-based organization (founded by Julio Medina).
With unprecedented access, this intimate documentary goes behind the scenes with Africa's first freelyelected female head of state, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, president of Liberia. The film explores the challenges facing the new president and the extraordinary women surrounding her as they develop and implement policy to rebuild their ravaged country and prevent a descent back into civil war.
Jock Soto, who is Navajo Indian and Puerto Rican as well as gay, retired in June 2005 from the New York City Ballet after a 24-year career; this story climaxes with his emotional retirement at age 40. This is not a film solely for a ballet audience; it is also an exploration of identity, heritage, transition and family.
King Corn is a feature documentary film released in October 2007 following college friends Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis as they move to Greene, Iowa to grow and farm an acre of corn. In the process, Cheney and Ellis examine the role that the increasing production of corn has for American society. The film shows how the industrialization of corn has all but eliminated the family farm, which is being replaced by larger and larger industrial farms. This trend reflects a larger industrialization of the North American food system, whereby, as was outlined in the film, decisions relating to what crops are grown, and how they are grown, are based more on economic considerations than their ramifications on the environment or the population. This is demonstrated in the film by the production of high fructose corn syrup, an ingredient found in many cheap food products, such as fast food. The two return to the same small town that was coincidentally home to both of their great-grandfathers.
This film follows one woman's quest to uncover the secrets of how her family survived the Khmer Rouge genocide. Socheata Poeuv's family survived the Killing Fields, escaped across the border and became Americans. She searches for the truth about what her family escaped from and why her history has been buried in secrecy for so long.
Reveals a little-known battle of the Civil Rights Movement, led by an indigent, under-educated prisoner. Texas-born, Mexican American Fred Cruz came of age and found his life's calling in prison, where the sanctioned cruelty and brutality among inmates and guards moved him to fight the state prison system in the court of law.
The amazing and compelling true story of the fateful voyage of Donald Crowhurst, an amateur yachtsman who enters the most daring nautical challenge ever - the very first solo, non-stop, round-the-world boat race. Through re-enactments and interviews with family and friends, the viewer witnesses Crowhurst's maritime inexperience and eventually an ending that shocked a nation.
A Japanese family searches for their daughter who was abducted by North Korean spies in 1977. / Recalls the 1977 kidnapping of schoolgirl Megumi Yokota from her Japanese hometown by North Korean agents, who took her to North Korea.
2021
When doctors classified homosexuality as a mental illness to be “cured,” they employed cruel treatments like electroshock and lobotomies. LGBTQ+ activists and their allies fought back — and won a momentous victory when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its manual of mental disorders in 1973.
How does a father find purpose in pain? In 2014, Michael Brown Sr.’s son was killed by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, an event that fueled the global Black Lives Matter movement. But his personal story seeking justice and healing has not been told until now.
Does American democracy survive without the backbone of independent local journalism? Go inside The Storm Lake Times, a newspaper serving an Iowa town that has seen its fair share of changes in the 40 years since Big Agriculture came to the area. Pulitzer-winning editor Art Cullen and his family dedicate themselves to keeping the paper alive as local journalism across the country dies out.
75-year-old Rebecca loses the only job she's even known. She has no savings, no 401K safety net, and no employment prospects. Rebecca teams up with son Sian-Pierre to take the trip of a lifetime, one bucket list adventure at a time. Her journey uncovers the economic insecurity faced by millions of Americans.
"Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” This was the guiding principle that removed thousands of Native American children and placed them in Indian boarding schools. Among the many who died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School were three Northern Arapaho boys. Now, more than a century later, tribal members journey from Wyoming to Pennsylvania to help them finally come home.
What happens when you discover that your assumptions are flawed? A white filmmaker starts his academic inquiry by documenting low-income, adult students of color at the Clemente Course in Boston. After time, he comes to terms with his own complicity in racism. Alongside students, a unique filmmaking collaboration forms to explore the area's history of racism and gentrification.
Migrants go missing in rural South Texas more than anywhere else in the U.S. For many families whose loved ones have disappeared after crossing the Mexico border, activist detective Eddie Canales is their last hope. Unlock the mysteries and confront the agonizing facts of life and death in Brooks County, 80 miles north of the border.
Is the "American Dream" of home ownership a false promise? While the government’s postwar housing policy created the world’s largest middle class, it also set America on two divergent paths – one of perceived wealth and the other of systematically defunded, segregated communities.
What is the cost of feeling safe? In an era of mass shootings, lockdown drills and teacher firearms training are as much a part of life as homecoming dances and basketball practice. Take a provocative look at fear, violence, and what Americans will do to feel safe in schools.
Since the beginning of the War on Drugs, the number of women in U.S. prisons has grown drastically. The majority are mothers. Three unforgettable formerly incarcerated mothers, jailed for drug-related charges, fight to overcome alienation—and a society that labels them "felons"—to readjust to life with their families.
In a male-dominated media landscape, the women journalists of India's all-female Khabar Lahariya ("News Wave") newspaper risk it all, including their own safety, to cover the country's political, social, and local news from a women-powered perspective. From underground network to independent media empire, they defy the odds to redefine power. Nominated for an Academy Award.
What is the science behind consciousness? Six brilliant researchers from around the world—a brain scientist, a plant behaviorist, a healer, a philosophy professor, a psychedelics scientist, and a Buddhist monk—take you on a mind-blowing quest to investigate this seemingly unsolvable mystery.
At Lowell High School, San Francisco's academic pressure cooker, the kids are stressed out. With a majority Asian American student body, high-achieving seniors share their dreams and anxieties about getting into a top university. But is college worth the grind?
In Milwaukee, a 15-year-old attempted to carjack law student Claude Motley and shot him in the face. Through multiple surgeries and catastrophic health care bills, the effects of gun violence upends Claude’s life. Yet he still finds himself torn between punishment for the young man and the injustice of mass incarceration for Black men and boys. Can he find mercy in his heart for his attacker?
Three Indigenous students experience the highs and lows of adolescence while attending one of the most remote high schools in the United States. Living in the uniquely beautiful but isolated Diné community within the Navajo Nation reservation, they navigate life as teenagers and dream of a glittering future.
2015
The portrait of a motorcycle-riding Vietnam veteran. There’s much more to Ron “Stray Dog” Hall than meets the eye. Behind the tattoos and leather vest is a man dedicated to helping his fellow vets and immigrant family as he also comes to terms with his combat experience.
The story of the brutal gang rape and murder in Delhi of 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh, which sparked outrage and protests in India, a country beset by extreme poverty and gender inequality.
What happens when love runs out of time? For 92-year-old Mimi, who has spent much of her life caring for 64-year-old Dona, her daughter with an intellectual disability, it means facing the inevitable — the likelihood that she will not outlive her daughter and the need to find her a new home.
Born in Mexico but living in Salinas, California, 3rd-grader Jose loves school. With little support at home, he turns to his teacher, Oscar Ramos, who like Jose was born the son of migrant farm workers, and who inspires him to imagine a life beyond the fields.
1980s Romania: thousands of American movies were smuggled through the Iron Curtain, opening a window into the free world. A black market racketeer and a courageous female translator brought the magic of film to the people, and helped spark a revolution.
Finding love can be hard enough for anyone, but for those on the autism spectrum, the challenges may seem overwhelming. The disorder can jeopardize the core characteristics of a successful relationship — communication and social interaction. Autism in Love offers a warm and stereotype-shattering look at four people with autism as they pursue and manage romantic relationships.
The story of a little-known but landmark event in reproductive justice, when a small group of Mexican immigrant women sued county doctors, the state, and the U.S. government after they were sterilized while giving birth at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Transporting viewers deep inside the tightly-knit and complex Polynesian community in Salt Lake City, one of the chief sources of the modern influx of Pacific Islander football players to the NFL. Shot over a four-year period with intimate access, this is the story of four young men striving to overcome gang violence and near poverty through the promise of American football.
Misty Copeland is on a mission to make history by becoming the first African American principal dancer of a major ballet company.
Weaving together a treasure trove of rare footage with the voices of a diverse group of people who were there, Stanley Nelson tells the vibrant story of a pivotal movement as urgent today as it was then.
With twists and turns fit for an espionage thriller, (T)error goes deep inside an active terror sting without FBI consent.
A Southern grandmother struggles to help her granddaughter survive the health risks and social stigma of living with HIV in South Carolina.
Fed up with faith healers, fortune-tellers, and psychics using his beloved magician’s tricks to swindle money out of credulous people, James “The Amazing” Randi dedicated his life to exposing frauds with the wit and style he brought to his stage show. An Honest Liar is part detective story, part biography, and a bit of a magic act itself.
When a notorious white supremacist and his followers hatch a scheme to gain electoral control of Leith, North Dakota, the residents of the tiny town desperately seek to expel their frightening new neighbors.
Rival political operatives attempt to make history as they navigate Zimbabwe's volatile political landscape to draft a new constitution.
My Nazi Legacy explores the relationship between two men, each of whom are the children of Nazi war criminals who were responsible for thousands of deaths. Through frank interviews with internationally renowned British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, whose family perished in the Holocaust, the men reflect on the crimes of their fathers and the price of forgiveness.
Meet Dub Lawrence, a crusading former sheriff whose investigations highlight increasingly militarized state of American police. Dub established Utah’s first SWAT team, only to see that same unit kill his son-in-law in a controversial standoff.
The Armor of Light follows the journey of Evangelical minister Rob Schenck, who is trying to find the courage to preach about the growing toll of gun violence in America, and Lucy McBath, the mother of an unarmed teenager who was murdered in Florida and whose story cast a spotlight on the state’s “Stand Your Ground” laws.
Dogtown Redemption is the story of three recyclers struggling to survive in West Oakland, a neighborhood already decimated by unemployment, addiction, and violence. Their only lifeblood is a controversial recycling center threatened with closure.
Trapped goes inside the contentious issue of abortion rights through the story of health care providers in Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama who are struggling to comply with controversial new TRAP laws (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers). The current case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, will decide whether these laws are constitutional.
Flint, Michigan’s Claressa "T-Rex" Shields won a Gold Medal in 2012, the first time women were allowed to box in the Olympics. T-Rex is a coming-of-age tale of a girl who learns that in Flint, a gold medal doesn't always make life easier.
2016
Best of Enemies captures the legendary 1968 debates between two famed intellectuals and ideological opposites: leftist Gore Vidal and neoconservative William F. Buckley. Their televised sparring shaped a new era of public discourse in the media, marking the moment TV’s political ambition shifted from narrative to spectacle.
Ravi Patel is almost 30, an actor, and, worst of all to his traditional Hindu parents, still unmarried. After he breaks up with his white girlfriend, Ravi submits to his parents' wishes and allows them to play matchmaker. The true-life romantic comedy Meet the Patels explores the influences of culture and identity on the most intense, personal, and important part of one's life — love.
Michelle, a precocious 20-year-old woman living in rural Maine with her mother, is legally blind and on the autism spectrum. With big dreams and varied passions, she explores love and empowerment outside the limits of “normal” through a provocative sex-positive community. Best and Most Beautiful Things tells Michelle’s joyful story of self-discovery as a celebration of outcasts everywhere.
Left over from the Cold War are a hundred million gallons of radioactive sludge, covering a great amount of land. Governments around the world are imagining society 10,000 years from now to create monuments protecting future generations. Containment weaves between an uneasy present and an imaginative but troubled distant future, exploring the idea that over millennia, nothing stays put.
Residents of Wyoming's isolated Wind River Indian Reservation, a young Arapaho journalist, and a teenage powwow princess travel with a Shoshone elder to search for missing artifacts in the vast archives of Chicago's Field Museum. There they discover a treasure trove of ancestral objects, setting them on a journey to recover what has been lost, and build hope for the future.
After Kitty Genovese was repeatedly attacked on a street in Queens, New York in 1964, The New York Times published a front-page story asserting that 38 witnesses watched her murder from their apartment windows and did nothing to help. Genovese's death quickly became a symbol of urban apathy. The Witness follows the efforts of her brother Bill as he uncovers the truth buried beneath the story.
In 1915, African American newspaper editor and activist William M. Trotter waged a battle against D.W. Griffith’s notoriously Ku Klux Klan-friendly blockbuster The Birth of a Nation, which unleashed a fight still raging today about race relations and representation, and the power and influence of Hollywood. The Birth of a Movement features Spike Lee, Reginald Hudlin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and DJ
Renowned musician Daryl Davis has an unusual, controversial hobby: meeting and befriending members of KKK, many of whom have never met a black person. When some decide to leave the Klan, Daryl keeps their robes and hoods, a collection built piece by piece, story by story. Accidental Courtesy captures Daryl's search for answers to the question, "How can you hate me when you don't even know me?"
Combining archival footage with rotoscopic animation in a dynamic, never-before-seen way, TOWER reveals the action-packed, untold stories of the witnesses, heroes, and survivors of America’s first mass school shooting, at the University of Texas, 1966, when the worst in one man brought out the best in so many others.
Located in an impoverished Mojave Desert community, Black Rock Continuation High School is a last-chance alternative for students who've fallen so far behind they have no hope of earning a diploma at a traditional school. But extraordinary educators believe empathy and life skills give these so-called "bad kids" command of their own futures to combat the crippling effects of poverty.
Ovarian Psycos is about a new generation of fierce, unapologetic and feminist women of color from the Eastside of Los Angeles who confront injustice, build community, and redefine identity through a raucous, irreverently named bicycle crew: The Ovarian Psycos Cycle Brigade.
Filmed over the course of nearly three years, Newtown uses deeply personal, never-before-heard testimonies to relate the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting of schoolchildren in American history, documenting a traumatized community still reeling from the senseless tragedy, fractured by grief but driven toward a sense of purpose
Worshipped and treasured since the dawn of humankind, few things on Earth are as miraculous and vital as seeds, but in the last century, 94% of our seed varieties have disappeared. More than a cautionary tale of “man against nature,” SEED: The Untold Story follows passionate seed keepers, farmers, scientists, and lawyers intent on protecting our 12,000 year-old food legacy.
The Holocaust would seem to be an absolutely off-limits topic for comedy — but is it? History shows that even the victims of the Nazi concentration camps used humor as a means of survival and resistance. The Last Laugh weaves together stories from Auschwitz survivor Renee Firestone and interviews with influential comedians from Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, and Gilbert Gottfried.
National Bird follows whistleblowers who, despite possible consequences, are determined to break the silence around one of the most controversial issues of our time: the secret U.S. drone war. The film gives rare insight through the eyes of both survivors and veterans who suffer from PTSD while plagued by guilt over participating in the killing of faceless people in foreign countries.
More people are imprisoned in the U.S. at this time than any other time or place in history, yet prisons themselves have never felt further away or more out of sight. A cinematic journey through a series of seemingly ordinary American landscapes, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes excavates the hidden world of the modern prison system and explores lives outside the gates affected by prisons.
The story of how Beitar Jerusalem, the most popular and controversial soccer team in Israel, spiraled out of control after their Russian-Israeli oligarch owner brought two Muslim players from Chechnya onto the team. Forever Pure examines the clash between personal identity, politics, money and sports, exploring how racism has the potential to destroy not only a team but an entire society.
They Call Us Monsters goes behind the walls of the Compound, a high-security facility where Los Angeles houses its most violent juvenile criminals, to follow three young offenders who sign up to take a screenwriting class with producer Gabe Cowan as they await their respective trials. To their advocates, they’re kids. To the system, they’re adults. To their victims, they’re monsters.
Home from three combat tours in Iraq, Alex Sutton forges a new identity as a farmer, hatching chicks and raising goats on 43 acres in rural North Carolina. Farmer/Veteran shows Alex diving into life on the farm with his new love Jessica, while the traumas of war linger on.
A moving and intimate story of a family in transition, Real Boy follows the journey of trans teen Bennett as he navigates adolescence, sobriety, and the physical and emotional ramifications of his changing gender identity. Through the process, his mother Suzy makes her own transformation — travelling a difficult road toward accepting that the daughter she raised as Rachael is now her son Bennett.
2022
Hazing is a widespread, far-reaching practice fueled by tradition, secrecy, groupthink, power, and the desire to belong in fraternities and sororities on college campuses across the U.S. Filmmaker Byron Hurt embarks on a deeply personal journey to understand the underground rituals of hazing, revealing the abuse and the lengths college students will go to fit in.
What does it mean to be a digital native? TikTok, Boom. dissects the platform along myriad cross-sections—algorithmic, socio-political, economic, and cultural—to explore the impact of the history-making app. Balancing a genuine interest with healthy skepticism, delve into the security issues, global political challenges, and racial biases behind the platform.
At 27, Kelsey Peterson dove into Lake Superior as a dancer and emerged paralyzed. But within the Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) community, she found allies in her quest to discover who she is now and to dance with disability. When a cutting-edge trial surfaces, it tests her expectations of a possible cure. She finds herself both scared it might not work—and scared that it might.
In Venezuela, amidst a backdrop of poverty, murder, and corruption, the El Sistema youth orchestra offers children hope and the opportunity to pursue a life of art in spite of the harshness of the society around them. Yet the country’s spiraling collapse and political repression threatens the musicians’ dreams of a better life.
An Evanston, Illinois rookie alderwoman led the passage of the first tax-funded reparations bill for Black Americans. While she and her community struggle with the burden to make restitution for its citizens, a national racial crisis engulfs the country. Will the debt ever be addressed, or is it too late for a reparations movement to finally get the big payback?
When Alison Bechdel received a coveted MacArthur Award for her best-selling graphic memoir Fun Home, it heralded the acceptance of LGBTQ+ comics in American culture. From DIY underground comix scene to mainstream acceptance, meet five smart and funny queer comics artists whose uncensored commentary left no topic untouched and explored art as a tool for social change.
The vibrant life of Ernest Withers—civil rights photographer, and FBI informant—was anything but black and white. From his Memphis studio, Withers' nearly 2 million images were a treasured record of Black history but his legacy was complicated by decades of secret FBI service revealed only after his death. Was he a friend of the civil rights community, or enemy—or both?
Wade into the rich soil of Pahokee, Florida, a town on the banks of Lake Okeechobee. Beyond its football legacy, including sending over a dozen players to the NFL (like Anquan Boldin, Fred Taylor, and Rickey Jackson), the fiercely self-determined community tells their stories of Black achievement and resilience in the face of tragic storms and personal trauma.
As fentanyl overdose deaths in Vancouver, Canada reach an all-time high, the Overdose Prevention Society opens its doors—a renegade safe injection site that employs current or former drug users. Its staff and volunteers save lives and give hope to a marginalized community, doing whatever it takes to remain open in this intimate documentary that looks beyond the stigma of injection drug users.
After losing her job as a hotel worker in Las Vegas, Ruby Duncan joined a welfare rights group of mothers who defied notions of the “welfare queen.” In a fight for guaranteed income, Ruby and other equality activists took on the Nevada mob in organizing a massive protest that shut down Caesars Palace.
The bonds of sisterhood, and the parallels of struggles among generations of women in China, are drawn together by the once-secret written language of Nüshu, the only script designed and used exclusively by women.
Sentenced to life for a 1973 San Francisco murder, Korean immigrant Chol Soo Lee was set free after a pan-Asian solidarity movement, which included Korean, Japanese, and Chinese Americans, helped to overturn his conviction. After 10 years of fighting for his life inside California state prisons, Lee found himself in a new fight to rise to the expectations of the people who believed in him.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neuromuscular disease with an average survival time of 2-5 years from diagnosis. In this intimate exploration, three people with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, bravely face different paths as they live with this progressively debilitating illness.
In this coming-of-age documentary about generational trauma, follow Sam Harkness from age 11 to 36 as his middle-class Seattle family is heartbroken and unsure of what to do after his mother suddenly leaves them. Woven together with home movies lovingly crafted by Sam’s half brother, director Reed Harkness, witness a boy grow up grappling with the ripple effects of a singular traumatic event.
In this autobiographical exploration of survivorship, New Orleans journalist and filmmaker Jasmin Mara López unabashedly shares her process of healing from childhood sexual abuse. After Jasmin discloses to her family she'd been abused by her grandfather, she liberates others to come forward in a story of confronting a culture of silence over generational trauma.
They call one another “mama bears” because of the ferocity with which they fight for their children’s rights. Although they grew up as fundamentalist, evangelical Christians praying for the souls of LGBTQ+ people, these mothers are now willing to risk losing friends, family, and faith communities to champion their kids—even if it challenges their belief systems and rips apart their worlds.
2017
Set against the social, political and cultural landscape of the times, Chasing Trane brings saxophone great John Coltrane to life, as a man and an artist. The film is the definitive look at the boundary-shattering musician whose influence continues to this day.
Explore the shocking realities of the billion-dollar global arms trade through those who perpetrate and investigate it.
A profile of a seemingly ordinary Orthodox Jewish preteen from New Jersey whose extraordinary talent—breaking world powerlifting records—has turned her into an international phenomenon.
A profile of "Tales of the City" creator Armistead Maupin, including his evolution from a conservative son of the Old South to a gay rights pioneer.
Director Jennifer Brea, confined to her bed due to chronic fatigue syndrome, documents how people around the world live and function with this disease.
Filmmaker Raoul Peck examines James Baldwin's unfinished book about the lives and assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
A cinema vérité look at the Oakland Police Department as it struggles to confront federal demands for reform, a popular uprising following events in Ferguson, Mo., and an explosive sex scandal.
Chinese filmmaker Nanfu Wang follows a homeless man on a journey across America, exploring the meaning of freedom.
One of the more misunderstood and intriguing contemporary female political figures, Winnie Mandela's rise and seeming fall from grace bear the hallmarks of epic tragedy. Winnie explores her life and contribution to the struggle to bring down apartheid in South Africa from the inside, with intimate insight from Winnie herself, those closest to her and enemies who sought to extinguish her activism.
Historically black colleges and universities play a pivotal role in shaping American history, culture and national identity.
The history and cultural fabric of Baltimore is explored through the lens of the city's rat infestation.
The story of Dolores Huerta, among the most important, yet least-known, activists in American history. Co-founder of the first farmworkers union with Cesar Chavez, she tirelessly led the fight for racial and labor justice, becoming one of the most defiant feminists of the 20th century.
The story of Iranian musician Shahin Najafi's stand for freedom of expression, after he was forced into hiding when hardline clerics issue a fatwa for his death, incensed by a rap song focusing on human rights. Despite the risks to his life every time he performs on stage, Shahin refuses to stop, even with a $100,000 bounty on his head.
Shining shoes is a calling and a passion, a way to be one’s own boss and connect with other people from all walks of life. From New York to Toronto, from Paris and La Paz, travel the world for an inside look at a forgotten profession.
Investigative filmmaker Cullen Hoback travels to West Virginia to study the unprecedented loss of clean water for over 300,000 Americans in the 2014 Elk River chemical spill. While he’s deep into his research in West Virginia, a similar water crisis strikes Flint, Michigan, revealing that the entire system that Americans assume is protecting their drinking water is fundamentally broken.
A portrait of the changing landscapes and shifting values of rural America through the voice of writer, farmer, and activist Wendell Berry. Centered in his native Henry County, Kentucky, Look & See is an elegy to a lost way of life that was once the bedrock of America--the culture of agriculture.
After serving a combined 60 years in prison for crimes they did not commit, three recently exonerated Texans join forces to form the unlikeliest of investigative teams, on a mission to help wrongfully convicted prisoners obtain freedom like they did.
A detailed, on-the-ground account of the 2016 standoff between protesters occupying Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and federal authorities.
For 40 years, the community-organizing group ACORN sought to empower poor and marginalized communities. Its critics believed ACORN exemplified everything wrong with progressive ideals. In 2008, these competing perceptions exploded on the national stage as Barack Obama was running for president. Fueled by a YouTube video made by amateur undercover “journalists,” ACORN came under attack.
A candid look at a shared sisterhood to help the rising number of homeless women veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffer from PTSD, sexual abuse, and other traumas. By entering into the “Ms. Veteran America” competition, these amazing ladies unexpectedly come full circle in a quest for healing and hope.
2019
In Boise, nurses, nail technicians, and stay-at-home mothers are choosing to become paid reproductive surrogates for people from around the world. Made in Boise offers a rare glimpse into this world by intimately following the lives of four surrogates, as they build relationships with the intended parents, prepare for the rigors of pregnancy, and navigate the mixed feelings of their own families.
Decade of Fire covers a shocking but untold piece of American urban history, when the South Bronx was on fire in the 1970s. Left unprotected by the city government, nearly a quarter-million people were displaced as their close-knit, multiethnic neighborhood burned to the ground. Decade of Fire also shows what can happen when a community chooses to fight back and reclaim their neighborhood.
The Interpreters is a poignant but tense portrayal of a very human and high-stakes side of war's aftermath, the story of how Afghan and Iraqi interpreters risked their lives aiding American troops--but then became the people we left behind.
A Native American activist fights to protect her tribe from the onslaughts of development in the Hamptons. Can Jewel balance the complications of a modern teenager with her connection to village life?
ATTLA tells the gripping story of George Attla, a charismatic Alaska Native dogsled racer who, with one good leg and fierce determination, became a legendary sports hero in Northern communities around the world.
25 years after Yusuf Abdurahman left Somalia as a refugee to begin his life anew in Minnesota — which has the largest population of Somalis in America — his worst fear is realized when his 19-year-old-son Zacharia is arrested in an FBI counterterrorism sting operation. Accept the Call captures the story of a father and son attempting to mend their relationship after breaking each other’s hearts.
In 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party formed alliances across ethnic and racial lines with other community-based movements in the city, including Latino group the Young Lords and southern whites the Young Patriots. Banding together in one of postwar America's most segregated cities to confront issues like police brutality and substandard housing, they called themselves the Rainbow Coalition.
Cooked: Survival by Zip Code tells the story of the tragic 1995 Chicago heatwave, the most traumatic in U.S. history, in which 739 citizens died over the course of just a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American. Cooked is a story about life, death, and the politics of crisis in an American city that asks the question: Was this a one-time tragedy, or an appalling trend?
Leftover Women follows three successful Chinese women who, despite thriving careers, are still labeled sheng nu, a derogatory term in China to describe educated, professional women in their mid-20s and '30s who are not married. As they search for “Mr. Right,” they struggle to stay true to their ambitions, while dealing with pressure from families, friends, and governmental stigma.
In We Believe in Dinosaurs the Bible and science collide amid the battleground of a Creation Museum and a $120 million Noah’s Ark-inspired theme park in rural Kentucky.
Always in Season follows the tragedy of African American teenager Lennon Lacy, who in August 2014, was found hanging from a swing set in North Carolina. His death was ruled a suicide, but Lennon’s mother and family believe he was lynched. The film chronicles her quest to learn the truth and takes a closer look at the lingering impact of more than a century of lynching African Americans.
After the birth of her first child, filmmaker Nanfu Wang returns to China to speak with her family and explore the ripple effect of that country's devastating social experiment, the one-child policy. At its core, One Child Nation is a riveting personal story revealing shocking human rights violations and forces us all to reckon with the consequences of blind obedience.
Shot over the course of five years, Bedlam examines the mental health crisis through intimate stories of those people who are in-and-out of overwhelmed and under-resourced psych emergency rooms, jails and homeless camps in Los Angeles, while psychiatrist and filmmaker Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, M.D. also searches for answers to his own late sister’s mental illness.
Brett Story’s critically acclaimed documentary The Hottest August raises the specter of climate change without ever mentioning it, spotlighting ordinary New Yorkers as they share their anxieties about what the future holds while bracing for what could be one of the hottest months on record.
The story of one warmhearted, stubborn man’s visionary quest to find a cure for cancer, Jim Allison: Breakthrough is an homage to an unconventional superhero — a pioneering, harmonica-playing scientist from a small town in Texas who triumphed over a doubtful medical establishment to save innumerable lives around the world and win the Nobel Prize.
Made up of home video footage that reveals a long-kept secret, Sasha Joseph Neulinger’s Rewind is a brave and wrenching look at his childhood and his journey to reconcile his past. By probing the gap between image and reality, the film depicts both how little and how much a camera can capture.
More than just a picture-perfect postcard of iconic stone statues, Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, is a microcosm of a planet in flux. Directed by native Rapa Nui filmmaker Sergio Mata’u Rapu, Eating Up Easter explores the challenges his people are facing, and the intergenerational fight to preserve their culture and a beloved environment against a modernizing society and booming tourism trade.
For 30 years, Marion Stokes records American television, creating a comprehensive archive of the media on 70,000 VHS tapes that are being digitized for future generations.
Pipe Dreams challenges preconceived notions about an age-old instrument—the pipe organ—while introducing viewers to a new generation of passionate, talented young organists in the intense lead up to the Canadian International Organ Competition (CIOC), widely regarded as the Olympics for organ music and which attracts virtuosi under the age 35 from all over the world. Who will come out on top?
2008
This program combines bold and original animation with extraordinary archival footage to explore the build-up to and unraveling of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. Set to the music of revolution, then and now, the film features the vocal talents of Hank Azaria, Mark Ruffalo, Dylan Baker, Liev Schreiber, Nick Nolte, Jeffrey Wright and Roy Scheider. A parable of hope, courage and victory, this program is the story of young Americans speaking out.
2011
Episode Synopsis: Season 13 premieres with new host Mary-Louise Parker introducing "Wham! Bam! Islam," about the challenges involving "The 99," a comic book about Muslim superheroes created by Kuwaiti psychologist Naif Al-Mutawa. He raised $7 million in capital, hired Marvel comic veterans and released the first issue during Ramadan 2006, but it was banned in Saudi Arabia and Middle East sales failed to meet expectations. As a result, he tried to go global without sacrificing the comic's underlying Muslim ideals.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf addresses his ideas for a democratized society.
Josh Osborne hatched a plan with his friends and relatives to kill his mother after she reneged on a deal which would have left the family farm to him.
The story of a group of female Army support soldiers who became the first women in American history to be sent into direct ground combat in violation of official policy. Without sufficient training but with a commitment to serve as needed, these young women ended up fighting in some of the bloodiest counterinsurgency battles of the Iraq war. This film makes public, for the first time, this hidden history. / The experiences of "Team Lioness," female soldiers in Iraq who took part in house raids and patrols in order to interact with Iraqi women. In the process, they became involved in direct combat with the enemy, including in 2004 in Ramadi.
Meet Cody, Nick and Travis—three teenagers from the Swinomish Tribe. After hard times on the rez lead to rehab and drug court, they are offered an alternative: to make a documentary about the impact of two oil refineries on their community. A collaborative coming of age story, MARCH POINT follows the ambivalent and once-troubled teens as they come to understand themselves and the threat their people face.
THE ATOM SMASHERS explores what happens when politicians, not scientists, decide which scientific projects will be funded and which will be cut, and depicts the contradictions that arise when the most educated population in the world begins to doubt the place and value of science. Archival film and vintage footage illustrate the history of Fermilab and cultural attitudes towards science in America, with key scientific ideas brought to life through animation. Despite the setbacks, the physicists at Fermilab continue the search. Until Europe’s atom smasher goes online and starts generating the massive amounts of collisions it takes to find such a minute particle, there’s still a chance that they can win the race. As physicist John Conway says, “This work is too important not to be done somewhere.” But will it be done here in the U.S.? Or will he and the rest of the physicists at Fermilab soon be packing their bags for Europe?
Filmmaker Immy Humes presents a portrait of her father, the legendary forgotten novelist and counterculture icon Harold Louis "Doc" Humes. Doc’s friends and family—including Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Timothy Leary, William Stryon, Peter Matthiessen, Paul Auster, and Jonas Mekas—weaving together a story of politics, literature, protest and mental illness, shedding light on an original mind as well as the cultural history of postwar America.
This program tells the story of making a grand opera about the birth of the atomic bomb. This behind-the-scenes documentary follows composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars over the course of a year as they work to forge the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer into a music drama like no other: the strange and beautiful "Doctor Atomic."
his 50-minute documentary unfolds the creative journey of Albert Maysles' cult classic, GREY GARDENS - from non-fiction film to spectacularly mounted Broadway musical. Captured in the 1975 Maysles film, GREY GARDENS, the indomitable Edith Beale and her daughter Edie, aunt and cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, were revealed to be a most unique and engaging mother daughter act - inhabiting a folie à deux built upon powerful interdependence, quirky eccentricity, courage, devotion and love. Their essence and their story soon catapulted them to cult icon status, an ironic counterpoint to Mrs. Onassis' own such status, and culminating in the ultimate homage: being portrayed on the Broadway stage. The documentary will feature behind-the-scenes footage of the show's rehearsals, performance and insightful interviews with the creators and cast, as well as a revealing interview with Albert Maysles and relevant insights from Beale authorities, devotees, cultural commentators, audience and fans.
Helvetica is about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.
Helvetica is about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.
America's original shock-jock, Petey Greene overcame poverty, drug addiction and prison time to "tell it like it is," shocking and entertaining everyone from the ghetto to the White House. Narrated by Don Cheadle, "Adjust Your Color" looks at how Greene's explosive language and brash style unsettled the establishment as he battled both the system and his own demons on a journey to becoming a leading activist during some of the most tumultuous years in recent history.
A lone undercover cop moves into a small farming town. By the end of the blazing summer of 1999, 46 people are arrested for selling cocaine—nearly all of them African American. It was heralded as one of the biggest drug busts in Texas history, until a team of lawyers set out to uncover the truth.
The doctrine, “separate but equal” ended in the 1950s, right? Think again. At America’s oldest Mardi Gras—celebrated each year in Mobile, Alabama—events remain segregated between white and black residents. Beneath the surface of pageantry, lies a complex story about race relations and the ever-present racial divide that persists in America today.
Iranian American filmmaker Marjan Tehrani chronicles her brother's return to Iran during the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as he travels with his American wife to have a traditional Persian wedding and explore his lost heritage. In weaving the couple's personal story with historical footage, "Arusi" considers the history, impact and troubled relationship between Iran and America. By Marjan Tehrani.
Have you ever dreamed of being waited on hand and foot? For the past six years, Lakshmi has been doing just that for her employers—virtually unnoticed. That is, until one of Lakshmi’s employers begins to film her daily life on the job in Mumbai, India. In a deeply personal portrait, the film takes a hard look at the Indian caste system, gender and class relations.
Abu Amar, an ex-Mujahideen soldier, is trying to build a peaceful life after years of fighting in the Soviet-Afghan war. "Recycle" follows Amar's daily life as he scours the streets to earn a meager living collecting cardboard to recycle while struggling with his faith and the social realities of life in the Middle East.
Everyone has seen a nature documentary with a ferocious kill on the Serengeti Plain. Well, here’s a different story about villagers navigating the dangers and costs of living with wildlife. After a century of “white man’s conservation,” the Maasai of Kenya and Namibia’s Himba people are vying to share a piece of the eco-tourism pie. But can they fulfill the expectations of Westerners without abandoning their native culture?
How does the simple act of planting trees lead to winning the Nobel Peace Prize? Ask Wangari Maathai of Kenya. In 1977, she suggested rural women plant trees to address problems stemming from a degraded environment. Under her leadership, their tree-planting grew into a nationwide movement to safeguard the environment, defend human rights and promote democracy, earning Maathai the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.
A home of your own: that’s the American dream. But what happens when the dreamers are immigrants, factory workers and Communists? Director Michal Goldman traces the history of "The Coops," a cooperative apartment complex built in the Bronx by Jewish garment workers. The film tracks the rise and fall of the community from the 1920s into the 1950s, bearing witness to lives lived across barriers of race, convention and sometimes even common sense.
What were the Japanese Kamikazes thinking just before crashing into their targets? When Risa Morimoto discovered that her beloved uncle trained as a Kamikaze pilot in his youth, she wondered the same thing. Through rare interviews with surviving Kamikaze pilots, Morimoto retraces their journeys from teenagers to doomed pilots and reveals a complex history of brutal training and ambivalent sacrifice.
It’s a civil war that’s lasted 40 years. Passed down from son to son. Fought eye for an eye. Over 15,000 dead and counting, while the world stands by. Welcome to South Central Los Angeles. But what’s at the root of this long-standing battle? Filmmaker Stacy Peralta hits the streets of LA to find out, and speaks with former and current members of the Bloods and the Crips, two of the most notorious and violent street gangs in America.
This is the story of a group of young men who survived for 72 days after their plane crashed in the Andean Cordillera in October 1972. / The 16 young men (of 45 passengers and crew) of a 1972 plane crash in the Andes recall their ordeal, which found them stranded for 72 days on a snowy peak after the search for the plane's wreckage was called off.
In June 1943, Ina Soep, the rich and beautiful daughter of an Amsterdam diamond cutter, met a married couple—a poor accountant named Jack Polak and his vivacious wife, Manja—at a birthday party for a friend. Six months later, the three of them were sharing a barrack at Kamp Westerbork, a Nazi holding camp in the north of Holland. So begins one of the most complex stories of love, hope and transcendent luck to emerge from the Holocaust.
As wars rage in the Middle East, the U.S. military is eager for more recruits—unless you happen to be openly gay. ASK NOT explores the tangled political battles that led to the infamous “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and reveals the personal stories of gay Americans who serve in combat under a veil of secrecy.
Episode Synopsis: "Donor Unknown" charts the story of 20-year-old JoEllen Marsh, who was raised by two mothers in Pennsylvania, as she searches for her sperm-donor father, known only as "Donor 150." Thanks to an online registry for the children of sperm donors, she meets half-siblings that she never knew existed; and, thanks to a New York Times article about her quest that he just happens to see in a Venice, Cal., coffee shop, eventually manages to connect with her biological dad.
"Lives Worth Living" tells the story of the disability rights movement in America, which began after WWII when disabled veterans returned home; and culminated in 1990 with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The documentary includes remarks from the movement's pioneers, including Fred Fay (1940-2011) and Judi Chamberlin (1944-2010); former congressman Tony Coelho; and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).
"Deaf Jam" chronicles the experiences of Aneta Brodski, a deaf Israeli teen living in New York, as she moves from American Sign Language poetry, where body movements convey meaning, into the spoken-word slam scene and collaborates with Palestinian slam poet Tahani Salah on a politics-transcending performance.
Anne Makepeace's "We Still Live Here—As Nutayunean" tells the story of linguist Jessie Little Doe Baird's work to resurrect the long-forgotten language of the Wampanoag (the Native Americans who saved the Pilgrims from starvation). The documentary details what led Baird, in 1994, to begin the effort to return the dormant language to the living; and also explains the factors that led to the language's extinction a century ago.
"The Woodmans" charts the short life of influential photographer Francesca Woodman, who took her own life in 1981 at the age of 22. The profile includes comments from her parents, artists George and Betty Woodman; and brother Charles Woodman.
"These Amazing Shadows" focuses on the National Film Registry, an eclectic collection of movies considered to be "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the National Film Preservation Board. Included: clips from many of the films; remarks from Librarian of Congress James Billington; such directors as Barbara Kopple, Christopher Nolan, Rob Reiner, John Singleton and John Waters; such actors as Tim Roth, Debbie Reynolds and Zooey Deschanel; and film critics and historians.
The five-part "Have You Heard From Johannesburg?," a history of the global anti-apartheid movement, opens with "Road to Resistance," which recalls the 1948 implementation of government-sanctioned discrimination in South Africa. The African National Congress launches a nonviolent campaign against apartheid, but its leaders are forced underground or, like Nelson Mandela, imprisoned. ANC deputy president Oliver Tambo, meanwhile, travels the world in search of support for the anti-apartheid cause.
Part 2 of 5 of "Have You Heard From Johannesburg?" examines "The New Generation," and its effort to overturn South Africa's apartheid system. Included: the refusal of western nations to boycott South Africa; a youth uprising in the township of Soweto; the 1977 murder of activist Steve Biko.
Part 3 of 5 of "Have You Heard From Johannesburg?," "From Selma to Soweto," details the anti-apartheid movement in the U.S., where in 1986 legislation was passed that imposed sanctions on South Africa over the objections of President Reagan.
Part 4 of 5 of "Have You Heard From Johannesburg?, The Bottom Line," details how international grassroots campaigns to boycott and divest from companies that did business in South Africa pressured those companies to exit the apartheid state.
The conclusion of "Have You Heard From Johannesburg?, Free at Last," recalls the end stage of South Africa's apartheid system, when internal and external pressures forced the government to the negotiating table and consent to elections in 1994 that resulted in the once-banned ANC winning a majority in parliament and the once-imprisoned Nelson Mandela becoming president.
Daisy Bates was a complex, unconventional, and largely forgotten heroine of the civil rights movement who led the charge to desegregate the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.
The Black Power Mixtape examines the evolution of the Black Power Movement in the black community and Diaspora from 1967 to 1975. The film combines music, startling 16mm footage (lying undiscovered in the cellar of Swedish Television for 30 years), and contemporary audio interviews from leading African-American artists, activists, musicians and scholars.
Shukree Hassan Tilghman, a 29-year-old African-American filmmaker, is on a cross-country campaign to end Black History Month. Through this tongue-in-cheek journey, “More Than a Month” investigates what the treatment of history tells us about race and equality in a “post-racial” America.
In Danville, California, Lee Gorewitz wanders on a soul-searching odyssey through her Alzheimer’s & Dementia care unit. Confined by the limits of her physical boundaries, she scavenges for reminders of her life in the outside world. Yet her search is for more than a word, or a memory, or a familiar face. It is a quest for understanding. A total immersion into the fragmented day-to-day experience of mental illness, You're Looking at Me Like I Live Here and I Don't is the first documentary filmed exclusively in an Alzheimer’s & Dementia care unit, and the first told from the perspective of someone suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The film reveals Lee's penetrating ruminations and charismatic vitality, challenging our preconceptions of illness and aging. Here is the journey of a woman who will not let us forget her – even as she struggles to remember her self.
Every day, millions tune in to Sesame Street to see one of the world’s most adored and recognizable characters — a furry red three-and-a-half year-old monster named Elmo. Yet, with all of Elmo’s fame, the man behind the icon is able to walk down the street without being recognized. As a teenager growing up in Baltimore in the 1970s, Kevin Clash had very different aspirations from his classmates — he wanted to be a puppeteer. More specifically, he wanted to be part of Jim Henson’s team, the creative force responsible for delivering the magic of Sesame Street on a daily basis. With a supportive family behind him, Kevin made his dreams come true. Combining amazing archival footage with material from the present day, filmmaker Constance Marks explores Kevin's story in vivid detail and chronicles the meteoric rise of Jim Henson in the process. Narrated by Whoopi Goldberg and including interviews with Frank Oz, Rosie O’Donnell, Cheryl Henson, Joan Ganz Cooney and others, this insightful and personal documentary offers up a rare, behind-the-scenes look at Sesame Street and the Jim Henson legacy.
Interweaves the extraordinary story of Septentrional’s six decades of creativity with the history of Haiti. How did the country go from being the first free black republic with a huge wealth of natural resources to a shattered nation unable to support its citizens? How did the hope created by the rise of Jean Bertrand Aristide and the despair that followed the coup that drove him from power contribute to the inevitability of the January 2010 earthquake’s horrific death toll? The film gives context to the current problems facing Haiti, from the brutality of French colonialism and the bloody revolution that brought Haitians their freedom to the crushing foreign debt, the 15-year American occupation that ushered in the brutal dictatorship of “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and the earthquake that killed almost 300,000 people. The passion, commitment, dreams, and joy of Septentrional’s musicians reveal the indomitable Haitian spirit. With a sweeping narrative and infectious music, this is the story of not just one band’s survival, but also Haiti’s survival.
Revenge follows four entrepreneurs from 2007 through the end of 2010 as they fight to bring the electric car back to the world market in the midst of a global recession. The protagonists are Bob Lutz from General Motors, Elon Musk from the American start-up Tesla Motors, Carlos Ghosn from Nissan, and Greg Abbott, an independent electric car converter from California. Whereas the 2006 film Who Killed the Electric Car? ended with the destruction of nearly 5,000 electric cars from California's clean air program, notably the GM EV1, the new film features the birth of a new generation of electric cars including the Chevrolet Volt, the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla Roadster.
Millions of bison once roamed the Great Plains. Can this nearly extinct icon of the American West make a 21st century comeback?
The Ponce family circus has been living and performing in rural Mexico for seven generations. Its history dates back to the late 19th century, when Genaro Ponce founded the Circo Ponce Hermanos. Today, the circus members are still carrying on their ancestors’ traditions. But their performing days may be numbered. Tino, the ringmaster, has long been driven by his dream to lead his parents’ circus to success. He urges everyone in the family, including his four young children, to help meet this goal. But Tino’s wife Ivonne is determined to make a change. Feeling exploited by her in-laws, she regrets that her children have spent their childhoods laboring in the circus. Can Tino choose between his circus dreams and a wife who wants a better life for their children? Filmed along the back roads of Mexico, Circo is an intimate portrait of a family trying to stay together despite mounting debt, dwindling audiences, and simmering conflict. With a marriage in trouble and a century-old tradition hanging in the balance, the Ponce family circus struggles to make a living off its artistry, sweat, and wit.
Locho and Yama are nomadic herders in Tibet's high grasslands, who carve their existence from the land as their ancestors have for generations. As traditional nomadic life confronts rapid modernization, Summer Pasture captures a family at a crossroads, ultimately revealing the profound sacrifice they will make to ensure their daughter's future.
When a highly successful Mexican American Studies program at a high school in Tucson comes under fire for teaching ethnic chauvinism, teachers and students fight back. This modern civil rights struggle is happening at the epicenter of the immigration debate in the age of identity politics.
JR, Charlene, Margarita, and Robert are half American; they are among the many children born to local women and U.S. servicemen who were stationed in military bases in the Philippines until in 1992. Their stories illuminate a generation of Filipino Amerasians who live in limbo.
U.S. Marine Sergeant Nathan Harris, 25, leads his unit to fight a ghostlike enemy in Afghanistan. Wounded in battle, Harris returns to North Carolina and his devoted wife to fight pain, addiction, and the terrifying normalcy of life at home.
When AIDS arrived in San Francisco in 1981, it decimated a community, but also brought people together in inspiring and moving ways to support and care for one another and to fight for dignity and a cure.
A formidable figure standing at 5'8" and weighing more than 300 pounds, Cheryl Haworth struggles to defend her champion status as her lifetime weightlifting career inches towards its inevitable end. Her journey as an elite athlete presents physical and personal challenges, including popular notions of power, strength, beauty, and health.
2020
Feels Good Man is the story of how artist Matt Furie, creator of a once-benign comic character named Pepe the Frog, fought an uphill battle to reclaim his iconic creation from those who turned it into a symbol of hate. Feels Good Man is a thought-provoking, wild ride through an Internet that transformed an unlucky cartoon frog, and then the rest of the world.
Represent follows three women running for office in the heart of the Midwest leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, as they take on entrenched local political networks and fight to reshape politics on their own terms.
In Jonathan Scott's Power Trip, the HGTV home makeover guru shines a light on the obstacles and opportunities for America’s solar industry, following fossil fuel monopolies that halt the growth of renewable energy while visiting with politicians, coal miners, solar panel installers, the Navajo Nation building its own solar plant, and others at the forefront of the battle for energy freedom.
An unlikely duo discovers a pattern of illegal sterilizations in women’s prisons, shielded by prison officials and doctors, and wage a near-impossible battle against the Department of Corrections. Belly of the Beast exposes modern-day eugenics and reproductive injustice in California prisons, through intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated people.
A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem sheds light on the continued fight to end the gender pay gap prevalent throughout the National Football League, chronicling the journeys of cheerleaders from the Raiders and the Bills, each of whom put their careers on the line to take legal action and fight for fair pay.
A Day in the Life of America: Director Jared Leto crafts a sweeping yet intimate cross-section of America shot on a single July 4th in 2017 with 92 film crews fanning out across each of the United States and Puerto Rico to capture A Day in the Life of America. A gargantuan production shot over a single 24-hour period across the country, the film weaves a wide range of beliefs and backgrounds into a rich tapestry of life. American Nomads: As the cost of living rises across the United States, so too is the number of people who dwell in their vehicles. Some travel looking for work and to fulfill their American Dream. Others are simply happy to make a home for themselves in their vans, buses and campers. Meet these American Nomads, each having made their homes in their vehicles while living their best life on the road.
When Dolly Parton sang “9 to 5,” she was singing about a real movement that started with a group of secretaries in the early 1970s. Their goals were simple—better pay, more advancement opportunities and an end to sexual harassment—but as seen in 9to5: The Story of a Movement, their fight that inspired a hit would change the American workplace forever.
With the national conversation around police reform still resonating, Women in Blue shines a spotlight on women within the Minneapolis Police Department to reform it from the inside by fighting for gender equity. Filmed from 2017 to 2020, Women in Blue focuses on MPD’s first female police chief and three women in her department as they each try to redefine what it means to protect and serve.
Premiering in 1968, SOUL! was the first nationally broadcast all-Black variety show on public television, merging artists from the margins with post-Civil Rights Black radical thought. Mr. SOUL! delves into this critical moment in television history, as well as the man who guided it, highlighting a turning point in representation whose impact continues to resonate to this day.
Coded Bias follows M.I.T. Media Lab computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, along with data scientists, mathematicians, and watchdog groups from all over the world, as they fight to expose the discrimination within facial recognition algorithms now prevalent across all spheres of daily life.
Down a Dark Stairwell chronicles the tragic shooting of Akai Gurley, an innocent Black man, in Brooklyn, and the trial and subsequent conviction of the Chinese American police officer, Peter Liang, who pulled the trigger, casting a powerful light on the experiences of two marginalized communities thrust into an uneven criminal justice system together.
An immigrant story with a (glazed) twist, The Donut King follows the journey of Cambodian refugee Ted Ngoy, who arrived in California in the 1970s and, through a mixture of diligence and luck, built a multi-million dollar donut empire up and down the West Coast.
An intimate documentary about faith, renewal, and healing, Two Gods follows a Muslim casket maker and ritual body washer in New Jersey, as he takes two young men under his wing to teach them how to live better lives.
The People vs. Agent Orange closely follows two activists as they take on the chemical industry, and demand accountability for the pernicious legacy caused by the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War.
2010
This documentary is about a singular parking lot in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the select group of parking lot attendants that inhabit its microcosm. The attendants are a uniquely varied group of men comprised of both undergraduate and graduate students, philosophers, intellectuals, musicians, artists, and marginal-type characters.
A look at the work and wisdom of some of the most influential advertising creatives of our time - artists and writers who brought a rebellious spirit to their work in a business more often associated with mediocrity or manipulation. "Just Do It," "I Love NY, " "Where's the Beef?," "Got Milk," "Think Different," and other brilliant campaigns for everything from cars to presidents.
The portrayal of Native Americans in cinema. / Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond takes an entertaining, insightful, and often humorous look at the Hollywood Indian, exploring the portrayal of North American Natives through a century of cinema and examining the myth of "the Injun." Narrated by Diamond with infectious enthusiasm and good humor, this film is a loving look at cinema through the eyes of the people who appeared in its very first flickering images and have survived to tell their stories their own way.
Private Felix Longoria fought and died while fighting the Japanese during World War II. When his body was sent back to his small hometown in Texas, the only funeral parlor there refused to hold a wake for the Mexican American GI because "the whites would not like it." The incident would ripple outward, launching the career of Lyndon B. Johnson, landing the undertaker in a mental institution, and launching the Mexican American civil rights movement.
Filmmaker Chris Billing investigates the deaths of his adopted brothers, two Crow Indian boys who disappeared in 1978. / Some questions are never answered. Some answers are hard to take. Three decades ago, two Crow Indian brothers ran away from home and no one knew why. Their sudden and mysterious deaths sent shockwaves through a tiny upstate New York community. This program relates their adoptive brother's journey to bring Bobby and Tyler home and confront a painful truth that shattered his family.
Beverly May and Terry Ratliff grew up on opposite sides of a mountain ridge in eastern Kentucky. When a mountaintop removal coal mine encroaches on their community, the two find themselves on opposite sides of a debate that divides their community. Who controls, consumes, and benefits from the planet's dwindling supply of natural resources? In a small town in dire economic straits and high unemployment, the coal company's offer to buy land and provide jobs can be hard to resist. How can a community choose between its present and its future? Also: The Virtual Mine.
An inquisitive look at everyday life in Middle America. "45365" explores the vagaries of daily life in an American town -- Sidney, Ohio. Through an intimate look at the lives and landscapes that make up this community of 20,000 people, the film captures various aspects of their shared experience. Conclusions are left to the audience as the component characters speak and act for themselves.
This mini-series follows seven Muslims, Catholics, Evangelical Christians and Jews in training to become professional clergy. Embarking on life paths that demand tremendous personal sacrifice and commitment, these seminarians must uphold timeless truths in an era that values quick fixes and hot trends, and face a public that challenges the relevance of their mission. A new look at an old job, "The Calling" takes viewers into the unknown world of seminaries to tell personal stories of how faith is lived today. (Part 1 of 2)
Muslim, Catholic, Evangelical Christian, and Jewish seminarians embark on their life path in a secular and cynical era. A close look at how faith is lived today. / The conclusion of "The Calling," about America's next generation of religious leaders in the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths. The documentary chronicles their transformation from students to ordained religious professionals.
A group of middle-aged men who have found unlikely success as members of Sweden's all-male synchronized swimming team. What begins as a weekly escape from the daily grind of work and family responsibilities gradually evolves into a more serious commitment. Inspired by Esther Williams's techniques from the 1950s, these train engineers and meat buyers, archivists and teachers have become passionate exponents of a sport generally associated with women.
In the midst of Haiti's lush mountains and historical relics are 500,000 orphan children who live in the streets -- known as "the soulless" and forgotten by their own people. This program follows three teenage boys -- Denick, a charming 14-year-old; Nickenson, a tough but sensitive 16-year-old; and Antoine, an energetic paint-thinner abuser -- who share a common dream of education, government assistance, and social acceptance. Shot in the northern city of Cap-Haitien over a period of two years, this film captures the spirit of human survival.
Made up of 28 musicians and singers with severe mental and physical disabilities, the Spirit of Goodwill Band is a raucous home away from home where members are free to display their talent, humor, and tenacity. This film challenges preconceived notions of what it means to be disabled. / South Florida's Spirit of Goodwill Band, a music group of persons with mental and physical disabilities, as it progresses from small appearances to larger public performances, including the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Miami.
A profile of Barbara Smith Conrad, a gifted University of Texas music student, who finds herself at the epicenter of racial controversy, struggling against the odds and ultimately ascending to the heights of international opera.
An iconoclast who himself became an icon, William Burroughs explored the outer boundaries of culture and identity in the 1950s. His work was vilified by conservatives and banned by the U.S. government, but emerged to influence artists for generations to come. Burroughs's friends and colleagues remember the public persona and the private man.
At the age of 16, Cyntoia Brown, who had suffered a long history of abuse, killed a man who picked her up for sex. The filmmaker has unprecedented access to Cyntioa in prison, and spends two years with her and her family as they await her eventual sentencing to life in prison in Tennessee. This film challenges our assumptions about violence and explores how a young person can be predestined for tragedy by life circumstances.
Civil war came to Rose's Congolese village, with it the nighttime arrest of her entire family, the execution of her husband and grim negotiations with guards which led to her separation from her five-year-old daughter, Nangabire. More than a decade later, resettled in Phoenix, Rose and her children are reunited with Nangabire. Rose emerged from her experience advocating forgiveness and reconciliation.
This story of how a treasure trove of banned Soviet art worth millions of dollars was stashed in a far-off desert of Uzbekistan develops into a larger exploration of how art survives in times of oppression.
In his short career, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a phenomenon. Discovered in the late 1970s through his graffiti art on the Lower East Side, he sold his first painting to Deborah Harry for $200 and later became best friends with Andy Warhol. Director Tamra Davis pays homage to her friend in this documentary.
Artist Vik Muniz journeys from to his home country of Brazil, and to Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest garbage dump located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There Muniz photographs an eclectic band of catadores -- pickers of recyclable materials -- and works with them to "paint" their portraits using garbage. The resulting collaboration with these inspiring characters provides profoundly moving evidence of the transformative power of art and its impact on the human spirit.
After being beaten into a coma, Mark Hogancamp is left brain damaged and traumatized. He devises his own brand of therapy by constructing a 1/6th-scale World War II-era town in his backyard and weaving complex storylines around his characters. Through Marwencol, Mark embarks on a long journey back into the real world, both physically and emotionally.
This haunting film about a film examines a classic Nazi propaganda movie used by historians for decades to provide insight into the realities of life in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. The recent discovery of a second reel in an East German archive has thrown the veracity and intent of the Warsaw Ghetto footage into question.
As the first Muslim woman to lead an Islamic nation, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto evolved from a pampered princess to a polarizing politician in one of the most dangerous countries on Earth. Accused of rampant corruption, imprisoned, then exiled abroad, Bhutto was called back to Pakistan in 2007 as her country's best hope for democracy. Struck down by assassins, her untimely death sent shock waves throughout the world.
Beginning in the modern day and working backward, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo explores the history of Japan's love affair with bugs. Using insects like an anthropologist's toolkit, the film uncovers Japanese philosophies that will shift viewers' perspectives on nature, beauty, and life, and counter the exigencies of day-to-day life.
Welcome to Shelbyville is a glimpse of America at a crossroads. In this one small town in the heart of America's Bible Belt, a community grapples with rapidly changing demographics. Just a stone's throw away from Pulaski, Tennessee (the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan), longtime African American and white residents are challenged with how best to integrate with a growing Latino population and the more recent arrival of hundreds of Muslim Somali refugees.
Fred Martinez was one of the youngest hate-crime victims in modern history when he was brutally murdered at 16. Two Spirits explores the life and death of a boy who was also a girl, and the essentially spiritual nature of gender.
2018
Filmed during two recent wildfire seasons, Wildland is a sweeping yet deeply personal account of a wildland firefighting crew as they struggle with fear, loyalty, dreams, and demons. This is the story of ordinary people with nothing left to lose — as they trudge through an unforgiving face a test of mind, body, and spirit.
Dawnland reveals the untold story of Indigenous child removal in the United States through the first government-endorsed truth and reconciliation commission in the nation, tasked with investigating the devastating impact of Maine’s child welfare practices on Native American communities.
"Delete...Ignore...Delete… Ignore…" Someone is out there censoring your social media feed. Do their decisions distort your understanding of the world as much as clever hoaxes and "fake news"? The Cleaners charts social media’s evolution from a shared vision of a global village to a dangerous web of fake news, extremism, and radicalization.
Showing Shari’a law in a way we've never seen before--through the story of the first-ever female judge in Palestine’s religious courts--The Judge is a portrait of a remarkable woman that also provides rare insight into both Islamic law and gendered justice.
In 2014, 79-year-old white Methodist minister drove to an empty parking lot in his old hometown of Grand Saline, Texas, and set himself on fire. He left a note on his car’s windshield calling the act his final protest against the virulent racism of the community and his country at large. Man on Fire uncovers the truth about the town’s past and what drove Moore to his shocking final act.
Following the rise and fall of the oil boom in North Dakota, My Country No More paints a portrait of a rural American community in crisis split by a high-stakes divide.
Rodents of Unusual Size is a real-life horror "tail" about the various and eccentric methods Louisiana residents have employed to tackle a growing menace that lurks in the bayous and backwaters: hordes of monstrous 20-pound swamp rats known as nutria.
RUMBLE is the electric story of how Native American influence shaped rock and roll, a missing chapter in music history.
Forty years after the death of Elvis Presley, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki takes the King’s 1963 Rolls-Royce on a musical road trip across America. From Memphis to New York, Las Vegas, and beyond, the journey traces the rise and fall of Elvis as a metaphor for the country he left behind.
What does it mean when Americans rebuke racism yet hold on to nostalgic objects that embrace it? Black Memorabilia explores the world of racist material, both antique and new, that pushes demeaning representations of African Americans. From industrial China to the rural South to Brooklyn, the film shines a light on those who reproduce, consume--and reclaim--racially-charged items.
RaMell Ross's Hale County This Morning, This Evening, one of the year's most critically acclaimed films, is a dreamy and intimate journey through the world of Hale County, Alabama, a richly detailed glimpse into life in America’s Black Belt.
In an age where the power of technology helps us connect, are we as isolated as ever? People’s Republic of Desire exposes the baffling reality of how virtual relationships are replacing real-life human connections through China’s video-based social network YY––a hugely popular gathering place for over 300 million people in China.
Told directly through the eyes of the children themselves, Tre Maison Dasan is an up-close and unfiltered look at the lives of three Rhode Island boys, each navigating childhood and adolescence with a parent in prison. Society writes these parents off as criminals, but in their hearts their children still see them as mom and dad.
Three rural healthcare providers try to make a difference in the lives of their patients against overwhelming odds.
Elizabeth Perez, a decorated U.S. Marine veteran living in Cleveland, fights to reunite her family after her undocumented husband, Marcos, is deported. Acclaimed filmmaker David Sutherland examines the U.S. immigration system through the lives of two unforgettable protagonists whose lives reveal the human cost of deportation.
In Baltimore, the murder rate is high and trust in law enforcement is low—meet the engaged citizens reversing those trends in Charm City.
In Out of State, two native Hawaiians sent thousands of miles away to a private prison in the desert find a community of other native Hawaiians and discover indigenous traditions from a fellow inmate serving a life sentence. After finishing their terms and returning to Hawai'i, the men both find life on the outside a struggle and wonder if it’s possible to ever go home again.
California’s Napa Valley is one of the premier wine growing regions in the world, celebrated as an idyllic and luxurious destination. Yet, many of the vineyard workers and the small producers with roots in the fields are rarely credited for the valley's famed bounty. Filmed over the course of one agricultural year, Harvest Season takes an “other side of the valley” approach, giving a unique view of the dramatic process that goes into making some of the world’s most celebrated wines. Kristyn Leach's seeds come from ancient heritage breeds from Asia, and she is one of only a handful of farmers still growing these crops as they face extinction. But the day-to-day challenges of disease and wildlife take their toll as she feels a deep responsibility to the seeds she is trying to save. The Seed Saver is a short film airing with Harvest Season on Independent Lens.
Wrestle goes inside the lives of four members of the high school wrestling team at Huntsville’s J.O. Johnson High School--a longstanding entry on Alabama’s list of failing schools. Teammates Jailen, Jamario, Teague, and Jaquan show that needing a win can be about much more than just beating your opponent on the mat.
2023
Filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes wants to document Sansón's story, an immigrant serving life in prison. Unable to film Sansón, the documentary creatively shares his narrative through reenactments of his letters, featuring his own family as actors.
Legendary U.S. anthropologist Dr. Clyde Snow sets out to train a new group of Latin American students in the use of forensic anthropology. Their goal: to investigate disappearances in Argentina during the “dirty war”. The group expands its horizons, traveling to El Salvador, Bolivia and Mexico, doggedly working behind the scenes to establish the facts for the families of the victims.
Muslim chaplains uphold the First Amendment and vow to protect service members' right to practice their faith freely, despite facing long-held prejudice and disapproval from their own communities. The Muslim chaplains work hard to ensure that all service members have access to religious materials, services, and resources regardless of the religious beliefs they hold.
A south Texas town is thrown into the national spotlight when a local mosque is burned down in an apparent hate crime. After the media moves on, the community is left to reflect on its complex history with racism.
With the arson trial near, the suspect’s family argues his innocence. Meanwhile, facets of Victoria reveal the ingredients that might have turned him to hate and support for the town’s Muslim community begins to wane.
The prosecution presents shocking evidence. As the trial concludes, the engaged citizens of Victoria seek a way to build a more inclusive community.
They grew up believing their land was paradise. Now, they risk everything in escaping it. In an unforgettable documentary, follow families on a treacherous journey to defect from their homeland of North Korea, as the threat of severe punishment and possible execution looms over their passage, revealing a world many have never seen.
Were trees intentionally planted to exclude and segregate a Black neighborhood? Racial tensions ignite in this documentary, when a historically Black neighborhood in Palm Springs, California, fights to remove a towering wall of tamarisk trees. The trees form a barrier, believed by some to segregate the community, frustrating residents who regard them as an enduring symbol of racism.
Liberty City, Miami, is home to one of the oldest segregated public housing projects in the U.S. Now with rising sea levels, the neighborhood’s higher ground has become something else: real estate gold. Wealthy property owners push inland to higher ground, creating a speculators’ market in the historically Black neighborhood previously ignored by developers and policy-makers alike.
Following a cancer diagnosis, Sister Úna—a mischievous, rule-breaking Catholic nun dedicated to social justice—chooses to live as she’s dying. In this touching end-of-life documentary, the self-proclaimed “leader of the misfits” plans her funeral in her last nine months to live.
Who decides which stories get told? A scrappy group of women and LGBTQ+ journalists buck the white male-dominated status quo, banding together to launch The 19th*, a digital news startup aiming to combat misinformation. A story of an America in flux, and the voices often left out of the narrative, the documentary Breaking the News shows change doesn’t come easy.
There is a mental health crisis happening for many American farmers. A combination of climate change and the pandemic have contributed to increasing economic uncertainty and isolation. Following four family farms in the Midwest over several years, the documentary Greener Pastures is a story of perseverance and survival within the farming industry in the heartland.
Over the course of a grueling eight months, a crew of Oaxacan guest workers plant trees throughout the United States. This intimate portrait shows how hard it is to balance the physical demands of reforestation and extreme isolation while staying connected to the family back home.
In Matter of Mind: My Parkinson's, three people navigate their lives with resourcefulness and determination in the face of a degenerative illness, Parkinson’s disease. An optician pursues deep brain stimulation surgery; a mother raising a pre-teen daughter becomes a boxing coach and an advocate for exercise; and a cartoonist contemplates how he will continue to draw as his motor control declines.
Hunting whales is a matter of life or death for the residents of St. Lawrence. When a shy Alaska Native teen becomes the youngest person ever to harpoon a whale for his village, his family is blindsided by thousands of keyboard activists brutally attacking him online—without full perspective on the importance of the hunt to his community's well-being.
NASA's goal to send astronauts to Mars would require a three-year absence from Earth, during which communication in real time would be impossible due to the immense distance. Meet the psychologists whose job is to keep astronauts mentally stable in outer space, as they are caught between their dream of reaching new frontiers and the basic human need to stay connected to home.
What is the role of sound and what does it mean to listen? Hard of hearing filmmaker Alison O’Daniel uses a series of tuba thefts in Los Angeles high schools as a jumping-off point to explore these questions. Through several d/Deaf people telling stories in a unique game of telephone, the central mystery of The Tuba Thieves isn’t about theft of instruments; it’s about the nature of sound itself.
2006
The World According to Sesame Street is a 2005 feature-length documentary created by Participant Productions, looking at the cultural impact of the children's television series Sesame Street, and the complexities of creating international adaptations.[1] It focuses on the adaptations of Sesame Street in Bangladesh (Sisimpur), Kosovo (Rruga Sesam, in Albanian; and Ulica Sezam, in Serbian), and South Africa (Takalani Sesame).
Residents, artists and activists in Hudson, N.Y., protest the proposal for a multinational coal-fired cement plant.
This documentary tells the story of five Cuban photographers whose lives and work span more than four decades and whose perspectives on photography are as varied as their opinions about the Cuban Revolution. From photographers whose lens portrayed the heroic masses to more contemporary photographers who seek to portray individual truths, their stories uncover the power of art to liberate.
Meet two women who lead in a battle against a coalition of national environmental groups for control of the ocean. Three hundred years of fishing tradition and the health of the ocean hang in the balance.
Shadya Zoabi, a charismatic 17-year-old karate world champion, strives to succeed on her own terms within her traditional Muslim village in northern Israel. Despite her father's support, she faces the challenge of balancing her dreams with her religious commitments and others' expectations. This film takes an intimate look at the evolution of a young Arab-Israeli woman with feminist ideas in a male-dominated culture.
As Duke Ellington's co-composer, arranger, and right-hand man, Billy Strayhorn wrote some of the greatest American music of the 20th century. But as a gay man in the ’40s and ’50s, Strayhorn had to lead a discreet existence, while Ellington played to thunderous applause on center stage.
Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes is a 2006 documentary film written, produced, and directed by Byron Hurt. The documentary explores the issues of masculinity, violence, homophobia and sexism in hip hop music and culture, through interviews with artists, academics and fans. Hurt's activism in gender issues and his love of hip-hop caused him to feel what he described as a sense of hypocrisy, and began working on the film.
Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? is a 2006 documentary film written by Matt Coen, Mike Kime and Frank Popper and directed by Frank Popper.
In 1990, two thieves dressed as police officers gained entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, successfully executing the largest art heist in modern history. Among the 13 priceless works lifted was Vermeer's "The Concert," thought to be the world's most valuable stolen painting. This riveting film thoroughly explores the theft and the fascinating, disparate characters involved.
Race discrimination infects America’s capital punishment system. According to a landmark study regarding race and the death penalty, a black defendant who kills a white victim is up to 30 times more likely to be sentenced to death than a white defendant who kills a black victim. RACE TO EXECUTION, a film by Rachel Lyon, traces the fates of two death row inmates, Robert Tarver in Russell County, Alabama and Madison Hobley in Chicago, Illinois. Their compelling personal stories are enlarged and enriched by attorneys who fought for these men’s lives, and by prosecutors, criminal justice scholars and experts in the fields of law and the media. RACE TO EXECUTION reveals how, beyond DNA and the issue of innocence, the shameful open secret of America's capital punishment system is a matter of race. Once a victim’s body is discovered, his or her race—and the race of the accused—deeply influence the legal process: how a crime scene is investigated and the deployment of police resources, the interrogation and arrest of major suspects, how the media portrays the crime and ultimately, the jury selection and sentencing. Hugh Kite, a white man, general store owner and mainstay of his rural Alabama community, was murdered during the course of a robbery on September 15, 1984. Less than four months after Kite was murdered, Robert Tarver, a black man, was sentenced to die. The prosecutor at Tarver’s trial rejected all but one of the African Americans qualified for jury service. Eleven white Alabamans and one African American composed Tarver’s “jury of his peers.” And as prosecutors have long known, a trial can turn on who is sitting in the jury box. Recent research indicates the extent to which the make-up of the jury affects sentencing: when five or more white males sit on a capital trial jury, there is a 70 percent chance of a death penalty outcome. If there are four or fewer white males, the chance of a death sentence is only 30 percent. Whether in the rural South or the inner city North, virtually all-white juries are commonplace—and potentially lethal to black defendants. In 1987, in Chicago, Madison Hobley, a young black medical technician married to his high school sweetheart, lost his wife and son in an apartment house blaze. Hobley was accused of setting the fire. Police officers claimed that Hobley had signed a written confession but that spilled coffee had destroyed the document. A panel consisting of 11 white jurors and one African American juror convicted Madison Hobley and sentenced him to die. With key 2005 Supreme Court decisions overturning death sentences in Texas and California due to racial discrimination in jury selection, RACE TO EXECUTION offers a timely analysis. The film examines the subtle yet persistent ways in which American culture consistently overlooks matters of race in criminal justice. Neither advocating nor repudiating capital punishment, the film catalyzes dialogues about the inherent imbalances that lead to inaccuracy and unfairness in the application of the “ultimate punishment.” The film concludes with the exoneration of one man and the execution of another. In both cases, race is a factor impossible to avoid. Yet there are signs that the death penalty is being used less often in the United States and scrutinized differently than it was even five years ago. The Supreme Court heard five death penalty cases in 2005 alone. Is this progress, or are recent reforms still inadequate? The varied voices heard in RACE TO EXECUTION contribute to a thoughtful examination of the factors that influence who lives and who dies at the hands of the state.
They live crowded together in cement factory dormitories where water has to be carried upstairs in buckets. Their meals and rent are deducted from their wages, which amount to less than a dollar a day. Most of the jeans they make in the factory are purchased by retailers in the U.S. and other countries. China Blue takes viewers inside a blue jeans factory in southern China, where teenage workers struggle to survive harsh working conditions. Providing perspectives from both the top and bottom levels of the factory’s hierarchy, the film looks at complex issues of globalization from the human level. China Blue, which was made without permission from the Chinese authorities, offers an alarming report on the economic pressures applied by Western companies and the resulting human consequences, as the real profits are made—and kept—in first-world countries. The unexpected ending makes the connection between the exploited workers and U.S. consumers even clearer.
This eye-opening expose of the $80 billion coffee industry traces one man's fight for fair trade.
Enron dives from the seventh largest US company to bankruptcy in less than a year in this tale told chronologically. The emphasis is on human drama, from suicide to 20,000 people sacked: the personalities of Ken Lay (with Falwellesque rectitude), Jeff Skilling (he of big ideas), Lou Pai (gone with $250 M), and Andy Fastow (the dark prince) dominate. Along the way, we watch Enron game California's deregulated electricity market, get a free pass from Arthur Andersen (which okays the dubious mark-to-market accounting), use greed to manipulate banks and brokerages (Merrill Lynch fires the analyst who questions Enron's rise), and hear from both Presidents Bush what great guys these are.
In 2001, Japanese American painter Jimmy Mirikitani, over 80 years old, is living in the streets of lower Manhattan. Filmmaker Hattendorf takes an interest, and begins to engage with him to create a documentary of his life. After the World Trade Center destruction on September 11, 2001, the debris- and dust-choked streets are deserted. When Hattendorf looks for Mirikitani, he is still in his usual spot near Washington Square Park. She invites him to stay a while at her apartment nearby to recover from the devastation and unhealthy air in the streets. Gradually we learn who he is, and of his past...with amazing and unexpected results. (The cats of the title are featured in Mirikitani's artwork.)
This film tells the true story of a bohemian St. Francis and his remarkable relationship with a flock of wild red-and-green parrots. Former street musician and San Francisco dharma bum Mark Bittner falls in with the flock as he searches for meaning in his life, unaware that the parrots will bring him everything he seeks.
Legendary Afro-Cuban pop singer Lupe Victoria Yoli, “The Queen of Latin Soul Music,” aka La Lupe or La Yiyiyi, rose to fame in the 1960s and died in 1992 virtually unknown. Beautiful, sexual and the epitome of Afro-Cuban 60s sophistication, La Lupe remains the quintessential bad girl and perpetual outsider, renowned for emotional performances and as the embodiment of female narcissism who stopped at nothing in the name of love and passion. Shot in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the U.S., this film tells her story through interviews and rare archival footage from the groundbreaking musical era.
2009
During the 1976-1983 military dictatorships in Argentina, thousands of citizens were kidnapped and never heard from again. Director Juan Mandelbaum returns to his native Argentina to discover what happened to friends and loved ones who were among the "desaparecidos." His journey reveals the depths of terror that they experienced and the continued fight for justice. Terrence Howard hosts the series.
Five generations of mining families illustrate the story of Butte, Mont., once the world's largest producer of copper. / Irish actor Gabriel Byrne narrates the tale of Butte, Montana, once the world's largest producer of copper -- the "Richest Hill on Earth," the town that "plumbed and electrified America," the Pittsburgh of the West. Butte forged a community whose toughness, vitality and solidarity speak to what's missing in America today, while raising profound questions about the costs and consequences of industrialization and use of natural resources.
Pickpocketing is common practice in Kolkata, India. In an attempt to crack down on more serious crime, the police offer Azad, a young pickpocket, a full pardon if he helps track down more notorious criminals. Azad must choose whether he'll collaborate with the police or risk it all for life on the streets.
This program follows the efforts of American Indian tribes to bring renewable energy projects into their communities. From the Sioux tribes of Great Plains in the Midwest to the Navajo and Hopi of the Southwest, tribes are fighting to protect their land, air and water from the harmful impacts of mining and burning coal on their lands. This program documents how young Native leaders won a legal battle to close a large dirty coal plant not far from Las Vegas, which sends electricity to California.
When indie rock drummer Pat Spurgeon finally gets his big break, his body breaks down. Refusing to make his failing kidney a deterrent, Pat goes on tour with his band Rogue Wave: making music, searching for a donor and administering his own dialysis along the way.
They took Hollywood by storm -- escaping the brutal Soviet oppression of the Hungarian Revolution and rising to fame with classic films like Easy Rider, Deliverance, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Deer Hunter. Cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond pioneered the "American New Wave." This film is a portrait of their 50-year journey and their deep bond of brotherhood.
Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.
A documentary exploring the art and science of origami. / Think origami is just paper planes and cranes? Meet a determined group of theoretical scientists and fine artists who have abandoned careers and scoffed at graduate degrees to forge new lives as modern-day paper folders. Together they reinterpret the world in paper, creating a wild mix of sensibilities towards art, science, creativity and meaning.
A young, irreverent priest arrives at Saint Patrick Parish in Lawrence, Massachusetts, only to confront boiling ethnic tensions in a changing working-class community. Filmed over four years, the program follows the wildly diverse personal stories of Father Paul O'Brien and his unruly flock, as they struggle to hold onto faith in the face of desperate circumstances.
A documentary following an New England senior citizens chorus preparing a one-night-only concert of rock, punk and R&B for the town of Northampton, Massachusetts.
This program examines the creative and commercial value of musical sampling, including the related debates over artistic expression, copyright law and, of course, money. For more than 30 years, innovative hip-hop performers and producers have been re-using portions of previously recorded music. When lawyers and record companies got involved, what was once referred to as a "borrowed melody" became a "copyright infringement."
Who has the authority to define your identity? Considered one of the most controversial scholars of our time, Melville Herskovits — a Jewish anthropologist — challenged the norm in the 1940s when he wrote that black culture wasn’t pathological, it was African. Leading a seismic shift in the way African American culture is understood, Herskovits’s work raises ideas that still
This is the story of a single father who is determined that his nine-year-old daughter become a rap star and thus redeem his deferred dream. This program follows the father-daughter duo through the grit and glamour of the music industry, the struggles of being a single dad with no means and the sacrifices a child makes in order to make her daddy proud.
Mine tells the poignant and powerful story of animals left behind during Katrina, and of the struggles of hurricane victims to reunite with their beloved pets. This meditation on the essential bond between humans and animals expresses the power of compassion in contemporary America. In "Home," director Matthew Faust gives an evocative archive of his family's house in Chalmette, Louisiana, flooded by Hurricane Katrina.
With engrossing interviews and archival footage, filmmaker Jihan El-Tahri exposes the power struggles inside South Africa's African National Congress and charts its shift from liberation organization to the country's post-apartheid ruling party. Ousted president Thabo Mbeki, new leader Jacob Zuma and others offer insight into the polarizing political tug-of-war that threatens not only the ANC, but also South Africa itself.
This is an up-close look at four teens who have lost their sight. The film follows their struggles to fit in, prepare for college and live independently. Theirs is a world where crossing an intersection, cooking a meal or navigating an unfamiliar area can be a challenge that sighted viewers never consider.
In 1999, filmmaker Monika Navarro's uncles were deported from the United States to Mexico, forced to leave the only country they knew and, as servicemen, had pledged to protect. Set against the backdrop of increased attention to the U.S.-Mexican border, "Lost Souls (Animas Perdidas)" explores national identity, the lives of immigrants and what happens when deportees are returned to a homeland they no longer consider home.
What's a child's education worth? For one visionary rookie principal, it's priceless. At the Bronx Center for Science & Mathematics, an innovative public high school in New York City's South Bronx, Principal Edward Tom leads a dedicated group of teachers, students and parents in their biggest gamble yet. Within a community infamous for hardship, can this brand-new school live up to its promise, and inspire new stories of achievement and excellence?
After world-renowned Tibetan master Geshe Lama Konchog passed away in 2001 at age 84, the Dalai Lama charged the deceased monk’s devoted disciple, Tenzin Zopa, with the task of finding the reincarnation of this spiritual leader. Plagued by doubt, Tenzin knows his discovery is awaited by thousands of followers. Unmistaken Child is the story of his four-year search. Stunningly shot, Unmistaken Child follows Tenzin as he embarks on an unforgettable quest by foot, mule, and even helicopter, traveling through breathtaking landscapes and remote traditional Tibetan villages. Along the way, Tenzin listens to stories about young children with special characteristics and performs rarely seen ritualistic tests designed to determine the likelihood of reincarnation. He eventually presents the child he believes to be his reincarnated master to the Dalai Lama — who will ultimately make the final decision.
Joan Allen narrates this film about Hannah Senesh, the World War II-era poet and diarist who became a paratrooper, resistance fighter and modern-day Joan of Arc. Safe in Palestine in 1944, Hannah joined a mission to rescue Jews in her native Hungary. Hannah parachuted behind enemy lines, was captured, tortured and ultimately executed by the Nazis.
Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis, "DIRT! The Movie" digs into the fascinating history of this lowly substance, explaining how four billion years of evolution have created the dirt that recycles our water, gives us food, provides us shelter and can be used as a source of medicine, beauty and culture. Destructive methods of agriculture, mining practices and urban development have placed this vital resource in danger.
Filmed over four years, GARBAGE DREAMS follows three teenage boys born into the trash trade and growing up in the world's largest garbage village, a ghetto located on the outskirts of Cairo. When their community is suddenly faced with the globalization of its trade, each of the teenage boys is forced to make choices that will impact his future and the survival of his community.
In 1975 rural Texas, a local mayor's daughter grapples with an unplanned pregnancy -- finally deciding to have her baby in secret before giving her away in a hidden adoption. Twenty-three years later, the adopted child also has an unplanned baby out of wedlock. "Sunshine" tells the intimate story of this second-generation single mother and her own struggle with the idea of family.
Explore one family's unforgettable journey as they travel halfway across the world in search of a miracle to heal their autistic son. The film blends footage from the family's adventure through the Mongolian countryside with scenes from their life at home in Texas. Bolstered by testimony from autism experts, including Dr. Temple Grandin, this compelling film exquisitely captures an astonishing physical and spiritual journey.
Two filmmakers, one Hindu and the other Muslim, sneak their cameras into one of the most beautiful, yet dangerous, places on Earth. In a region where religious alliances have spawned more than half a century of war, can these two filmmakers learn what makes Kashmiris choose their homeland over their own lives, even as their friendship is put to the test?
Versailles, a tight-knit neighborhood on the edge of New Orleans, is home to the densest ethnic Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, residents rebuild their homes — only to have them threatened by a toxic landfill planned in their neighborhood. As the community fights back, it turns a devastating disaster into a catalyst for change.
An elderly man hires Solo, a Senegalese cab driver, to drive him to a mountaintop in North Carolina where he plans to commit suicide.
2025
Phil Sharp's RNA discovery reshaped science, medicine, and the global biotech industry.
A bipartisan coalition continues a century-long fight to add gender equality into the Constitution.
Disabled filmmaker Reid Davenport investigates assisted dying and uncovers how ableism, policy, and systemic failures can make death seem like the only option. Who gets real choice -- and who doesn't -- in life and death?
When her eyesight begins to fade, a film editor reimagines belonging and what it truly means to see.
Librarians across the U.S. examine how restrictions on library content are shaping communities. Drawing on historical context, the film explores the broader implications for education and public life.
Barbara Jordan was a groundbreaking Texas congresswoman whose sharp intellect and moral clarity transformed U.S. politics. From Nixon's impeachment to civil rights battles, her voice demanded accountability, while she privately faced struggles few ever knew of.
Three decades after her assault, Lizzie confronts her Amish community’s silence around sexual abuse. She leads a movement to support fellow Amish and Mennonite survivors as they navigate trauma, faith, and family ties. With rare access, Keep Quiet and Forgive follows Lizzie and other survivors as they fight to replace “forgive and forget” with healing and justice.
The Tallest Dwarf follows filmmaker Julie Forrest Wyman as she searches for her place in the little people community and unpacks rumors of dwarfism in her own family. Through intimate stories, creative collaborations, and archival history, the film delves into identity and medicine, asking whether society should change people or the structures that limit them.
Immigrant grooms work year-round on the hidden “backside” of Churchill Downs. Rising before dawn, they care for some of the world’s most prized Kentucky Derby racehorses, revealing how race, labor, and class shape an elite American industry. BACKSIDE: The Unseen Hands of Horse Racing honors the resilience that’s behind the spectacle.
Antebellum homes draw visitors to Natchez, Mississippi, but not everyone agrees on the stories being told. As tour guides, homeowners, and activists navigate competing histories, the town confronts the tension between preservation and truth, offering a glimpse into a Southern community wrestling with race, memory, and identity.
A Chinese family’s multigenerational trauma unfolds across time, place, and identity. Turning the camera inward, filmmaker Vicky Du traces her family’s mental illness back to the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. Spanning Taipei, Taiwan, and New Jersey, Light of the Setting Sun explores identity, gender roles, and whether or not healing can break the cycle for future generations.
Generations call Robert A. Nakamura the godfather of Asian American film. Tadashi Nakamura calls him Dad. Tadashi turns the camera on his father as they confront art, activism, and aging. From WWII incarceration to cultural awakening and a Parkinson’s diagnosis, Third Act is a tender portrait of legacy, inherited trauma, and the final chapter of a shared creative life.
Vogue, AI, and identity collide as an artist creates an exhibition honoring Black and queer culture.
How 1960s Montreal helped shape the global movement for Black liberation.
A filmmaker revisits her evangelical roots to find connection with her estranged father.
2024
At a time when many Americans question democratic institutions, One Person, One Vote? unveils the complexities of the Electoral College, the uniquely American and often misunderstood mechanism for electing a president. The documentary follows four presidential electors representing different parties in Colorado during the intense 2020 election.
Riddled with survivor's guilt after his unit lost 17 men during "Operation Enduring Freedom" in Afghanistan, Marine veteran Anthony Marquez makes it his mission to reconnect with the Gold Star families of the fallen. By carving and hand-delivering a battlefield cross for each of the families affected by loss, Anthony finds the path to heal himself.
Tornados. Drive-by shootings. Environmental racism, The stark North-South Dallas economic divide. Dallas residents and city workers like City Manager T.C. Broadnax respond to the causal effects of natural and human-caused disasters while navigating a city in crisis.
Dreaming of a brighter future through the eyes of three people: a graduating high school student prepares to navigate the real world; Dallas Superintendent Michael Hinojosa reflects on sacrifices he's made in his career for a failing system; and Dallas County Sheriff Marian Brown looks for respect while questioning the future of law enforcement amidst a seemingly endless cycle of incarceration.
Three spirits with longstanding Texas roots struggle with their place in the world: a transgender woman working at an LGBTQ organization lives her full truth; a Dallas County Court commissioner has given 40 years of his life to his work but questions his role and identity; and the director of Health and Human Services wrestles with his new role while reflecting on his Asian American roots.
Meet a criminal district attorney bringing reform to a complex and disparate justice system; a judge who is dedicated to breaking cycles of incarceration and knows what it's like to have a loved one in the system; the unapologetic owner of the largest bail bonds company in Dallas; and a community organizer with a mighty voice and warrior spirit.
Featuring intimate stories of workers and young people—the chief medical examiner, a hospital worker, an auto body shop owner, and a high school senior—who all in their own ways make Dallas what it is, the final episode of Dallas, 2019 poses the question: What does it mean to be alive?
An insider’s look at the rise and fall of the NFT (non-fungible token) phenomenon and how technology transformed the traditional art world, for better and worse. Featuring verité footage and candid interviews with groundbreaking artists—like Beeple, Latasha Alcindor, and Loish— at the center of this phenomenon, Minted delves into the complex world of the $40 billion NFT digital art market.
After 13 years living in Philadelphia, Delwin Fiddler Jr., a champion grass dancer, embraces indigenous culture by returning to his ancestral home on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. Leaving his big city life behind, Delwin aims to protect his centuries-old Lakota heritage and heal from family tragedy, through his passion for dance.
The high-security Pelican Bay prison was designed for mass-scale solitary confinement, often for a decade or more, and with little due process. In 2013, 30,000 prisoners went on a hunger strike that spread into a feat of unity across California prisons. The Strike follows these solitary survivors who fought to abolish indefinite isolation.
Following her brother's death, a filmmaker returns to Eagle Pass, the Texas bordertown where she grew up, to document the places that shaped their family. She finds a treasure trove of his own footage that brings him back to life, sparking a reflection on growing up Mexican American along the U.S.-Mexico border. She rediscovers the beautiful mysteries of their complex hometown.
A journey to reckon with Brazil’s harsh inequality begins when filmmaker Denise Zmekhol discovers her father’s architectural masterpiece in São Paulo—a 24-story tall modernist icon known as “Pele de Vidro” (Skin of Glass)—is inhabited by hundreds of unhoused people. But after getting to know these occupants, what started as a personal quest becomes something much bigger.
Knowing his dad miraculously recovered from three open-heart surgeries after discovering a passion for cycling, filmmaker Eric D. Seals proposes an ambitious idea: Bike together from St. Louis to Chicago. 350 miles. 4 days. On their journey, the two push each other as they find a deeper connection and a renewed appreciation of their quests for their own health and to reimagine Black health
Home Court is the coming-of-age story of Ashley Chea, a Cambodian American basketball prodigy in Southern California whose life intensifies as recruitment heats up. As she overcomes injury as well as racial and class differences between her home and private school worlds, in peer groups, and against rival schools, Ashley strives to become her own person and leave a legacy behind.
WE WANT THE FUNK! is a syncopated voyage through the history of funk music, spanning from African, soul, and early jazz roots, to its rise into the public consciousness. Featuring James Brown's dynamism, the extraterrestrial funk of George Clinton's Parliament Funkadelic, transformed girl group Labelle, and Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, the story also traces funk's influences on both new wave and hip-hop.
Free For All: The Public Library tells the story of the quiet revolutionaries who made a simple idea happen. From the pioneering women behind the “Free Library Movement” to today's librarians who service the public despite working in a contentious age of closures and book bans, meet those who created a civic institution where everything is free and the doors are open to all.
Matter of Mind: My Alzheimer’s is an intimate portrayal of three families confronting the unique challenges of Alzheimer’s and how this progressive neurodegenerative disease transforms roles and relationships. Whether it's a partner caring for a loved one or an adult child shifting into being their parent's caregiver, these stories show how families evolve when a loved one is diagnosed.
And So It Begins follows the Philippines’ turbulent 2022 presidential race, with the son of ousted former dictator Ferdinand Marcos waging a combative social media campaign against his more progressive opponent, incumbent Vice President Leni Robredo. Following it all is independent journalist and Nobel-winner Maria Ressa, with an eye toward the specter of increasing autocracy.
After a long career as a commercial and portrait photographer, mischievous San Francisco artist Michael Jang sat for decades on a hidden treasure of pictures taken in his 20s—both candid celebrity shots and a down-to-earth cross-section of Chinese American family life rarely captured so playfully. Then, during the pandemic, Jang set out to share his work with the world, street guerilla-style.
