POV

Jul 5, 1988

"There's nobody that's not going to get old — unless they die," says Enola Maxwell at the beginning of this engaging and refreshing film. Through the eyes of six women, aged 65-75, we are treated to a variety of new perspectives on aging, along with such complex and emotional subjects as changing body image, sexuality, family life and dealing with death. Generous portions of insight and good humor provide clues to grappling with these issues that effect us all.

Jul 5, 1988

Rich in humor and regional color, this sometimes hilarious film uses the prism of language to reveal our attitudes about the way other people speak. From Boston Brahmins to Black Louisiana teenagers, from Texas cowboys to New York professionals, American Tongues elicits funny, perceptive, sometimes shocking, and always telling comments on American English in all its diversity.

Jul 12, 1988

Based on the autobiography of Nicaraguan author Omar Cabezas, Fire From the Mountain is the lyrical, earthy, sometimes humorous account of the author's political journey from student activist to guerrilla to government official. Shaffer's last film, Witness to War: Dr. Charlie Clements, won an Oscar in 1985.

Jul 19, 1988

Half comedy, half horror story, this disturbing film focuses on several spokesmen for America's survivalist movement as they reveal the way they think, the way they play, and the way they prepare for the next world war.

Jul 19, 1988

If Armageddon's Door is about the explosion of community, Living with AIDS is just the opposite. It's a graceful, moving film about a community that provides both compassion and care to someone with a debilitating disease, in this case a courageous 22-year-old man with AIDS.

Aug 2, 1988

During the late 1970s, tens of thousands of men, women and even children were abducted by the right-wing military government in Argentina. While most of the population was terrorized by these actions, a small group of mothers of the disappeared began staging weekly demonstrations to demand that their children be released and the kidnappers be brought to justice. This is the dramatic story of their courageous struggle, which ultimately served as a catalyst for the toppling of the dictatorship. Las Madres has won multiple awards at film festivals around the world and was nominated for an Oscar.

Aug 9, 1988

Five years before the United States entered World War II, 3,200 Americans went off to Europe to fight the spread of fascism. At 18, 19 and 20 years old, they volunteered to risk their lives defending a democratically elected government in the Spanish Civil War. Fifty years later, in their own words, the survivors recount a vivid story of those years — and what's happened to them since.

Aug 23, 1988

A lively portrait of 76-year-old Harold "Louie Bluie" Armstrong, musician, artist, raconteur and rogue.

Aug 30, 1988

On the surface, this is a somewhat unusual film about pet cemeteries and their owners. But then it grows much more complicated and bizarre, until in the end it is about such large issues as love, immorality, failure, and the dogged elusiveness of the American Dream. Featured at major film festivals like New York, Cannes, and Berlin, Gates of Heaven was included in Roger Ebert's all time 10 best list.

Sep 6, 1988

Hailed by many critics as a classic, Best Boy is the moving story of Philly, a 53-year-old mentally-disabled man who adapts to an independent life as he prepares to move away form his elderly parents.

Jul 26, 1988

Rate It X is a bitingly funny and disarming journey through the landscape of American sexism. Men only are interviewed by the two filmmakers in a witty montage of free-wheeling encounters. Pornographers, corporate executives, a funeral parlor director and Santa Claus are among those who reveal more than they intended. A surprisingly candid view of men's feelings towards women 15 years after the birth of the women's movement.

Aug 16, 1988

Metropolitan Avenue is an inspiring contemporary story about women who strive to combine new roles and old values in our rapidly changing society. We are introduced to a lively Brooklyn neighborhood which, like many urban areas, faces problems caused by racial tensions and cuts in municipal services. But in this case, a group of "traditional" homemakers from varied ethnic backgrounds rise to the challenge and become leaders in the effort to save their community.

Jul 15, 1989

A heartbreaking yet hopeful portrait of three runaway girls with histories of abuse and neglect. Pinky, a Puerto Rican girl, refuses to go to school. Mars, on the streets since age 13, works as a stripper. Martha, who has lived in a dozen foster homes, confronts teenage motherhood. Music, humor, and intimate conversations play against the disturbing reality of these girls' lives.

Jul 16, 1989

On a hot summer night in Detroit, Ronald Ebens, an autoworker, killed a young Chinese-American engineer with a baseball bat. Although he confessed, he never spent a day in jail. This gripping Academy Award-nominated film relentlessly probes the implications of the murder in the streets of Detroit, for the families of those involved, and for the American justice system.

Jul 23, 1989

The debutante tradition is alive and well. Witness the annual Debutante Cotillion in Washington, DC -- a meticulously planned ritual where networking and meeting people who can help you later are as important to today's debs as the style of the gown or the height of the escort.

Jul 23, 1989

A stamp dealer from Los Angeles, a former school teacher form Miami, a born again Christian from Las Vegas, and a whiz-kid law student square off in the Jeopardy! $100,000 Tournament of Champions. Peek behind the scenes and into the fact-filled minds of contestants in one of America's favorite game shows.

Jul 30, 1989

Home movies and tape recordings collected from 60 different American families comprise a composite lifetime which moves from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience.

Aug 6, 1989

Denounced by officials and shunned by broadcasters when it was first released, this exploration of the personal and immediate impacts of the nuclear age carries a chilling thesis: The Bomb is killing ordinary Americans, even in the absence of a nuclear war.

Aug 13, 1989

A bold and unconventional film portrait of one of America's leading Social Realist painters doing what he does best: skewering corrupt politicians, raging over social injustices, and satirizing the petty foibles of humankind.

Aug 20, 1989

On the streets and subways of New York, 101 itinerant performers whirl firesticks, mimic passers-by, imitate Stevie Wonder, tap dance and perform classical music. A delightful mixture of music and magic moments, celebrating some joyful encounters in New York City streets.

Aug 27, 1989

The untold story of a handful of Jewish youth who organized an underground resistance against the Nazis in the Lithuanian ghetto of Vilna.

Sep 3, 1989

Moved by the growing desperation of thousands of laid-off steel workers, a group of ministers in Pittsburgh begins to confront the city's government and powerful corporations. Their passionate, controversial, and unorthodox actions lead to profound soul-searching, Church rejection, and imprisonment.

Sep 17, 1989

Videomaker Lynn Hershman places herself center-screen for an intimate, humorous, and piercing narrative about her efforts to control her weight.

Sep 17, 1989

For more than a hundred years cowboys have written with feeling about the life and land they love. Several contemporary poet lariats keep that tradition alive — even on the Johnny Carson show.

Sep 17, 1989

The inner and outer lives of identical twins Doug and Mike Starn, whose collaborative painting and photographic work is rapidly gaining acclaim in the art world.

Sep 24, 1989

The lives and struggles of a group of homeless people who've been moved into an "urban campground" in Los Angeles.

Jun 26, 1990

An underground, high-security isolation unit at the Federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, was built to house three female inmates convicted of politically motivated crimes. An international campaign advocates closing the controversial unit on humanitarian grounds.

Jul 3, 1990

Gary, a 39 year-old successful animation artist and devout Christian, is pursuing a lifelong dream — to become a woman. A candid, non-sensational and sometimes humorous journey of nearly three years during which Gary prepares physically and emotionally for sex reassignment surgery, the film raises provocative questions about what really makes us men and women.

Jul 10, 1990

With a subway platform as his stage and a plastic can as his instrument, 14-year-old Larry Wright is a self-taught drummer with astonishing talent. A rousing tribute to the Harlem youth and the rich culture of the urban streets.

Jul 10, 1990

Cryonics — the freezing of human beings after death for future revival — is the focus of this off-beat film by two science buffs-turned-film-majors. Alternately deadpan and dead serious, the film features commentary from Timothy Leary, a theologian, and skeptical scientists.

Jul 24, 1990

In its national broadcast premiere, this bittersweet classic from pioneering filmmakers follows four door-to-door Bible salesmen as they walk the line between hype and despair. The critics used all the superlatives on this one, and it's as fresh today as when it was originally released.

Jul 31, 1990

Three big-city police chiefs reveal sharply differing philosophies of law enforcement. Daryl Gates introduced SWAT to Los Angeles. Anthony Bouza ruffled feathers in Minneapolis. Lee Brown recently left Houston for New York. These top cops' ideas about the causes and cures of crime are as varied as their personalities.

Aug 7, 1990

Two poor women in India attempt to improve their lives. Kamala and Raji's resourcefulness, aspirations, and capacity for joy shatter stereotypes of Indian women as voiceless figures leading desolate lives of abject poverty. They have joined a growing organization of street vendors and laborers; the husbands and wholesalers of Ahmedabad may never be the same.

Aug 15, 1990

Artist Estelle Peck Ishigo went with her Japanese American husband into an internment camp during World War II, one of the few Caucasians to do so. An "outsider's" perspective on the shattering experience of relocation is vividly recreated from Ishigo's own memoirs, photos, and paintings.

Aug 14, 1990

The role of art in America has been debated everywhere from the Halls of Congress to the local shopping mall. More than a portrait of the socially committed painter Leon Golub, whose massive canvases are intended to provoke viewers, this film is about media and contemporary society, social responsibility and creativity, art and information.

Aug 21, 1990

If a tree can grow in Brooklyn, can an eggplant flourish in the Bronx? Community gardens in New York City have helped to nourish neighborhood pride, racial tolerance, and a budding sense of hope for hundreds of enthusiastic gardeners in the urban jungle.

Aug 21, 1990

The creation of a skyscraper is transformed into a breathtaking visual experience as time-lapse photography, hard hat banter and construction worker choreography are set to a score by 15 new music composers in an urban ballet forty stories above New York harbor.

Aug 28, 1990

Behind the faded signs of three motels in the American Southwest lay entire worlds of passion, loyalty, adventure and fate. Veteran filmmaker Christian Blackwood winds his way into the soul of remarkable people in uniquely American subculture.

Sep 4, 1990

Ossian Maclise is not an average American teenager. Born in Massachusetts, he has been living in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery since the age of four. At seven, his monastic order recognized Ossian as a tulku — a reincarnation of a high Tibetan lama. Ossian offers a fascinating glimpse into the life of a young man who embodies a surprising meeting of Eastern and Western culture.

Sep 4, 1990

Founded by a Jesuit priest from St. Louis, a grassroots theatre company takes its shows on the unpaved roads of Honduras to enlighten and inspire villagers in the impoverished countryside.

Sep 11, 1990

After years of witnessing firsthand the horrors of guerrilla wars, Israeli-born producer Ilan Ziv traveled to Chile, the Philippines and the West Bank to explore the development of "People Power" and to reexamine his own long-held belief in the necessary evil of violence to overthrow repressive governments. Set against the background of a predominantly nonviolent transformation of Eastern Europe, this is the first film to examine and evaluate nonviolence as an effective strategy for political change.

Jul 17, 1990

Are college students today apathetic and self-centered? Twenty years after National Guardsmen opened fire on student antiwar demonstrators, Jim Klein, a '60s radical-turned-filmmaker (Union Maids, Seeing Red) visits the campus of Kent State to probe behind the stereotypes. Together with young patrons of the local tanning salon, activists-turned-professors, and an ROTC captain, Klein ponders the social forces that are changing campuses and the country in the '90s.

Jun 18, 1991

Peter Adair asks 11 people — women and men, gay and straight, from all walks of life — to share their stories about having HIV. Alternately irreverent, candid and soulful, this stirring film is not about being sick; it is about being true to the emotional complexity of being mortal.

Jun 25, 1991

Marc Savoy knows only one way to talk about Cajun music -- with the same passion and conviction as the music itself. Legendary filmmaker Les Blank delves directly into the heart of Cajun country to portray a couple devoted to the preservation of Louisiana French culture in both their personal and public lives. The joy of Cajun music, its signature yelps and wails, filter through many of the kitchens, porches, and dance halls of the Savoys' Eunice, LA, community.

Jun 25, 1991

Plena is in Puerto Rico what the blues are in the U.S.: a musical expression abounding with romance, daily news, and personal sagas. As the Puerto Rican community grows on the mainland, the infectious rhythms of Puerto Rico's most original contribution to Caribbean urban music are celebrated with gusto.

Jun 25, 1991

Every year 2,500 sets of twins gather in Twinsburg, Ohio for Twins Days. Most are dressed alike, many live together, and all seem to have rhyming names. Standing out amidst the lighthearted contests and games are filmmaker Sue Marcoux and her sister Michele, separated by 3,000 miles and a lifetime of anti-twin behavior.

Jul 2, 1991

For 99 years, the residents of Salamanca, N.Y. have rented the land under their homes for an average of $1/year from the Seneca Indians, under the terms of a lease imposed by Congress. Now, as the lease is about to expire, a century of bad business must be renegotiated. The survival of an American town and justice for the Senecas appear to be in conflict.

Jul 9, 1991

A series of accidents at a West Virginia chemical plant producing the same deadly toxins that caused the disaster in Bhopal, India, has alarmed area residents. But the area's fragile economy depends on the jobs provided by the plant, dividing the community.

Jul 9, 1991

The Exxon Valdez disaster left far more than a soiled coastline in its wake. Grief, suspicion, anger and greed oozed through the small, formerly pristine town of Valdez. The human toll of an environmental nightmare is evoked in a haunting film which Exxon and the City of Valdez attempted, unsuccessfully, to suppress.

Jul 9, 1991

A search for meaning beyond cliches and nostalgia, as a family farm is lost to speculative suburban real estate developers. The camera moves through a Minnesota corn field and finds a photograph of a suburban tract clothes-pinned to a cornstalk. Layered with visual and emotional paradoxes, the film juxtaposes innovative video techniques with slices of a simpler, threatened life, in an emotional and personal reflection on the colonization of cornfields by shopping malls.

Jul 16, 1991

Angry, funny, erotic and poetic by turns (and sometimes all at once), this exploration of what it means to be black and gay jumps from interview to confession, music video to documentary to poem.

Jul 23, 1991

From the Free Speech Movement to the anti-war protests to the last stand over People's Park, Berkeley, California became synonymous with a generation's quest for social, political, and cultural transformation.

Jul 30, 1991

A pit bull, his elderly master, and a dog trainer/philosopher form a curious love triangle. Elegantly crafted, wryly narrated by Kevin Bacon, and infused with a blend of humor and pathos, Immy Humes' dog-umentary is a quirky, off-beat gem of a film.

Aug 6, 1991

Whether the subject is sex, death, madness or God, The Big Bang never lets up in its weird and wonderful search for the meaning of it all.

Aug 13, 1991

Maria Serrano, El Salvadoran wife, mother, and guerrilla leader, helps plan a major nationwide offensive that led to the historic peace pact of 1992. Skirting bullets and mortar attacks, recounting a childhood of poverty and abuse by government troops, suffering the tragic loss of her daughter to enemy fire, and spending precious moments with her husband and surviving daughters, Maria brings viewers to the heart of the fight for a more just society.

Aug 20, 1991

Ten million families were separated between North and South Korea when the Korean War ended in 1953. Beginning with the story of one man's journey to reunite with his sister in North Korea, the film reveals the personal, social, and political dimensions of the last divided nation on earth.

Jul 30, 1991

Romance novels comprise nearly half the paperback books sold in America. Chiffon-shrouded, jewel-laden, flower-bedecked Barbara Cartland has written hundreds of them. And filmmaker George Csicsery has given his heart to this fascinating subculture where all the women are beautiful, all the men are mysterious, and all the endings are happy.

Sep 3, 1991

Abortion has been at the center of one of the most dramatic and wrenching debates of our times, but the social forces and the changing lives behind the rhetoric are rarely explored. This film draws complex portraits of individuals on both sides of the controversy in a small town in Pennsylvania, where very different life experiences have shaped conflicting values and beliefs.

Sep 3, 1991

Jun 22, 1992

Jun 29, 1992

Jul 6, 1992

Jul 6, 1992

Jul 20, 1992

Jul 27, 1992

Aug 3, 1992

Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance Vs. Judas Priest is a TV series.

Aug 10, 1992

Aug 10, 1992

Aug 21, 1992

Aug 31, 1992

Sep 28, 1992

Sep 28, 1992

Jun 15, 1993

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Jun 29, 1993

Jul 6, 1993

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Aug 10, 1993

Aug 17, 1993

Aug 24, 1993

Cousin Bobby is a 1992 American documentary film directed by Jonathan Demme. The film focuses on Demme's cousin, Robert W. Castle, an Episcopalian minister in Harlem, New York. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival.

Aug 24, 1993

Sep 10, 1993

Jun 7, 1994

Jun 14, 1994

Jun 28, 1994

Jul 5, 1994

Jul 12, 1994

Jul 19, 1994

Passin' It On is a 1993 documentary film directed by Jon Valadez.

Jul 26, 1994

Aug 2, 1994

Dialogues with Madwomen is a 1993 documentary by Allie Light focusing on mental illness in women.

Aug 9, 1994

Jun 21, 1994

Jun 1, 1995

Jun 6, 1995

Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter is a 1994 documentary film directed by Deborah Hoffmann, with her wife, Frances Reid, as cinematographer. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film is about the struggle of Doris Hoffman, mother of the director and widow of Albert Einstein's associate Banesh Hoffmann, with Alzheimer's disease.

Jun 13, 1995

Jun 20, 1995

Jun 14, 1995

Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy is a 1995 short documentary film directed by Ellen Bruno.

Jul 4, 1995

Jul 11, 1995

Jul 18, 1995

Jul 25, 1995

Dealers Among Dealers is a 1995 documentary film directed by Gaylen Ross.

Oct 6, 1995

May 28, 1996

Jun 1, 1996

Jun 11, 1996

Jun 18, 1996

A Litany For Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde is a 1995 documentary film directed by Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson.

Jun 25, 1996

"Although Ny admits that it is very uncomfortable for a traditional Cambodian family to talk about its secrets publicly, Sokly “Don Bonus” Ny allows the audience access to his life during his senior year of high school in this simple, yet powerful video diary. After his father was murdered by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, Ny escaped to the United States with his mother, grandmother, and siblings. Ny’s family has faced hardship and disappointment in America —Ny struggles to finish high school after failing many classes, his family’s apartment in the projects is a frequent target of vandalism, and his troubled younger brother stands accused of attempted murder. This is not an uplifting story of triumph against the odds, but a harshly honest depiction of a troubled son of an immigrant family in crisis" Quoting the synopsis from ExEAS

Jul 2, 1996

Jul 9, 1996

Jul 16, 1996

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Jul 30, 1996

Jul 30, 1996

Aug 6, 1996

This documentary exposes the role of General Motors' in the "Great American Street Car Scandal" of the 1930s. The scandal involved the dismantling of the street car transportation system in an effort to create demand for more automobiles.

Nov 27, 1996

Jun 3, 1997

Jun 10, 1997

Jun 17, 1997

Jun 24, 1997

Jul 1, 1997

Jul 8, 1997

Who Is Henry Jaglom? is a 1997 documentary film directed by Henry Alex Rubin and Jeremy Workman.

Jul 15, 1997

Takes a critical look at the long-standing practice of 'honoring' American Indians by using their names for mascots and sports teams and delves into the accompanying issues of racism, stereotypes, minority representation, and the powerful effects of media imagery. Follows the efforts of Native American Charlene Teters, a woman who went from graduate student to what some call the 'Rosa Parks of American Indians, ' and details her work to ban the sports usage of Indian designations and protect her people's cultural symbols and identity. In Whose Honor? looks at the issues of racism, stereotypes, minority representation and the powerful effects of mass-media imagery, and the extent to which one university will go to defend and justify its mascot.

Jul 22, 1997

Jul 29, 1997

Aug 5, 1997

Disproving the adage that there are no second acts in American life, Iran/Contra legend Oliver North re-emerged to challenge incumbent Charles Robb in a hotly contested 1994 Virginia senatorial race. R.J. Cutler and David Van Taylor weave a modern-day parable about leadership in America and campaign culture in a cynical age. The result is a clear-eyed examination of the electoral process, where issues take a back seat to the machinations of spin doctors, and voter interests are lost in a media hall of mirrors.

Jun 2, 1998

Jun 9, 1998

Jun 16, 1998

Jun 23, 1998

Jun 30, 1998

Jul 7, 1998

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Jul 21, 1998

Jul 28, 1998

Aug 4, 1998

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Sep 15, 1998

Jun 1, 1999

Jun 5, 1999

Well-Founded Fear is a 2000 documentary film from directors Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini. The film takes its title from the formal definition of a refugee under the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, as a person who deserves protection, "owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” The film analyzes the US asylum process by following several asylum applicants and asylum officers through actual INS interviews.

Jun 8, 1999

Jun 22, 1999

Jun 29, 1999

Jul 6, 1999

Jul 13, 1999

Corpus: A Home Movie about Selena is a film by filmmaker, Lourdes Portillo about Mexican American singer-songwriter Selena Quintanilla-Pérez. It places emphasis on the transformation of Selena from a popular entertainer into a modern-day saint and role model. This documentary uses authentic home videos, news stories, footage from concerts and a debate between intellectuals to analyze the effect of Selena and Selena’s murder at the hands of Yolanda Saldivar, the president of her fan club.

Jul 20, 1999

Jul 27, 1999

The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez is a TV episode/documentary film directed by Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan.

Jan 24, 2000

Regret to Inform is a 1998 American documentary film directed by Barbara Sonneborn. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film was made over a span of ten years. The documentary features filmmaker Barbara Sonneborn as she goes to the Vietnamese countryside where her husband was killed. Her translator is a fellow war widow named Xuan Ngoc Nguyen and together try to understand their losses. The film includes interviews with Vietnamese and American widows.

Jun 20, 2000

Chronicling the two-year “tree-sit” by environmental activist Julia Hill, examining the controversy over clear-cutting in old-growth Northern California forests. Hill, who took the name Butterfly, is interviewed on a platform more than 100 feet off the ground in the redwood (she calls it “Luna”) she lived in from December 1997 to December 1999 as part of a protest organized by the environmental group Earth First! “By staying in the tree,” she says, “I am completely enwrapped and encased in nature's world.”

Jun 27, 2000

“La Boda” (The Wedding) follows a Mexican-American migrant farmworker during the six days prior to her nuptials. Bride-to-be Elizabeth Luis, an American citizen, lives with her parents and seven siblings (six of them sisters) in Texas's Rio Grande Valley, but the family travels frequently to California fields and to their home town, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, where her wedding to Artemio Guerrero is to take place. “Destiny will take us,” he tells director Hannah Weyer, “and that's where we will go.” But he and Elizabeth both suspect that destiny will take them north again.

Jul 11, 2000

Stranger With A Camera is a 2000 documentary film by director Elizabeth Barret investigating the circumstances surrounding the 1967 death of Hugh O'Connor. Barret, who was born and raised in the region, explores questions concerning public image and the individual's lack of power to define oneself within the American media landscape. By contrasting multiple perspectives from locals and O'Connor's film crew, Barret weaves a tale of a complexly motivated crime with an insightful exploration of how the media affects the communities it chronicles. The film premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and later aired on the PBS series P.O.V.

Jul 18, 2000

Ex-white supremacist Ron Withrow, who founded the White Students Union at a California college, discusses why he became a racist and why he turned away from it in the late 1980s. Withrow is also seen in clips from “The Phil Donahue Show” (both before and after his conversion) and he's seen with his Hispanic wife. Also interviewed are Tom Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance and authors Matt Wray (“White Trash: Race and Class in America”) and Jessie Daniels (“White Lies”). Directed by Elizabeth Thompson.

Jul 25, 2000

Following Cuban expatriate Silvia Moroni Heath, the daughter of a sugar planter, as she returns to her homeland after an absence of 37 years. First stop: the house in which she grew up. It's now a bank, and the guard outside won't let her in. The hour, which intersperses family stills and footage of prerevolutionary Cuba, also follows Moroni to the the Cuban countryside and to the Havana Yacht Club, where her debutante ball was held.

Aug 22, 2000

Gambling hits home in filmmaker Lisanne Skyler's perceptive profile of Las Vegas residents living with constant temptation. “The hardest part of living in Las Vegas is the gambling machines,” says one woman. “They're everywhere.” Adds Lou Gerard, a Los Angeles tailor who retired to Las Vegas (and is the film's primary focus), about his gambling: “Sometimes I feel sorry for myself but I get over it. There's always a next time.” (But Gerard did stop gambling in 1999).

Aug 29, 2000

Exploring the secretive and largely unassimilated Romani culture as it follows one Spokane, Wash., Gypsy family. That family, the Markses, had a score to settle with the city of Spokane, which had their house raided in 1986 in search of stolen goods. The family later sued for improper police search, and writer-director Jasmine Dellal's film follows the case---and family head Jimmy Marks' obsession with it---closely.

Sep 20, 2000

A heartfelt history of KFPA, the nation's oldest alternative radio station, the Pacifica Foundation's eclectic flagship, based in Berkeley, Cal. Since KPFA signed on in 1949, it has broadcast everything from Soviet-press reviews to bird calls. Even conservatives have gotten airtime. Of course, KPFA has always been controversial, and recently, the controversy has been internecine. This hour doesn't shrink from that, but mostly it celebrates KPFA. Author Alice Walker narrates.

Sep 27, 2000

Following abortion politics as they played out during the 1990s in one U.S. town, Bedford, N.H. It focuses on OB/GYN Wayne Goldner, who performs abortions. Not surprisingly, Goldner is a lightning rod for pro-life protesters, and he's also involved in two controversies: a hospital merger that imperiled abortion rights and a sex-education course he taught at Bedford's middle school.

Dec 18, 2000

A Korean-American adoptee tries to forge relationships with her biological family as she sorts out her feelings toward her adoptive one in “First Person Plural,” an intensely introspective film by Deann Borshay Liem, who was born amid the chaos and poverty of mid-1950s Korea, and adopted in 1966 by Californians Alveen and Arnold Borshay. They assumed Deann was an orphan, but she wasn't---a fact she learned after growing up.

Jun 19, 2001

Jun 26, 2001

Jul 3, 2001

Jul 10, 2001

Jul 17, 2001

Jul 24, 2001

Aug 14, 2001

A beautifully rendered account of the struggles of the Lakota in the Black Hills, the Hopi in Arizona and the Wintu in California to protect their sacred sites.

Aug 21, 2001

Life and Debt is an unapologetic look at the "new world order," from the point of view of Jamaican workers, farmers, government and policy officials who see the reality of globalization from the ground up.

Aug 28, 2001

Oct 2, 2001

Dec 13, 2001

Jul 9, 2002

Milford Beeghly discusses his company Beeghly's Best Hybrids.

Jul 16, 2002

It is America of the 1950s and 1960s, when a woman's most important contribution to society is generally considered to be her ability to raise happy, well-adjusted children. But for the mother whose child is diagnosed with autism, her life's purpose will soon become a twisted nightmare. Looking for help and support, she encounters instead a medical establishment that pins the blame for her child's bizarre behaviors on her supposedly frigid and detached mothering. Along with a heartbreaking label for her child, she receives a devastating label of her own. She is a "refrigerator mother". Refrigerator Mothers paints an intimate portrait of an entire generation of mothers, already laden with the challenge of raising profoundly disordered children, who lived for years under the dehumanizing shadow of professionally promoted "mother blame."

Jul 23, 2002

How black and white populations in Norco, La., have responded to links between a refinery's activities and people's illnesses.

Jul 30, 2002

Sweet Old Song is a 2002 documentary film directed by Leah Mahan.

Aug 6, 2002

A high school girl leaves Hanoi and comes to Mississippi.

Aug 20, 2002

Circumstances surrounding the discovery of the remains of more than 200 murdered girls in the desert around Juarez, Mexico.

Aug 27, 2002

A Mexican-American migrant teenager's freshman year in high school and how she handled work, education and family life.

Sep 10, 2002

Surgeon Gino Strada and coordinator Kate Rowlands try to provide medical and humanitarian support to civilian victims of war in Afghanistan. (Dari, Italian and English with English subtitles)

Jul 2, 2002

Jan 20, 2003

Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin is a 2003 documentary film written by Marc Weiss and directed by Nancy D. Kates and Bennett Singer.

Jan 22, 2023

Two film crews document the aftermath of the murder of a black man by three white men in 1998 and the trials of the men charged with the crime.

Jun 17, 2003

A black community in Columbus, Ohio, struggles with cultural and legal conflicts while experiencing urban renewal.

Jul 1, 2003

A farmer in Lockney, Texas, makes headlines after he refuses the school permission to test his son for drugs during random testing.

Jul 8, 2003

Massacre survivor Denese Becker returns to her Guatemalan village on a journey of self-discovery and to find her roots.

Jun 22, 2003

What are the chances that a former prostitute could be elected a Member of the Parliament of New Zealand by a conservative, rural district? What if that person were also a transsexual? The odds may seem daunting, but Georgina Beyer did it.

Jul 22, 2003

Musician Arn Chorn-Pond, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, travels to his native Cambodia to face his past.

Jul 29, 2003

90 Miles is a 2001 documentary film written and directed by Juan Carlos Zaldívar. The film is a recounting of the events that lead Zaldívar to become a Marielito and leave Cuba for a better life in Miami. It premiered in 2003 on PBS as part of its P.O.V. series. It won two awards: the Grand Coral, First Prize, for Documentary and the Memoria Documentary Award. 90 Miles recounts the strange twist of fate that took Juan Carlos Zaldívar across one of the world's most treacherous stretches of water. It is a journey of a family in search for healing and understanding. Probing and thoughtful, Zaldívar uncovers the emotional distance opened in thousands of families by the 90 miles between the U.S. and Cuba.

Aug 5, 2003

Few American icons are as well known for their popular kitsch as the hula dance. From old Hollywood movies to entertainment for tourists, the hip-swaying girls in grass skirts and colorful lei have long masked an ancient cultural tradition. Now, after years of being shadowed by stereotypes, the hula is experiencing a rebirth that celebrates Hawaiian culture.

Aug 19, 2003

West 47th Street is a documentary film produced by Bill Lichtenstein and June Peoples of the Peabody Award-winning Lichtenstein Creative Media. "West 47th Street" is an intimate cinéma vérité portrait of four people with serious mental illness as their lives naturally unfold over a three-year period beginning in spring 2001. The characters are all members of Fountain House, a psychiatric rehabilitation programme located on West 47th Street in a part of New York City once known as Hell's Kitchen. At times hilarious and at other times tragic, West 47th Street provided an unprecedented window on the lives of people who are often feared and ignored, seldom understood. The film features Fitzroy Fredericks; Zeinab Wali; Nathanial "Tex" Gordon; and Frances Olivero. The film highlights the faith and courage with which these four people fight to regain control of their lives. Viewers see them on and off the streets, in and out of the hospital, on and off medication, at home and at work.

Aug 26, 2003

Three Christian families who have gay children campaign against gay rights.

Sep 2, 2003

The experiences of Mexican-Americans participating in the Vietnam War.

Sep 16, 2003

State of Denial is a 2003 documentary film about AIDS in Africa, produced and directed by Elaine Epstein. The film highlights the errors of President Mbeki's government, which insists that there isn't enough evidence to show that HIV causes AIDS and refuses vital life-saving drugs to their people because of unknown long-term risks. The film follows the stories of HIV positive Africans and activists as well as their careers, interspersed with the harrowing statistics of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. It features various HIV positive patients coping with the disease in times when the use of ARV medicine was strongly discouraged by the South African government. The movie captures the desperation and growing discontent of average South Africans infected and affected by the disease. Some of the subjects interviewed make heartbreaking but inspirational statements about AIDS and how living with it is like.

Dec 16, 2003

Eve Ensler conducts a writing workshop for female inmates at a state prison in New York.

Jul 1, 2003

Jun 29, 2004

Filmmaker Richard Kassebaum chronicles his brother Bill's run for the Kansas House of Representatives.

Apr 21, 2004

Flag Wars is a poignant account of the politics and pain of gentrification. Working-class black residents in Columbus, Ohio fight to hold on to their homes. Realtors and gay home-buyers see fixer-uppers. The clashes expose prejudice and self-interest on both sides, as well as the common dream to have a home to call your own.

Jun 22, 2004

"In the current frigid national climate facing economic migrants, Carlos Sandoval and Catherine Tambini enter the traumatized world of Farmingville, a previously unassuming Long Island suburb that witnessed the beating and attempted murder of two Mexican day laborers. What the filmmakers find is the very dangerous, two-edged sword of a growing national crisis: on the one side, the community's increasing population of undocumented aliens, who are crowding into single-family dwellings and assembling on early morning street corners, hoping to grab a day's wage; on the other, Farmingville's home-owning families, many of whom have lived there for generations and are watching what they envision as a bucolic little village slipping away."

Jul 6, 2004

War Feels Like War is a 2004 British documentary film. It was broadcast in the United States as part of the P.O.V. series. For three months, Spanish filmmaker Esteban Manzanares Uyarra followed five reporters and photographers from Denmark, Norway, Poland, and the United States in Iraq. These journalists circumvented military media control to get access to a different perspective on the Iraq War. As the Coalition of the willing swept into Iraq, some journalists in Kuwait decided to travel in their wake, risking their lives to discover the impact of war on civilians. The journalists include best-selling author P.J. O'Rourke, who was working for ABC Radio, as well as reporters and photographers for news operations ranging from Poland's Radio Zet to Stephanie Sinclair, a photographer for the Chicago Tribune.

Jul 13, 2004

Global corporations who buy up local water supplies and sell for profit, including a look at tensions in Bolivia, India and Stockton, Calif.

Jul 20, 2004

What is old is often new again. Most funerals today are part of a multimillion-dollar industry run by professionals. This increased reliance on mortuaries has alienated Americans from life's only inevitability — death. A Family Undertaking explores the growing home funeral movement by following several families in their most intimate moments as they reclaim the end of life, forgoing a typical mortuary funeral to care for their loved ones at home. Far from being a radical innovation, keeping funeral rites in the family or among friends is exactly how death was handled for most of pre-20th century America. Prior to the Civil War, caring for and preparing the dead for burial on family farms or in local cemeteries was both a domestic skill and a family responsibility.

Aug 3, 2004

The movement to take the end of life process out of corporate funeral parlours and put it back into the family's hands.

Aug 24, 2004

A profile of demolition-derby driver Ed "Speedo" Jager.

Aug 17, 2004

Three New York mothers unite to seek justice for police brutality.

Sep 14, 2004

Freedom Machines is a 2004 PBS/P.O.V. documentary that looks at disability in the age of technology, presenting intimate stories of people ages 8-93, whose talents and independence are being unleashed by access to modern, enabling technologies. Nearly twenty years after the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the film reflects on the gaps between its promise and the realities for our largest minority group – 54,000,000 Americans with disabilities. Whether mainstream tools or inventions such as a stair climbing wheelchair, Freedom Machines examines the power of technology to change lives.

Sep 21, 2004

Pete O'Neal, a former leader of the Black Panthers, lives in exile in Tanzania.

Feb 7, 2005

Shirley Chisholm's 1972 presidential bid.

Jun 21, 2005

Teenager Shelby Knox advocates sex education in the high schools of her hometown, Lubbock, Texas.

Jun 28, 2005

Physical and emotional challenges faced by the dwarfs profiled in the 1982 film "Little People."

Sep 28, 2004

Lost Boys of Sudan is a feature-length documentary that follows two Sudanese refugees on an extraordinary journey from Africa to America.

Sep 7, 2004

Wattstax is a 1973 documentary film by Mel Stuart that focused on the 1972 Wattstax music festival and the African American community of Watts in Los Angeles, California. The film was nominated for a Golden Globe award for Best Documentary Film in 1974. It was also screened at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, but was not entered into the main competition.

Jun 29, 2004

Sep 21, 2004

Feb 7, 2005

Chisholm `72: Unbought Unbossed is a PBS P.O.V. documentary about Shirley Chisholm.

Jun 21, 2005

The Education of Shelby Knox is 2005 documentary film that tells the coming-of-age story of public speaker and feminist Shelby Knox, a teenager who joins a campaign for comprehensive sex education in the high schools of Lubbock, Texas. TEOSK was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival in 2005 and aired on PBS’ P.O.V. series that same year. It was directed and produced by Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt.

Jun 28, 2005

A follow-up to the 1982 Emmy-nominated film Little People, Big Enough is a 2004 documentary film about Anu Trombino, Karla and John Lizzo, Len and Lenette Sawisch, and Sharon and Ron Roskamp, who are all typical Americans in every respect, except that they are dwarfs. Twenty years after her first film, Jan Krawitz finds out what has happened to her subjects. Big Enough was met with high critical acclaim, receiving an Independent Filmmaker Award from the Carolina Film & Video Festival and was aired as part of PBS's Point of View series in 2005.

Jul 5, 2005

Jul 12, 2005

Jul 19, 2005

Jul 26, 2005

Aug 2, 2005

In the Realms of the Unreal is a 2004 documentary about outsider artist Henry Darger. An obscure janitor during his life, Darger is known for the posthumous discovery of his elaborate 15,143-page fantasy manuscript entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred watercolor paintings and other drawings illustrating the story.

Aug 16, 2005

Hardwood is a 2005 short documentary film about Canadian director Hubert Davis' relationship to his father, former Harlem Globetrotters member Mel Davis. Through interviews with his mother, his father's wife, his half-brother, and Mel Davis himself, Hubert Davis explores why Mel made the decisions that he did, and how that has affected his life. Hardwood was met with high critical acclaim and received an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject nomination. It also aired on PBS as part of its Point of View series in 2005.

Aug 23, 2005

Bright Leaves is a 2003 documentary film by independent filmmaker Ross McElwee about the association his family had with the tobacco industry. Bright Leaf is the name of a strain of tobacco. It was also the name of a 1949 novel and 1950 feature film about a struggle between two tobacco barons. The struggle depicted in the film, according to McElwee family tradition, parallels the historical one between McElwee's great-grandfather and the patriarch of the Duke family who founded Duke University. The documentary follows McElwee's usual style, where he gives voiceovers to apparently spontaneous footage, making the story more personal.

Aug 30, 2005

Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust is 2004 documentary film about Menachem Daum, an Orthodox Jew and son of German Nazi Holocaust survivors who has spent his life interviewing survivors about the impact of the Holocaust on their lives. After hearing a disturbing tape of a rabbi openly preaching "hatred" of non-Jews, Daum attempts to raise an outcry in his Brooklyn Orthodox community. When ignored by the media and community leaders, Daum decides to fly to Israel to discuss the matter with his two sons, concerned with the "ethical legacy" he is responsible for leaving them. Hiding and Seeking was produced, written, and directed by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky and aired on PBS's Point of View series in 2005. It has been met with high critical praise, receiving a 90% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Sep 6, 2005

The Hobart Shakespeareans of Hobart Boulevard Elementary School is a 2005 documentary film that tells the story of the inspirational inner-city Los Angeles school teacher Rafe Esquith whose rigorous fifth-grade curriculum includes English, mathematics, geography, and literature. The pinnacle of student achievement each year is the performance of a play by William Shakespeare; in the year of filming, that play was Hamlet. The Hobart Shakespeareans drew the attention of renowned Shakespearean actors Ian McKellen and Michael York, who pay a visit to the class to watch their performance of Hamlet. Delighted with the students, York calls the Hobart Shakespeareans "one of the great Shakespeare troupes" in Los Angeles. Rafe and the Hobart Shakespeareans work hard every year to achieve a beautiful Shakespeare play. The recent plays they have performed were As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice. The Hobart Shakespeareans aired on PBS' P.O.V. series in 2005. It was produced and directed by Mel Stuart.

Sep 13, 2005

Aug 16, 2005

Aug 23, 2005

Aug 16, 2005

Jun 27, 2006

A story of love, revolution and betrayal, No More Tears Sister explores the price of truth in times of war. Set during the violent ethnic conflict that has enveloped Sri Lanka over decades, the film recreates the courageous and vibrant life of renowned human rights activist Dr. Rajani Thiranagama. Mother, anatomy professor, author and symbol of hope, Thiranagama's commitment to truth and human rights led to her assassination at the age of 35. This documentary recounts her dramatic story through rare archival footage, intimate correspondences, and poetic recreations, exposing the high price that this revolutionary woman paid for her pursuit of justice.

Jul 4, 2006

In Japan, baseball is not a pastime — it's a national obsession. And for many of the country's youth, the sport has become a rite of passage, epitomized by the national high school baseball tournament known simply as "Koshien." Four thousand teams enter, but only 49 are chosen to compete in the championship that grips the nation for two weeks every August.

Jul 11, 2006

Why do the comic-strip Adventures of Tintin, about an intrepid boy reporter, continue to fascinate us decades after their publication? "Tintin and I" highlights the potent social and political underpinnings that give Tintin's world such depth, and delve into the mind of Hergé, Tintin's work-obsessed Belgian creator, to reveal the creation and development of Tintin over time. Rare and surprisingly candid 1970s interviews reveal the profound insecurities and anxieties that drove Hergé to produce stories that have not only entertained millions of children but also helped to satisfy a personal longing for self-expression. With stunning visual effects, "Tintin and I" takes us on a fascinating journey into the psyche and brilliant work of Hergé, in his own words.

Jul 18, 2006

In 1990, an unknown candidate named Alberto Fujimori rode a wave of popular support to become the president of Peru. He fought an allout war on terror against the guerilla organization Shining Path, and won. Ten years later, accused of kidnapping, murder and corruption, he fled Peru to his native Japan, where he was in exile for four years. Fujimori has remained virtually silent about the abrupt end of his controversial presidency, until now. He granted an unprecedented, in-depth interview to filmmaker Ellen Perry, who presents an intimate, chilling portrait of this enigmatic leader's rise and fall, interweaving neverbefore-seen footage from his regime with Fujimori's own words. As events unfold in his quest to return to Peruvian politics, The Fall of Fujimori offers a cautionary tale about power and corruption in an age of terrorism.

Jul 25, 2006

Global Recordings Network (GRN), founded in Los Angeles in 1939, has produced audio versions of Bible stories in over 5,500 languages, and aims to record in every language on earth. They distribute the recordings, along with ultra-low-tech hand-wind players, in isolated regions and among displaced migrant workers. The Bible stories played by the missionaries are sometimes the first encounter community members have had with recorded sound, and, even more frequently, the first time they have heard their own language recorded. GRN calls their target audience "the tailenders" because they are the last to be reached by worldwide evangelism. Filmed in the Solomon Islands, Mexico, India and the United States, The Tailenders focuses on the intersection of missionary activity and global capitalism and raises questions about how meaning, carried by the simple sound of a human voice, changes as it crosses language and culture.

Aug 1, 2006

The proud Mexican tradition of corrido music—captured in the performances of Mexican band Los Tigres del Norte and the late Chalino Sanchez—provides both heartbeat and backbone to this rich examination of songs, drugs and dreams along the U.S./Mexico border. Al Otro Lado follows Magdiel, an aspiring corrido composer from the drug capital of Mexico, as he faces two difficult choices to better his life: to traffic drugs or to cross the border illegally into the United States. An Official Selection of the Tribeca Film Festival.

Aug 22, 2006

Alan Lomax was "the song hunter." He devoted his life to recording the world's folk tunes before they would permanently disappear with the rise of the modern music industry. In Lomax the Songhunter, filmmaker Rogier Kappers seeks to tell Lomax's story by interviewing friends such as Pete Seeger, combining it with archival recordings of music greats Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and gathering footage of the cotton fields, rock quarries and prisons where Alan Lomax captured America’s quintessential music. Finally, Kappers followed the route that Lomax took so many years ago and traveled to remote villages in Spain and Italy, hearing memories and music from the farmers, shepherds and weavers whose songs Lomax recorded decades earlier.

Aug 29, 2006

The term "working poor" should be an oxymoron. If you work full time, you should not be poor, but more than 30 million Americans — one in four workers — are stuck in jobs that do not pay the basics for a decent life. Waging a Living chronicles the day-to-day battles of four low-wage earners fighting to lift their families out of poverty. Shot over a three-year period in the northeast and California, this observational documentary captures the dreams, frustrations, and accomplishments of a diverse group of people who struggle to live from paycheck to paycheck. By presenting an unvarnished look at the barriers that these workers must overcome to lift their families out of poverty, Waging a Living offers a sobering view of the elusive American Dream.

Sep 12, 2006

Devon, Montrey, Richard, and Romesh are just at that age — 12 and 13 years old — when boys start to become men. But in their hometown of Baltimore, one of the country’s most poverty-stricken cities for inner-city residents, African-American boys have a very high chance of being incarcerated or killed before they reach adulthood. The boys are offered an amazing opportunity in the form of the Baraka school, a project founded to break the cycle of violence through an innovative education program that literally removed young boys from low-performing public schools and unstable home environments. They travel with their classmates to rural Kenya in East Africa, where a teacher-student ratio of one to five, a strict disciplinary program and a comprehensive curriculum form the core of their new educational program. The Boys of Baraka follows along with their journey, and examines each boy’s transformation during this remarkable time. Winner of awards at the Newport, Chicago, Woodstock and SILVERDOCS Film Festivals. A co-presentation with the Independent Television Service (ITVS). Produced in association with P.O.V./American Documentary.

Sep 19, 2006

In the wake of his stepfather’s death, Thomas Allen Harris embarks on a journey of reconciliation with the man who raised him as a son but whom he could never call "father." As part of the first wave of black South African exiles, Harris’s stepfather, B. Pule Leinaeng, and his eleven comrades left their home in Bloemfontein in 1960. They told the world about the brutality of the apartheid system and raised support for the fledgling African National Congress and its leader, Nelson Mandela. Drawing upon the memories of the surviving disciples and their families, along with the talent of young South African actors who portray their harrowing experiences, Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela tells an intimate story of family and home against the backdrop of a global movement for freedom. A co-production of the Independent Television Service (ITVS), in association with P.O.V./American Documentary and the National Black Programming Consortium.

Oct 3, 2006

"My name is Steven, and I am a dwarf..." So begins No Bigger than a Minute, a stylishly eclectic documentary film that introduces viewers to four-foot-tall filmmaker, Steven Delano. For forty years Steven lived his life as a reluctant celebrity, disavowing his dwarf deviance and avoiding both the benefits and potential traumas of real self-discovery. In making this film Steven uses his license-of-stature and a healthy dose of irreverent humor to show first-hand how a genetic mutation marks a person for life. Brimming with bright colors, bold images, surreal reenactments, and an original score composed from Steven's very own mutated DNA sequence, No Bigger than a Minute finds the dignity of dwarfs in an exposé of the delightful, fulfilling and sometimes shocking realities that define a tip-toe life.

Oct 10, 2006

Just over the border in Mexico is an area peppered with maquiladoras: massive factories often owned by the world's largest multinational corporations. Carmen and Lourdes work at maquiladoras in Tijuana, where each day they confront labor violations, environmental devastation and urban chaos. In this lyrical documentary, the women reach beyond the daily struggle for survival to organize for change, taking on both the Mexican and U.S. governments and a major television manufacturer. A co-production of the Independent Television Service (ITVS).

Oct 24, 2006

My Country, My Country is a 2006 documentary film about Iraq under U.S. occupation by the filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Jul 11, 2006

Jun 19, 2007

How do you measure the distance from an African village to an American city? What does it mean to be a refugee in today's "global village?" Rain in a Dry Land provides eye-opening answers as it chronicles the fortunes of two Somali Bantu families, transported by relief agencies from years of civil war and refugee life to Springfield, Massachusetts and Atlanta, Georgia. As the newcomers confront racism, poverty and 21st-century culture shock, the film captures their efforts to survive in America and create a safe haven for their war-torn families. Their poetry, humor, and amazing resilience show us our own world through new eyes. A co-production of the Independent Television Service (ITVS). (packaged to 86:46)

Jun 26, 2007

If the refugee is today’s tragic icon of a war-torn world, then Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, a reggae-inflected band born in the camps of West Africa, represents a real-life story of survival and hope. The six-member Refugee All Stars came together in Guinea after civil war forced them from their native Sierra Leone. Traumatized by physical injuries and the brutal loss of family and community, they fight back with the only means they have – music. The result, as shown in Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, is a tableau of tragedy transformed by the band’s inspiring determination to sing and be heard. A Diverse Voices Project co-production. (packaged to 86:46)

Jul 3, 2007

What does a family have to endure to create a future for itself? In April 2000, Alex White Plume and his Lakota family planted industrial hemp on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota after other crops had failed. They put their hopes for a sustainable economy in hemp’s hardiness and a booming worldwide demand for its many products, from clothing to food. Although growing hemp, a relative of marijuana, was banned in the U.S., Alex believed that tribal sovereignty, along with hemp’s non-psychoactive properties, would protect him. But when federal agents raided the White Plumes’ fields, the Lakota Nation was swept into a Byzantine struggle over tribal sovereignty, economic rights and common sense. A co-presentation with Native American Public Telecommunications. (packaged to 56:46)

Jul 10, 2007

Revolution ’67 is an illuminating account of events too often relegated to footnotes in U.S. history – the black urban rebellions of the 1960s. Focusing on the six-day Newark, N.J., outbreak in mid-July, Revolution ’67 reveals how the disturbances began as spontaneous revolts against poverty and police brutality and ended as fateful milestones in America’s struggles over race and economic justice. Voices from across the spectrum – activists Tom Hayden and Amiri Baraka, journalist Bob Herbert, Mayor Sharpe James, and other officials, National Guardsmen, and Newark citizens – recall lessons as hard-earned then as they have been easy to neglect since. A co-production of the Independent Television Service (ITVS ) and American Documentary | P.O.V. in association with WSKG. (packaged to 86:46)

Jul 17, 2007

A decade ago, after an epiphany at a New York restaurant, Richard Ogust began dedicating his time and resources to rescuing endangered turtles – confiscating hundreds bound for Southeast Asian food markets. When the filmmakers catch up with the 50-year-old writer, he is sharing his Manhattan loft with 1,200 turtles, including five species extinct in the wild. But his growing “ark” and preservation efforts are threatening to exhaust him, both mentally and financially. With luminous images and a haunting musical score, The Chances of the World Changing documents two years in the life of a man who finds himself struggling to save hundreds of lives, including his own. (packaged to 86:46)

Jul 24, 2007

In the 1990s, at the height of the prison-building boom, a prison opened in rural America every 15 days. Prison Town, USA tells the story of Susanville, California, one small town that tries to resuscitate its economy by building a prison – with unanticipated consequences. Weaving the stories of a laidoff mill worker turned guard, a struggling dairy owner and an inmate’s family stranded in Susanville, the film sheds light on an industry that is transforming the social and economic landscape of rural America. A co-production of the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and KQED/Truly California. (packaged to 86:46)

Jul 31, 2007

Thirty years after making a celebrated student short about a four-year-old child of free spirits living in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district at the height of the 1960s, Ralph Arlyck attempts the kind of revelation only documentary film can provide. In Following Sean, he goes in search of the impish, barefoot kid who delighted or horrified audiences, reflecting the hopes and fears of a turbulent, utopian era. In discovering what has become of Sean, Arlyck finds a complex reality—and experiences pure cinematic surprise. As the filmmaker comes to grips with his own midlife conflicts, Following Sean may reveal as much about Arlyck and his generation as it does his subject. A co-presentation with KQED/Truly California. (packaged to 86:46)

Aug 21, 2007

In Arctic Son, the clash of tradition and modernity puts a Native father and son at odds in the village of Old Crow, 80 miles above the Arctic Circle. Stanley, Jr., raised in Seattle, is drifting deeper into drinking and partying. Stanley, Sr., a remote, philosophical figure to his son, keeps the ways of his Gwitchin ancestors alive by hunting, fishing and living by his wits in the harsh arctic environment. After a lifetime apart, the two are reunited in the raw, quiet beauty of the Canadian Yukon in a story that captures the dialogue between a father and son from vastly different worlds.

Aug 28, 2007

Nestled below the rugged peaks of the Northern Rockies in Montana—as iconic a representation of America’s “purple mountain majesties” as one can find—lies the worst case of community-wide exposure to a toxic substance in U.S. history. In the small town of Libby, many hundreds of people are sick or have already died from asbestos exposure. Libby, Montana takes a long working day’s journey into a blue-collar community, and finds a different reality—one where the American Dream exacts a terrible price. (packaged to 86:46)

Sep 4, 2007

Los Angeles is now the country’s center for apparel manufacturing, but many of its factories bear an eerie resemblance to New York’s early 20th century sweatshops. Made in L.A. follows the remarkable journey of three Latina immigrants working in L.A.’s garment factories and their struggle for self-empowerment as they wage a three-year battle to bring a major clothing retailer to the negotiating table. This intimate film offers a rare and poignant glimpse into this “other” California, where immigrants in many industries toil long hours for sub-minimum wages, fighting for an opportunity in a new country. A co-production with the Independent Television Service (ITVS). A Diverse Voices Project co-production. A co-presentation with Latino Public Broadcasting. (packaged to 86:46)

Sep 11, 2007

How far would you go to stop a war? The Camden 28 recalls a 1971 raid on a Camden, N.J., draft board office by “Catholic Left” activists protesting the Vietnam War and its effects on urban America. Arrested on site in a clearly planned sting, the protesters included four Catholic priests, a Lutheran minister, and 23 others. The Camden 28 reveals the story behind the arrests – a provocative tale of government intrigue and personal betrayal – and the ensuing legal battle, which Supreme Court Justice William Brennan called "one of the great trials of the 20th century." Thirty-five years later, the participants take stock of the motives, fears and costs of their activism – and its relevance to America today. (packaged to 86:46)

Sep 18, 2007

The agonies of present-day Africa are deeply etched in the bodies of women. In eastern Congo on the Rwanda border, vying militias, armies and bandits use rape as a weapon of terror. Lumo Sinai was just over 20 when marauding soldiers attacked her. A fistula, common among victims of violent rape, rendered her incontinent and threatens her ability to bear children. Rejected by her fiancé and cast aside by her family, Lumo awaits reconstructive surgery. Lumo is her story, tragic for its cruelties but also inspiring for the struggle she wages and the dignity she displays, with the help of an extraordinary African hospital, to overcome shame, fear, and the affliction that robs her of a normal life. (packaged to 56:46)

Oct 9, 2007

In one of documentary cinema’s more remarkable enterprises, 49 Up makes its U.S. broadcast premiere as the seventh in a series of films that has profiled a group of English children every seven years, beginning in 1964. Renowned director Michael Apted (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorky Park, Gorillas in the Mist) has doggedly pursued the series as the children have grown into adults, navigating the divide between childhood dreams and adult realities. 49 Up revisits questions of love, marriage, career, class and prejudice – discovering unexpected turns in individual lives, and surprising views of the Up film series itself. (packaged to 146:46)

Dec 12, 2007

Tony Kushner, whose epochal Angels in America won a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award, has emerged as one of the country’s leading playwrights – and one of its fiercest moral critics. In the film Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, Oscar-winning director Freida Lee Mock (P.O.V.’s Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision) followed Kushner for three tumultuous years, from Sept. 11, 2001 to the 2004 presidential election, to delve into the passions that keep him reaching for the great American play. Actors Marcia Gay Harden, Meryl Streep, Tonya Pinkins and Emma Thompson, directors Mike Nichols and George C. Wolf, and writer/artist Maurice Sendak are seen collaborating with Kushner on such landmark works as Angels in America; Caroline, or Change; and Homebody/Kabul. (packaged to 116:46)

Jun 24, 2008

The 21st-season opener features "Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North," an exploration of filmmaker Katrina Brown's slave-trading ancestors, the Rhode Island DeWolfs. She and nine relatives (including Tom DeWolf, author of "Inheriting the Trade") retrace the old slave-trading route, including stops in Bristol, R.I., Ghana and Cuba.

Jul 1, 2008

Forget the pie charts, color-coded maps and hyperventilating pundits. What's the street-level experience of voters in today's America? In a triumph of documentary storytelling, Election Day combines 11 stories — shot simultaneously on November 2, 2004, from dawn until long past midnight — into one. Factory workers, ex-felons, harried moms, Native American activists and diligent poll watchers, from South Dakota to Florida, take the process of democracy into their own hands. The result: an entertaining, inspiring and sometimes unsettling tapestry of citizens determined on one fateful day to make their votes count.

Jul 8, 2008

In 1997, U.S. Marines patrolling the Texas-Mexico border as part of the War on Drugs shot and killed Esequiel Hernández Jr. Mistaken for a drug runner, the 18-year-old was, in fact, a U.S. citizen tending his family's goats with a .22 rifle. He became the first American killed by U.S. military forces on native soil since the 1970 Kent State shootings. The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández, narrated by Tommy Lee Jones, explores Hernandez's tragic death and its torturous aftermath. His parents and friends, the Marines on patrol, and investigators discuss the dangers of militarizing the border and the death of one young man.

Jul 15, 2008

Renowned sculptor John Houser has a dream: to build the world's tallest bronze equestrian statue for the city of El Paso, Texas. He envisions a stunning monument to Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate that will honor the contributions Hispanic people made to building the American West. But as the project nears completion, troubles arise. Native Americans are outraged — they remember Oñate as the man who brought genocide to their land and sold their children into slavery. As El Paso divides along lines of race and class in The Last Conquistador, the artist must face the moral implications of his work.

Jul 22, 2008

A group of young Palestinian men work illegally as construction laborers in the Israeli city of Modi'in. Caught between Israeli security laws and a Palestinian Authority they see as having failed them, they work for Israeli contractors by day while hiding from police by night. Like youths everywhere, they pass their idle hours talking about love, marriage and future hopes. Israeli filmmaker Ido Haar has crafted a powerful vérité film that illuminates the plight of young men questioning their own culture while struggling to survive in the midst of bitter conflict.

Jul 29, 2008

This is democracy — Japanese style. Campaign provides a startling insider's view of Japanese electoral politics in this portrait of a man plucked from obscurity by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to run for a critical seat on a suburban city council. Kazuhiko "Yama-san" Yamauchi's LDP handlers are unconcerned that he has zero political experience, no charisma, no supporters and no time to prepare. What he does have is the institutional power of Japan's modern version of Tammany Hall pushing him forward. Yama-san allows his life to be turned upside down as he pursues the rituals of Japanese electioneering — with both tragic and comic results. A co-presentation with the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM).

Aug 5, 2008

In this classic 1969 documentary, the Man in Black is captured at his peak, the first of many in a looming roller-coaster career. Fresh on the heels of his Folsom Prison album, Cash reveals the dark intensity and raw talent that made him a country music star and cultural icon. Director Robert Elfstrom got closer than any other filmmaker to Cash, who is seen performing with his new bride June Carter Cash, in a rare duet with Bob Dylan, and behind the scenes with friends, family and aspiring young musicians. Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music paints an unforgettable portrait that endures beyond the singer's 2003 death.

Aug 12, 2008

Belarus has been called "Europe's last dictatorship." Since 1994, Alexander Lukashenko has ruled the ex-Soviet republic with a despotic hand, jailing the opposition, shutting down the press and refusing to investigate the assassinations of dissidents. He has virtually silenced his critics — but not one lone performance artist who stages public stunts mocking the dictator's pretensions. Belarusian Waltz is the story of Alexander Pushkin, whose audacious, comical exploits find him facing the hostility of the police and the consternation of his family. An offbeat tale of post-modern street theater meeting 1930s-style authoritarianism, the film offers a surprising window into the soul of the Belarusian people.

Aug 19, 2008

When in 1998 Chilean judge Juan Guzmán was assigned the first criminal cases against the country's ex-dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, no one expected much. Guzmán had supported Pinochet's 1973 coup — waged as an anti-Communist crusade — that left the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and thousands of others dead or "disappeared." The filmmakers trace the judge's descent into what he calls "the abyss," where he uncovers the past — including his own role in the tragedy. The Judge and the General reveals one of the 20th century’s most notorious episodes and tells a cautionary tale about violating human rights in the name of "higher ideals." A co-production of Independent Television Service (ITVS) in association with Latino Public Broadcasting.

Sep 16, 2008

When brothers Armando and Carlos Peña set off to carry their mother's ashes to south Texas, their road trip turns into a quest for answers about a strangely veiled past. As they reunite with five other brothers, the two men try to piece together their family's shattered history. Why was their mother cast out by her family? What happened to their father, who disappeared during the notorious 1954 U.S. deportation program Operation Wetback? Calavera Highway is a sweeping story of seven Mexican-American men grappling with the meaning of masculinity, fatherhood and a legacy of rootless beginnings. Produced in association with American Documentary | P.O.V. A co-presentation of Latino Public Broadcasting. Funded in part by Center for Asian American Media with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Sep 30, 2008

What happens if you fall sick and are one of 47 million people in America without health insurance? Critical Condition by Roger Weisberg (Waging a Living, POV 2006) puts a human face on the nation's growing health care crisis by capturing the harrowing struggles of four critically ill Americans who discover that being uninsured can cost them their jobs, health, home, savings, even their lives. Filmed in vérité style, Critical Condition offers a moving and invaluable expose at a time when the nation is debating how to extend health insurance to all Americans. A production of Public Policy Productions in association with Thirteen/WNET New York and American Documentary | POV

Oct 1, 2008

How much would you sacrifice to survive? When Chicago filmmaker Joanna Rudnick tested positive for the "breast cancer gene" at age 27, she knew the information could save her life. And she knew she was not only confronting mortality at an early age, but also was going to have to make heart-wrenching decisions about the life that lay ahead of her. Should she take the irreversible preventive step of having her breasts and ovaries removed or risk developing cancer? What would happen to her romantic life, her hopes for a family? In the Family documents Rudnick's efforts to reach out to other women while facing her deepest fears. A co-production of Joanna Rudnick, Kartemquin Films and Independent Television Service (ITVS).

Oct 8, 2008

Nearing completion, China's massive Three Gorges Dam is altering the landscape and the lives of people living along the fabled Yangtze River. Countless ancient villages and historic locales will be submerged, and 2 million people will lose their homes and livelihoods. The Yu family desperately seeks a reprieve by sending their 16-year-old daughter to work in the cruise ship industry that has sprung up to give tourists a last glimpse of the legendary river valley. With cinematic sweep, Up the Yangtze explores lives transformed by the biggest hydroelectric dam in history, a hotly contested symbol of the Chinese economic miracle. An official selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. An EyeSteelFilm/National Film Board of Canada production in association with American Documentary | P.O.V. A co-presentation with the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM).

Oct 16, 2008

When is it right to kill? In the midst of war, is it right to refuse? Eight U.S. soldiers today, some who killed and some who said no, reveal their inner moral dilemmas in Soldiers of Conscience. Made with official permission of the U.S. Army, the film transcends politics to explore the tension between spiritual values and military orders. Soldiers follows the stories of both conscientious objectors and those who criticize them. Through this clash of views, the film discovers a surprising common ground: all soldiers are "soldiers of conscience," torn between the demands of duty and the call of conscience.

Dec 10, 2008

Imagine watching Schindler's List and knowing the sadistic Nazi camp commandant played by Ralph Fiennes was your father. Inheritance is the story of Monika Hertwig, the daughter of mass murderer Amon Goeth. Hertwig has spent her life in the shadow of her father's sins, trying to come to terms with her "inheritance." She seeks out Helen Jonas, who was enslaved by Goeth and who is one of the few living eyewitnesses to his unspeakable brutality. The women's raw, emotional meeting unearths terrible truths and lingering questions about how the actions of our parents can continue to ripple through generations.

Jun 23, 2009

Puerto Rican-American rapper Hamza Pérez pulled himself out of drug dealing and street life 12 years ago and became a Muslim. Now he's moved to Pittsburgh's tough North Side to start a new religious community, rebuild his shattered family and take his message of faith to other young people through hard-hitting hip-hop music. But when the FBI raids his mosque, Hamza must confront the realities of the post-9/11 world, and himself. New Muslim Cool takes viewers on Hamza's ride through streets, slums and jail cells — following his spiritual journey to some surprising places in an America that never stops changing.

Jun 30, 2009

In September 2002, three skinheads were roaming a park in Rheims, France, looking to "do an Arab," when they settled for a gay man instead. Twenty-nine-year-old François Chenu fought back fiercely, but he was beaten unconscious and thrown into a river, where he drowned. The acclaimed French vérité film Beyond Hatred is the story of the crime's aftermath; above all, of the Chenu family's brave and heartrending struggle to seek justice while trying to make sense of such pointless violence and unbearable loss. With remarkable dignity, they fight to transcend hatred and the inevitable desire for revenge.

Jul 7, 2009

In 2004, Jason Crigler's life was taking off. He was one of New York's hottest young guitarists, his new CD was due for release and his wife, Monica, was pregnant with their first child. Then, at a gig in Manhattan, Jason suffered a near-fatal brain hemorrhage. His doctors doubted he would ever emerge from his near-vegetative state. The astonishing journey that followed, documented by friend and filmmaker Eric Daniel Metzgar (The Chances of the World Changing, POV 2007), is a stirring family saga and a portrait of creative struggle in the face of overwhelming tragedy.

Jul 14, 2009

The International Criminal Court is the first permanent court to prosecute perpetrators of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.

Jul 21, 2009

Filmed over 23 years, The Betrayal is the Academy Award-nominated directorial debut of renowned cinematographer Ellen Kuras in a unique collaboration with the film's subject and co-director, Thavisouk ("Thavi") Phrasavath. After the U.S. government waged a secret war in Laos during the Vietnam War, Thavi's father and thousands of other Laotians who had fought alongside American forces were abandoned and left to face imprisonment or execution. Hoping to find safety, Thavi's family made a harrowing escape to America, where they discovered a different kind of war. Weaving ancient prophecy with personal testimony and stunning imagery, The Betrayal is a story of survival and the resilient bonds of family.

Jul 28, 2009

One of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers takes a vérité look at Oxford's Mulberry Bush School for emotionally disturbed children. Mulberry's heroically forbearing staff greets extreme, sometimes violent behavior with only consolation and gentle restraint. Kim Longinotto's unblinking camera captures an arduous process and a nearly unhinged environment, but it also records the daily dramas of troubled kids trying to survive and the moments of hope they achieve with Mulberry's clear-eyed staff.

Aug 18, 2009

A collection of short documentaries, including "Utopia, Part 3: The World's Largest Shopping Mall," about the 7-million-square-foot South China Mall, which was built in 2005 and is virtually empty; "Nutkin's Last Stand," about the attempt of Britons to save their red squirrels from an influx of North American gray squirrels; "34x25x36," about the Patina V mannequin factory near L.A.; and "City of Cranes," which explores the world of crane operators

Aug 25, 2009

This is a story about a wall - the separations it's meant to enforce, and the unintended ones it creates. The security wall being constructed by Israel on the West Bank has divided Palestinian families and communities. It has also isolated the Catholic-run Our Lady of Sorrows nursing home, leaving its feisty residents to face old age in the throes of one of the world's most bitter conflicts.

Sep 1, 2009

For Spaniards — and for the world — nothing has expressed their country's traditionally rigid gender roles more powerfully than the image of the male matador. So sacred was the bullfighter's masculinity to Spanish identity that a 1908 law barred women from the sport. Ella Es el Matador reveals the surprising history of the women who made such a law necessary and offers fascinating profiles of two female matadors currently in the arena: the acclaimed Mari Paz Vega and neophyte Eva Florencia. These women are gender pioneers by necessity. But what emerges as their truest motivation is their sheer passion — for bullfighting and the pursuit of a dream.

Sep 8, 2009

What is it like to have power over life and death, and yet to struggle with your own humanity? This is the story of acclaimed British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, who has traveled to Ukraine for 15 years to treat patients who have been left to die; of his friend and medical colleague in Kyiv who carries on the fight despite official hostility and archaic surgical conditions; and of a young patient who hopes that Henry can save his life. Tense, heartbreaking and humorous, The English Surgeon is a remarkable depiction of one doctor's commitment to relieving suffering and of the emotional turmoil he undergoes in bringing hope to a desperate people.

Sep 15, 2009

Two stories that paint a dramatic portrait of the challenges facing America's public schools — and of the great difference a dedicated principal can make. Tresa Dunbar is a second-year principal at Chicago's Nash Elementary, where 98% of students come from low-income families; in Springfield, Illinois, Kerry Purcell has led Harvard Park Elementary, with similar demographics, for six years. Tod Lending (Omar & Pete, POV 2005) and David Mrazek followed both women over the course of a school year, discovering each one's unique styles yet similar passions. The Principal Story takes the viewer along for an emotional ride that reveals what effective educational leadership looks like in the 21st century.

Sep 22, 2009

Rocky Otoo is the Bronx-bred teenage daughter of Ghanaian parents, and she's no pushover. She is a sassy high-achiever bound for college. With freedom in sight, Rocky rebels against her mother's rules. When their relationship reaches a breaking point, Rocky flees to her father, a chief in Ghana. What follows is captured in Bronx Princess, a tumultuous coming-of-age story set in a homeland both familiar and strange. Her precocious — and very American — ideas of a successful, independent life conflict with her father's traditional African values. Reconciling her dual legacies becomes an unexpected chapter in this unforgettable young woman's education.

Nov 11, 2009

On call 24 hours a day for the past five years, a group of senior citizens has made history by greeting over 900,000 American troops at a tiny airport in Bangor, Maine. The Emmy-nominated film, The Way We Get By, is an intimate look at three of these greeters as they confront the universal losses that come with aging and rediscover their reason for living. Bill Knight, Jerry Mundy and Joan Gaudet find the strength to overcome their personal battles and transform their lives through service. This inspirational and surprising story shatters the stereotypes of today's senior citizens as the greeters redefine the meaning of community. A co-production of Dungby Productions and ITVS in association with WGBH and Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN) with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

Dec 30, 2009

Take a remarkable plunge into the life, art, memories and philosophical reflections of the legendary rocker, poet and artist.

Apr 21, 2010

How much do we know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families? Though our food appears the same as ever — a tomato still looks like a tomato — it has been radically transformed. In the Academy Award®-nominated blockbuster Food, Inc., producer-director Robert Kenner and investigative authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) lift the veil on the U.S. food industry, revealing surprising and eye-opening facts about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we may go from here. (120:00)

Jun 22, 2010

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe examines the life of this radical attorney from a surprising angle. Kunstler’s two daughters from his second marriage grew up lionizing a man already famous for his historic civil rights and anti-war cases. Then, in their teens, they began to be disillusioned by a stubborn man who continued representing some of the most reviled defendants in America — this time accused rapists and terrorists. In this intimate biography, Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler seek to recover the real story of what made their late father one of the most beloved, and hated, lawyers in America. Winner of the L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth Vision Award, 2009 Sundance Film Festival. A co-production of ITVS. (90:00)

Jun 29, 2010

The Beaches of Agnès is a 2008 French documentary film directed by Agnès Varda. The film is an autobiographical essay where Varda revisits places from her past, reminisces about life and celebrates her 80th birthday on camera. She has said that it will most likely be her last film.

Jul 6, 2010

Though apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994, economic injustices between blacks and whites remain unresolved. As revealed in Yoruba Richen’s incisive Promised Land, the most potentially explosive issue is land. The film follows two black communities as they struggle to reclaim land from white owners, some of whom who have lived there for generations. Amid rising tensions and wavering government policies, the land issue remains South Africa’s “ticking time bomb,” with farreaching consequences for all sides. Promised Land captures multiple perspectives of citizens struggling to create just solutions. A co-production of the National Black Programming Consortium, American Documentary/POV and the Diverse Voices Project, with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (60:00)

Jul 13, 2010

Good Fortune is a provocative exploration of how massive international efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa may be undermining the very communities they aim to benefit. In Kenya’s rural countryside, Jackson’s farm is being flooded by an American investor who hopes to alleviate poverty by creating a multimillion-dollar rice farm. Across the country in Nairobi, Silva’s home and business in Africa’s largest shantytown are being demolished as part of a U.N. slum-upgrading project. The gripping stories of two Kenyans battling to save their homes from large-scale development present a unique opportunity see foreign aid through eyes of the people it is intended to help. (90:00)

Jul 20, 2010

Past and present collide as award-winning filmmaker Natalia Almada (Al Otro Lado, POV 2006) brings to life audio recordings she inherited from her grandmother, daughter of Plutarco Elias Calles, a revolutionary general who became Mexico’s president in 1924. In his time, Calles was called El Jefe Maximo (Foremost Chief). Today he is remembered as El Quema-Curas (Priest Burner) and as a dictator who ruled through puppet presidents until his exile in 1936. Airing during the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, El General moves between a daughter’s memories as she grapples with history’s portrayal of her father and the weight of his legacy on Mexico today. Winner of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival U.S. Directing Award: Documentary. A co-production of ITVS in association with Latino Public Broadcasting. A co-presentation with Latino Public Broadcasting. (90:00)

Jul 27, 2010

Imagine being picked up off the street, told you have committed a murder you know nothing about and then finding yourself sentenced to 20 years in jail. In December 2005 this happened to Toño Zúñiga in Mexico City and, like thousands of other innocent people, he was wrongfully imprisoned. This is the story of two young lawyers and their struggle to free Zúñiga. With no background in film, Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete set about recording the injustices they were witnessing, enlisting acclaimed director Geoffrey Smith to tell this dramatic story.

Aug 17, 2010

In his search for “somewhere I could point my camera into pure space,” award-winning photographer Murray Fredericks began making annual solo camping trips to remote Lake Eyre and its salt flats in South Australia. These trips have yielded remarkable photos of a boundless, desolate yet beautiful environment where sky, water and land merge. Made in collaboration with documentary filmmaker Michael Angus, Salt is the film extension of Fredericks’ work at Lake Eyre, interweaving his photos and video diary with time-lapse sequences to offer viewers the liberating and disorienting experience of being thrown into an infinite dimension of mind and spirit. (60:00)

Aug 24, 2010

Scottish filmmaker Amy Hardie has built a career making science documentaries that reflect her rational temperament. When she dreamed one night that her horse was dying, only to wake and find the horse dead, she dismissed the incident as coincidental. Then she dreamed she would die at age 48 — the next year. When Hardie does get ill, just as the dream predicted, her search takes her to neuroscience experts and finally a shaman. The Edge of Dreaming is an evocative, intimate chronicle of that year and a fascinating investigation into the human subconscious. (90:00)

Aug 31, 2010

What is it like to be torn from your Chinese foster family, put on a plane with strangers and wake up in a new country, family and culture? Wo Ai Ni (I Love You) Mommy is the story of Fang Sui Yong, an 8-year-old orphan, and the Sadowskys, the Long Island Jewish family that travels to China to adopt her. Sui Yong is one of 70,000 Chinese children now being raised in the United States. Through her eyes, we witness her struggle with a new identity as she transforms from a timid child into someone that no one — neither her new family nor she — could have imagined. A co-production of American Documentary/POV and the Diverse Voices Project, presented in association with the Center for Asian American Media, with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (90:00)

Sep 7, 2010

Off and Running is the story of Brooklyn teenager Avery, a track star with a bright future. She is the adopted African-American child of white Jewish lesbians. Her two brothers are black and Puerto Rican and Korean. Though it may not look typical, Avery’s household is like most American homes — until Avery writes to her birth mother and the response throws her into crisis. She struggles over her “true” identity, the circumstances of her adoption and her estrangement from black culture. Just when it seems as if her life will unravel, Avery begins to make sense of her identity, with inspiring results. A co-production of ITVS in association with American Documentary/POV and the Diverse Voices Project, with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (90:00)

Sep 14, 2010

Her passport said she was Cha Jung Hee. She knew she was not. So began a 40-year deception for a Korean adoptee who came to the United States in 1966. Told to keep her true identity secret from her new American family, the 8-year-old girl quickly forgot she had ever been anyone else. But why had her identity been switched? And who was the real Cha Jung Hee? In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee is the search to find the answers, as acclaimed filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem (First Person Plural, POV 2000) returns to her native Korea to find her “double,” the mysterious girl whose place she took in America. A co-production of ITVS in association with the Center for Asian American Media and American Documentary/POV. (60:00)

Sep 21, 2010

Filmed in Yemen and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, The Oath interweaves the stories of Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard, and Salim Hamdan, a prisoner at Guantanamo facing war crimes charges. Directed by Laura Poitras (Flag Wars, POV 2003; the Oscar®-nominated My Country, My Country, POV 2006), The Oath unfolds via a narrative rife with plot reversals and betrayals that ultimately leads to Osama bin Laden, 9/11, Guantanamo and the U.S. Supreme Court. Winner of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Excellence in Cinematography Award: Documentary. A co-production of ITVS in association with American Documentary/POV. (90:00)

Oct 5, 2010

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is a 2009 documentary film directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith. The film follows Daniel Ellsberg and explores the events leading up to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the top-secret military history of the United States involvement in Vietnam.

Jun 21, 2011

When Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker, award-winning filmmakers of The War Room, Startup.com and Don’t Look Back, turn their sights on the competition for the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France awards, the country’s Nobel Prize for pastry, you’re in for a treat. In Kings of Pastry, 16 chefs, including Jacquy Pfeiffer, co-founder of Chicago’s French Pastry School, whip up the most gorgeous, delectable, gravity-defying concoctions and edge-of-your-seat drama as they deliver their spun-sugar desserts to the display table. The inevitable disasters and successes prove both poignant and hilarious. (90:00)

Jun 28, 2011

My Perestroika is an intimate look at the last generation of Soviet children. Five classmates go from living sheltered childhoods to experiencing the hopes of Gorbachev’s reforms and the confusion of the USSR’s dissolution, to searching for their places in today’s Moscow. With candor and humor, the punk rocker, single mother, entrepreneur and married teachers paint a picture of the challenges, dreams and disappointments of those raised behind the Iron Curtain. Through first-person testimony, vérité footage and vintage home movies, this beautifully crafted documentary reveals a Russia rarely seen on film. A co-production of Red Square Productions/Bungalow Town Productions and ITVS International in association with American Documentary | POV. An Official Selection of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. (90:00)

Jul 5, 2011

Sweetgrass presents a riveting and poetic portrait of the American West just as one of its traditional ways of life dies out. Shot amidst the grandeur of Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, the film follows the last modern day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into the breathtaking and often dangerous mountains for summer pasture. Magnificently photographed and unsparingly candid, Sweetgrass discovers a world of harsh beauty and arduous labor, where humans still work in rugged intimacy with nature. An Official Selection of the 2010 New York Film Festival. (90:00)

Jul 12, 2011

The Khmer Rouge slaughtered nearly two million people in the late 1970s. Yet the “killing fields” of Cambodia have remained largely unexplained. Until now, in Enemies of the People. Enter Thet Sambath, an unassuming, yet cunning, investigative journalist who lost his family in the conflict and spends a decade gaining the trust of the men and women who perpetrated the massacres. Sambath and co-director Rob Lemkin record shocking testimony, never before seen or heard, from the foot soldiers who slit throats and from Pol Pot’s right-hand man, the notorious Brother Number Two. Winner of the 2010 Sundance World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Prize. (90:00)

Jul 19, 2011

The Donkey Library is the story of a librarian — and a library — like no other. A decade ago, Colombian teacher Luis Soriano was inspired to spend his weekends bringing a modest collection of precious books, via two hard-working donkeys, to the children of a poor and violence-ridden province. As Soriano braves armed bands, drug traffickers, snakes and heat, his library on hooves carries an inspirational message about education and a better future for Colombia. His efforts have attracted worldwide attention — and imitators — but his story has never been better told than in this heartwarming yet unsentimental film. (60:00)

Jul 26, 2011

Mugabe and the White African, much of which was filmed clandestinely, tells an alarming story from one of the world’s most troubled nations. In Zimbabwe, de facto dictator Robert Mugabe has unleashed a “land reform” program aimed at driving whites from the country through violence and intimidation. One proud “white African,” however, has challenged Mugabe with human rights abuses under international law. The courage Michael Campbell and his family display as they defend their farm — in court and on the ground — makes for a film as inspiring as it is harrowing. (90:00)

Aug 2, 2011

From a land of long, dark winters comes Steam of Life, a moody, comic and moving study of Finnish men as framed by the national obsession with the sauna. There, they come together to sweat out not only the grime of contemporary life, but also their grief, hopes, joys and memories. Beautifully and hauntingly shot, the acclaimed film provides a surprising glimpse into the lives of Finnish men and a remarkable depiction of the troubled and often reticent hearts of contemporary Western men. (60:00)

Aug 23, 2011

A one-hour collection of documentary shorts by established and emerging filmmakers, including: Big Birding Day – David Wilson offers a glimpse into the world of competitive birdwatching, as three friends attempt to see as many species as possible in 24 hours. Flawed – Artist/filmmaker Andrea Dorfman's drawings burst colorfully into life as she animates the story of her longdistance relationship with a man whose profession — plastic surgery — gives her plenty of fodder. StoryCorps – StoryCorps brings its Peabody Award-winning storytelling to POV for a second season. POV’s animated shorts use original recordings that have become beloved public-radio “driveway moments.” Funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Miss Devine – Cousins James Ransom and Cherie Johnson recall their inimitable Sunday school teacher, Miss Lizzie Devine. This animation, set in the small Florida town of the cousins’ memories, will have you laughing as the cousins remember the fearsome Miss Devine. No More Questions – Strong-willed grandmother Kay Wang allowed her son and granddaughter to drag her into a StoryCorps booth. Though Kay was reluctant, she had stories to tell — from disobeying her mother and rebuffing suitors while growing up in China to late-life adventures as a store detective for Bloomingdale’s. Six Weeks – Six weeks is the period in which parents of newborn babies in Poland may decide to give up a child for adoption. Marcin Janos Krawczyk looks at one child’s fate through the eyes of the mother who must make her irreversible decision and the joyful parents who adopt her baby. Tiffany – Beverly Morris tells of her ongoing struggle to hold on to the most contested object in her divorce — the Tiffany lamp, in this animated short.

Aug 30, 2011

In 2009, Janus Metz and cameraman Lars Skree accompanied a platoon of Danish soldiers to Armadillo, a combat operations base in southern Afghanistan. For six months, often while under fire, they captured the lives of the young soldiers fighting the Taliban in a hostile and confusing environment, where official rhetoric about helping civilians too often met the unforgiving reality of being a foreign occupier. Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prix at Cannes, Armadillo is one of the most dramatic and candid accounts of combat to come out of Afghanistan.

Sep 6, 2011

The story of Bradley Crowder and David McKay, who were accused of intending to firebomb the 2008 Republican National Convention, is a dramatic tale of idealism, loyalty, crime and betrayal. Better This World follows the radicalization of these boyhood friends from Midland, Texas, under revolutionary activist Brandon Darby. The results: eight homemade bombs, multiple domestic terrorism charges and a high-stakes entrapment defense hinging on the actions of a controversial FBI informant. The film goes to the heart of the war on terror and its impact on civil liberties and political dissent in post-9/11 America.

Sep 13, 2011

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front explores two of America’s most pressing issues — environmentalism and terrorism — by lifting the veil on a radical environmental group the FBI calls America’s “number one domestic terrorism threat.” Former Earth Liberation Front member Daniel McGowan faces life in prison for two multimillion-dollar arsons against Oregon timber companies. What turned this working-class kid from Queens into an eco-warrior? Marshall Curry (Oscar®-nominated Street Fight, POV 2005) provides a nuanced and provocative account that is part coming-of-age story, part cautionary tale and part cops-and-robbers thriller.

Sep 20, 2011

One hundred years ago, American teachers established the English-speaking public school system of the Philippines. Now, in a striking turnabout, American schools are recruiting Filipino teachers. The Learning is the story of four Filipino women who reluctantly leave their families and schools to teach in Baltimore. They hope to use their higher salaries to transform their families’ impoverished lives back home. But the women bring idealistic visions of the teacher’s craft and of life in America, which soon collide with Baltimore’s tough realities.

Sep 27, 2011

Every spring, China’s cities are plunged into chaos as 130 million migrant workers journey to their home villages for the New Year in the world’s largest human migration. Last Train Home takes viewers on a heart-stopping journey with the Zhangs, a couple who left infant children behind for factory jobs 16 years ago, hoping their wages would lift their children to a better life. They return to a family growing distant and a daughter longing to leave school for unskilled work. As the Zhangs navigate their new world, Last Train Home paints a rich, human portrait of China’s rush to economic development. An EyeSteelFilm production in association with ITVS International. An Official Selection of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Winner of Best Feature-Length Documentary Award, 2009 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. (90:00)

Nov 10, 2011

From a small town in northern Michigan to the mountains of Afghanistan, "Where Soldiers Come From" follows the journey of childhood friends who join the National Guard after graduating from high school. It chronicles the young men's transformation from teenagers to soldiers to 23-year-old combat veterans. The film offers an intimate look at the young men who fight our wars.

Feb 23, 2012

'Racing Dreams' chronicles a year in the life of three "tweens" who dream of becoming NASCAR drivers. Though they aren't old enough for driver's licenses, Brandon, Josh, and Annabeth race extreme go-karts at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour in the World Karting Association's national series. The film is a humorous and heartbreaking portrait of racing, young love and family struggle.

May 16, 2012

May 26, 2012

There are over one million Gypsies living in America today, and most people don’t know anything about them. It is one man’s obsessive pursuit of justice and dignity that led filmmaker Jasmine Dellal into their hidden thousand-year-old culture. Charming and outspoken, Spokane resident Jimmy Marks defies widely held stereotypes–and his own people’s code of secrecy–to unlock a Romani world in America.

Jun 21, 2012

High Tibetan Buddhist Master Chögyal Namkhal Norbu teaches in the West, while his son, Yeshi, breaks from tradition and embraces the modern world.

Jun 28, 2012

In a stunning milestone for justice in Central America, a Guatemalan court recently charged former dictator Efraín Rios Montt with genocide for his brutal war in the 1980s — and Pamela Yates’ 1983 documentary, When the Mountains Tremble, provided key evidence for bringing the indictment. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator tells the extraordinary story of how a film helped tip the scales of justice.

Jul 5, 2012

Is darkness becoming extinct? A meditation on the human relationship to the stars.

Jul 12, 2012

Every four seconds a romance novel published by Harlequin or its British counterpart, Mills & Boon, is sold somewhere in the world. Julie Moggan’s 'Guilty Pleasures' takes an amusing and touching look at this global phenomenon. Ironies abound in the contrasts between the everyday lives of the books’ readers and the fantasy worlds that offer them escape.

Jul 19, 2012

Houda al-Habash, a conservative Muslim preacher, founded a Qur’an school for girls in Damascus, Syria, 30 years ago. Every summer, her students immerse themselves in a rigorous study of Islam. A surprising cultural shift is underway - women are claiming space within the mosque. Shot right before the uprising in Syria erupted, 'The Light in Her Eyes' offers an extraordinary portrait of a leader.

Jul 26, 2012

Up Heartbreak Hill chronicles the lives of three high school seniors living on the Navajo Nation and struggling to shape their identities as both Native American and modern American. They must decide whether to stay in their community - a place inextricably woven into the fiber of their beings - or leave in pursuit of educational and economic opportunities.

Aug 9, 2012

Five shorts, including "The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement," about an octogenarian Alabama barber and WWII veteran who carried the American flag across the bridge on the first Selma to Montgomery march of 1965; and "Sin País (Without Country)," about illegal immigrants from Guatemala who, 20 years after arriving in the U.S., are deported to their home country. Also: three StoryCorps animations, including "Eyes on the Stars," about astronaut Ronald McNair.

Sep 20, 2012

Jonathan Demme’s portrait of post-Katrina New Orleans tells the story of Carolyn Parker, a lifelong resident of the Lower Ninth Ward, who is fighting for the right to rebuild her home and community.

Sep 27, 2012

From dusk to dawn, 'El Velador' accompanies Martin, a guard who watches over the extravagant mausoleums of some of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords. In the labyrinth of the cemetery, this film about violence without violence reminds us that, amid the turmoil of a drug war that has claimed more than 50,000 lives, ordinary existence persists in Mexico and quietly defies the dead.

Oct 4, 2012

Exposing shocking corruption within the judicial system of the Philippines in one of the most sensational trials in the country’s history. Two grieving mothers, entangled in a case that ends a nation’s use of capital punishment but fails to free an innocent man, dedicate more than a decade to executing or saving him.

Oct 18, 2012

When a Navajo couple uncovers a hidden link between their children’s rare genetic disorder and the American government’s conquest of their tribe, their lives are changed forever.

Oct 25, 2012

Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light is a remarkable meditation on memory, history and eternity. Chile’s remote Atacama Desert, 10,000 feet above sea level, provides stunningly clear views of the heavens for astronomers. But it also holds secrets from the past: human remains, from pre-Columbian mummies to the bones of political prisoners "disappeared" during the Pinochet dictatorship.

Jan 7, 2013

A veteran reporter and his colleagues at an independent newsweekly defy powerful drug cartels and corrupt officials to continue publishing the news in Mexico.

Mar 24, 2013

A lyrical exploration of youth, beauty and ambition, seen through the eyes of a conflicted American scout and a 13-year-old she discovers.

Jun 24, 2013

Season 26 opens with "Homegoings," which profiles Harlem funeral director Isaiah Owens, the son of a South Carolina sharecropper whose fascination with burials began as a boy, while also examining the traditions of African-American funerals. Owens' fascination with burials dates to his childhood: He buried matchsticks at age 5, then progressed to actual dead things, including chickens, dogs and even a mule. He moved to NYC at age 17 to learn the craft and, in time, opened his own funeral home.

Jul 1, 2013

Special Flight is a dramatic account of the plight of undocumented foreigners at the Frambois detention center in Geneva, Switzerland, and of the wardens who struggle to reconcile humane values with the harsh realities of a strict deportation system. The 25 Frambois inmates featured are among the thousands of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants imprisoned without charge or trial and facing deportation to their native countries, where they fear repression or even death. The film, made in Switzerland, is a heart-wrenching exposé of the contradictions between the country's compassionate social policies and the intractability of its immigration laws.

Jul 8, 2013

Herman Wallace has spent more than 40 years in a 6’ x 9’ prison cell. He works with artist Jackie Sumell to imagine his "dream home," questioning justice and punishment in America.

Jul 15, 2013

Three teens in a Southern California town wrestle with questions of love and friendship along with adult realities of financial uncertainty.

Jul 15, 2013

The modern-day love story of a guy from small-town Illinois who reaches out to a beautiful New York City art student from Korea. They meet in the only place that such different people might ever find each other—online.

Jul 22, 2013

High Tech, Low Life follows two of China’s first citizen-reporters, bloggers who are fighting censorship to document the underside of the country’s rapid economic development.

Jul 29, 2013

A 4-year-old, a teenager and an adult, all on the autism spectrum and at pivotal moments in their lives, work with their perceptual and behavioral differences in a "neurotypical" world.

Aug 19, 2013

For the first time, Israeli military and legal professionals who devised the legal framework behind the occupation are interviewed about this system, which mirrors the country’s toughest moral quandaries.

Aug 26, 2013

Oscar®nominee 5 Broken Cameras depicts life in a West Bank village where a security fence is being built. The film was shot by a Palestinian and co-directed by an Israeli.

Sep 9, 2013

Seven players with 620 years between them compete in the Over 80 World Table Tennis Championships. Ping Pong is a meditation on mortality and a joyous tribute to the human spirit.

Sep 16, 2013

The World Before Her is a tale of two Indias: In one, a small-town girl competes in the Miss India pageant. In the other, a militant woman leads a fundamentalist Hindu camp for girls.

Sep 23, 2013

A Newark, N.J. public high school teacher races against the clock to find a place in the world for her students with autism before they graduate and "age out" of a unique and caring support system.

Oct 7, 2013

Brooklyn public school I.S. 318, serving mostly minority students from working-class families, has won more than 30 national chess championships, the country’s best record.

Oct 14, 2013

In 1964 a group of 7-year-old children were interviewed for the groundbreaking documentary Seven Up. Michael Apted has been back to film them every seven years since. Now they are 56.

Nov 28, 2013

Celebrate the transformative power of listening with this animated special from the oral history project StoryCorps, which captures intimate conversations among everyday people.

Feb 3, 2014

American Promise spans 13 years as Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, middle-class African-American parents in Brooklyn, N.Y., turn their cameras on their son, Idris, and his best friend, Seun, who make their way through one of the most prestigious private schools in the country. Chronicling the boys' divergent paths from kindergarten through high school graduation at Manhattan's Dalton School, this provocative, intimate documentary presents complicated truths about America's struggle to come of age on issues of race, class and opportunity

Jun 23, 2014

The Season 27 premiere features Jason DaSilva's "When I Walk," in which the filmmaker chronicles his life for five years after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at age 25. By happenstance, a family member records the moment when the diagnosis hits home: while vacationing in the Caribbean, his legs give out. Yet, not all is bad: he meets Alice Cook, whose mother also has MS, at a support group. The two fall in love, marry and collaborate on completing the documentary.

Jun 30, 2014

A profile of 98-year-old Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese-American social activist in Detroit who has spent much of her adult life fighting for civil rights and female equality.

Jul 7, 2014

Filmmaker Niko von Glasow profiles participants at the 2012 Paralympic Games in London, including a one-handed Norwegian table tennis player, the Rwandan sitting volleyball team, an American archer who uses his feet and a Greek paraplegic boccia player. Along the way, von Glasow—who was born with severely shortened arms—sees his preconceptions and stereotypes about the Paralympics and sports in general upended.

Jul 14, 2014

The changed realities of post-Katrina New Orleans, including a population that is less African-American and less poor than before the storm, are examined in this documentary, which focuses on the 2010 re-election campaign of city councilwoman Stacy Head, a polarizing figure, and her aide, Barbara Lacen-Keller.

Jul 21, 2014

The world of professional ballroom dancing in Denmark, where participants often look beyond the country's borders for the perfect partner, is examined. The documentary follows Egor, a 15 year old from Russia, as he adjusts to life in Denmark and to his 14-year-old Danish partner, Mie.

Jul 28, 2014

After Beichuan, China was destroyed in an earthquake, buildings are rebuilt more quickly than the community. Official Selection of Sundance 2013.

Aug 4, 2014

The story of a 15-year old sentenced to four life sentences. Does society benefit from incarcerating young teens to a lifetime in prison?

Aug 18, 2014

A family's experience living in a Lebanese refugee camp for multiple generations. Love and family are tinged with desperation. Official Selection of the 2013 Berlin International Film Festival.

Aug 25, 2014

Explorers the world of backroom negotiations and deal making in Ghana's oil business.

Sep 1, 2014

The story of the four abortion doctors that remained in Wichita, Kansas after the assassination of George Tiller in 2009.

Sep 8, 2014

Pam White and her family struggle to retain her memories and life by recording their interactions in the face of an Alzheimer diagnoses.

Sep 22, 2014

The mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989, Ed Koch fought crime and financial difficulties during a difficult period for the City of New York.

Oct 7, 2014

Joshua Oppenheimer visits men accused of playing a key role in the killing of over one-million Indonesians in 1965. Initially, the men explain their actions as patriotic and necessary. But over time, some question their actions. 2013 Oscar nominee. 2014 BAFTA Best Documentary.

Jun 22, 2015

Season 28 opens with "Out in the Night," about four African-American lesbian friends who became embroiled in a melee with a man who had verbally and physically attacked them in 2006 NYC. He was stabbed; and they were eventually convicted of gang assault. The case spurred sensationalized press coverage, with headlines labeling them a "Gang of Killer Lesbians." Included: remarks from the women, their families and one of the arresting officers; and surveillance-camera footage of the confrontation.

Jun 29, 2015

"The Overnighters," about the North Dakota oil boom, details the goings-on at a Williston church whose pastor turned it into a makeshift dorm for folks unable to find housing. The emigres moved to the region in hopes of finding work. Some have, some haven't, but a housing shortage means they have nowhere to live. Not all in the community welcome the arrangement, however. Also: the Immigrant Nation short "The Caretaker"; and StoryCorps shorts "A More Perfect Union" and "The Last Viewing."

Jul 6, 2015

A single dad in Seattle and a mother of two in NYC navigate the child welfare system in hopes of regaining custody of their children, who were removed from their care due to neglect. Patrick lost his daughter after he alerted CPS about her meth-addicted mother; he was addicted, too, but is now recovering. Hannah lost her kids after leaving them with her mom for nights on end. She's since married and is again pregnant; and her husband supports her in her quest to put her family back together.

Jul 13, 2015

A look at Internet addiction in China via the experiences of teens at Daxing Boot Camp in Beijing, one of some 400 rehabilitation centers created by the government to treat the disorder. Patients, who are kept under constant surveillance, take part in rigorous exercise, group therapy, brain scans and classroom instruction. "It is an abyss swallowing my son," says one mother of why she sought help for her son. It's also not cheap. Parents, many at their wits' end, often borrow money to pay.

Jul 20, 2015

The transformation of a one-time goalie for the Syrian national soccer team from peaceful protester to armed opponent of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's regime is chronicled. In 2011, when the documentary begins, 19-year-old Abdul Basset Saroot—once voted the second best goalie in Asia—is singing protest songs to like-minded people in Homs. The regime responds to the protests, however, with artillery fire, tanks, jets and snipers. Assad and his friends see no option but one: take up arms.

Jul 27, 2015

Five Chilean women meet each month for tea and pastries, a tradition they've maintained for 60 years. Through the decades, they've experienced many personal and societal changes; and weathered disagreements amongst themselves.

Aug 3, 2015

A look at life along the Sudan-South Sudan border, where many who fought to create South Sudan found themselves on the wrong side of the border once it was established in 2011. They harvest crops, raise cattle, try to avoid air raids—and make music on instruments made from found objects.

Aug 17, 2015

Meet the young migrants in a Swiss integration class, who have made long and arduous journeys for a new life. Separated from their families, they struggle to learn a new language, prepare for employment and reveal their innermost hopes and dreams.

Aug 24, 2015

Ride shotgun with Matt VanDyke, who films his self-transformation from a timid 26-year-old to a motorcycle-driving rebel, fighting in the Libyan revolution. Two-time Oscar nominee Marshall Curry tells his amazing story.

Aug 31, 2015

More than half a million Cambodians work abroad, and a staggering third of those become slaves. Many are young women, held prisoner and forced to work in horrific conditions, sometimes as prostitutes. French-Cambodian filmmaker Guillaume Suon presents an eye-opening look at the cycle of poverty, despair and greed that fuels this brutal modern slave trade.

Sep 18, 2015

An Oscar-nominated reflection on love, sacrifice and the creative spirit, this candid New York tale explores the chaotic 40-year marriage of famed “boxing” painter Ushio Shinohara and artist Noriko Shinohara.

Sep 21, 2015

In a community where silence is seen as necessary for survival, immigrant activist Angy Rivera joins a generation of Dreamers ready to push for change in the only home she’s ever known — the United States.

Sep 25, 2015

A cat-and-mouse caper told with humor and compassion, Art and Craft uncovers the universal in one man's search for connection and respect.

Oct 2, 2015

How the government's attempts to silence Ai Weiwei have turned him into China's most powerful artist and an irrepressible voice for free speech and human rights around the globe.

May 23, 2016

An unprecedented reform to California's "Three Strikes" law seen through the eyes of those on the front lines – prisoners suddenly freed, families turned upside down, reentry providers helping navigate complex transitions, and attorneys and judges wrestling with an untested law.

May 30, 2016

At a first-of-its-kind PTSD treatment center in California, follow Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families on their paths to recovery as they attempt to make peace with their pasts, their loved ones and themselves.

Jun 27, 2016

An optometrist identifies the men who killed his brother in the horrific 1965 Indonesian genocide. He confronts them while testing their eyesight and demands they accept responsibility.

Jul 11, 2016

Florida Justice Transitions trailer park is home to 120 sex offenders, all battling their own demons as they work toward rejoining society. This film considers how the destructive cycle of sexual abuse - and the silence surrounding it - can be broken.

Aug 1, 2016

Iris pairs the late documentarian Albert Maysles, then 87, with Iris Apfel, the quick-witted, flamboyantly dressed 93-year-old style maven who has had an outsized presence on the New York fashion scene for decades.

Sep 5, 2016

An escape from the doomsday thinking that is ruining our collective imaginations. An experience for smartphones composed of a suite of interconnected nonfiction stories, EXIT dares users to entertain a shocking possibility: that mankind may survive (and even thrive) beyond the challenges that await us in the future.

Sep 5, 2016

Go behind the scenes at Japan's Yoshida Brewery, where a brotherhood of artisans, ranging from 20 to 70, spend six months in nearly monastic isolation as they follow an age-old process to create saké, the nation's revered rice wine.

Sep 12, 2016

The largely invisible and often crushing struggles of young African-American men come vividly--and heroically--to life in All the Difference, which traces the paths of two teens from the South Side of Chicago who dream of graduating from college.

Sep 19, 2016

Emmy®-nominated filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz takes an unflinching look at the hard choices and destructive consequences of the U.S.-Mexico drug war. Witness the human side of the conflict through the eyes of a U.S. drug enforcement agent, an activist nun in Mexico and a former Texas smuggler.

Oct 10, 2016

When director Sharon Shattuck's father came out as transgender, Sharon was in the awkward throes of middle school. As the Shattucks reunite to plan Sharon's wedding, she seeks a deeper understanding of how her parents' marriage, and their family, survived intact.

Oct 17, 2016

The danger is palpable as intrepid young filmmaker Nanfu Wang follows maverick activist Ye Haiyan (aka Hooligan Sparrow) and her band of colleagues to southern China as they seek justice in the case of six elementary school girls allegedly sexually abused by their principal.

Oct 24, 2016

When Ryan Green, a video game programmer, learns that his young son Joel has cancer, he and his wife begin documenting their emotional journey with a poetic video game. Follow Ryan and his family over two years creating "That Dragon, Cancer," which evolves from a cathartic exercise into a critically acclaimed work of art that sets the gaming industry abuzz.

Oct 31, 2016

Inside the very first girls' school in a small Afghan village, education goes far beyond the classroom as the students discover the differences between the lives they were born into and the lives they dream of leading.

Jun 26, 2017

The nuanced story of a family displaced by the Syrian conflict and remaking themselves after the parents separate. Effervescent teen Dalya goes to Catholic high school and her mother Rudayana enrolls in college as they both walk the line between their Muslim values and the new world they find themselves in.

Jun 26, 2017

Daphne Matziaraki follows a day in the life of Kyriakos Papadopoulos, a captain in the Greek Coast Guard who is caught in the middle of the biggest refugee crisis since WWII. Despite limited resources, the captain and his crew attempt to save thousands of migrants from drowning in the Aegean Sea.

Jul 3, 2017

Radio host Obaidah Zytoon captures the fate of Syria through the intimate lens of a small circle of friends and journalists. Beginning with peaceful Arab Spring protests 2011, The War Show offers a four-year, ground-level look at how the country spiraled into bloody civil war.