Taking the Heat: The First Women Firefighters of New York City

Almost Home

Fishbowl; American Made

As Duke Ellington's co-composer, arranger, and right-hand man, Billy Strayhorn wrote some of the greatest American music of the 20th century.  But as a gay man in the ’40s and ’50s, Strayhorn had to lead a discreet existence, while Ellington played to thunderous applause on center stage.

Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life

The story of the brutal gang rape and murder in Delhi of 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh, which sparked outrage and protests in India, a country beset by extreme poverty and gender inequality.

India's Daughter

Eighty-five-year-old Jiro Ono, considered the world’s greatest sushi chef, is the proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station. Despite its humble appearance, it is the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a three-star Michelin Guide rating, and sushi lovers from around the globe make pilgrimages. “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is a thoughtful and elegant meditation on work, family and the art of perfection. By David Gelb.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

The story of the children bullied at school and online. The film questions assumptions about bullying behaviour beyond cliches and stereotypes of the past. It also examines changes in how schools treat the perpetrators and victims.

Bully

As fentanyl overdose deaths in Vancouver, Canada reach an all-time high, the Overdose Prevention Society opens its doors—a renegade safe injection site that employs current or former drug users. Its staff and volunteers save lives and give hope to a marginalized community, doing whatever it takes to remain open in this intimate documentary that looks beyond the stigma of injection drug users.

Love in the Time of Fentanyl

They live crowded together in cement factory dormitories where water has to be carried upstairs in buckets. Their meals and rent are deducted from their wages, which amount to less than a dollar a day. Most of the jeans they make in the factory are purchased by retailers in the U.S. and other countries. China Blue takes viewers inside a blue jeans factory in southern China, where teenage workers struggle to survive harsh working conditions. Providing perspectives from both the top and bottom levels of the factory’s hierarchy, the film looks at complex issues of globalization from the human level. 

China Blue, which was made without permission from the Chinese authorities, offers an alarming report on the economic pressures applied by Western companies and the resulting human consequences, as the real profits are made—and kept—in first-world countries. The unexpected ending makes the connection between the exploited workers and U.S. consumers even clearer.

China Blue

Weaving together a treasure trove of rare footage with the voices of a diverse group of people who were there, Stanley Nelson tells the vibrant story of a pivotal movement as urgent today as it was then.

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

July ’64 tells the story of a historic three-day race riot that erupted in two African American neighborhoods in the northern, mid-sized city of Rochester, New York. On the night of July 24, 1964, frustration and resentment brought on by institutional racism, overcrowding, lack of job opportunity and police dog attacks exploded in racial violence that brought Rochester to its knees. Directed by Carvin Eison and produced by Chris Christopher, JULY ’64 combines historic archival footage, news reports and interviews with witnesses and participants to dig deeply into the causes and effects of the historic disturbance.

July '64

Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes is a 2006 documentary film written, produced, and directed by Byron Hurt. The documentary explores the issues of masculinity, violence, homophobia and sexism in hip hop music and culture, through interviews with artists, academics and fans. Hurt's activism in gender issues and his love of hip-hop caused him to feel what he described as a sense of hypocrisy, and began working on the film.

Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes

How a small town in Alabama became influential in the music of Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Aretha Franklin.

Muscle Shoals

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neuromuscular disease with an average survival time of 2-5 years from diagnosis. In this intimate exploration, three people with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, bravely face different paths as they live with this progressively debilitating illness.

Matter of Mind: My ALS

They grew up believing their land was paradise. Now, they risk everything in escaping it. In an unforgettable documentary, follow families on a treacherous journey to defect from their homeland of North Korea, as the threat of severe punishment and possible execution looms over their passage, revealing a world many have never seen.

Beyond Utopia

Free For All: The Public Library tells the story of the quiet revolutionaries who made a simple idea happen. From the pioneering women behind the “Free Library Movement” to today's librarians who service the public despite working in a contentious age of closures and book bans, meet those who created a civic institution where everything is free and the doors are open to all.

Free For All: The Public Library

A Touch of Greatness

Race discrimination infects America’s capital punishment system. According to a landmark study regarding race and the death penalty, a black defendant who kills a white victim is up to 30 times more likely to be sentenced to death than a white defendant who kills a black victim. RACE TO EXECUTION, a film by Rachel Lyon, traces the fates of two death row inmates, Robert Tarver in Russell County, Alabama and Madison Hobley in Chicago, Illinois. Their compelling personal stories are enlarged and enriched by attorneys who fought for these men’s lives, and by prosecutors, criminal justice scholars and experts in the fields of law and the media. 

 RACE TO EXECUTION reveals how, beyond DNA and the issue of innocence, the shameful open secret of America's capital punishment system is a matter of race. Once a victim’s body is discovered, his or her race—and the race of the accused—deeply influence the legal process: how a crime scene is investigated and the deployment of police resources, the interrogation and arrest of major suspects, how the media portrays the crime and ultimately, the jury selection and sentencing. 

 Hugh Kite, a white man, general store owner and mainstay of his rural Alabama community, was murdered during the course of a robbery on September 15, 1984. Less than four months after Kite was murdered, Robert Tarver, a black man, was sentenced to die. The prosecutor at Tarver’s trial rejected all but one of the African Americans qualified for jury service. Eleven white Alabamans and one African American composed Tarver’s “jury of his peers.” And as prosecutors have long known, a trial can turn on who is sitting in the jury box. Recent research indicates the extent to which the make-up of the jury affects sentencing: when five or more white males sit on a capital trial jury, there is a 70 percent chance of a death penalty outcome. If there are four or fewer white males, the chance of a death sentence is only 30 percent. 

 Whether in the rural South or the inner city North, virtually all-white juries are commonplace—and potentially lethal to black defendants. In 1987, in Chicago, Madison Hobley, a young black medical technician married to his high school sweetheart, lost his wife and son in an apartment house blaze. Hobley was accused of setting the fire. Police officers claimed that Hobley had signed a written confession but that spilled coffee had destroyed the document. A panel consisting of 11 white jurors and one African American juror convicted Madison Hobley and sentenced him to die. 

 With key 2005 Supreme Court decisions overturning death sentences in Texas and California due to racial discrimination in jury selection, RACE TO EXECUTION offers a timely analysis. The film examines the subtle yet persistent ways in which American culture consistently overlooks matters of race in criminal justice. Neither advocating nor repudiating capital punishment, the film catalyzes dialogues about the inherent imbalances that lead to inaccuracy and unfairness in the application of the “ultimate punishment.” 

 The film concludes with the exoneration of one man and the execution of another. In both cases, race is a factor impossible to avoid. Yet there are signs that the death penalty is being used less often in the United States and scrutinized differently than it was even five years ago. The Supreme Court heard five death penalty cases in 2005 alone. Is this progress, or are recent reforms still inadequate? The varied voices heard in RACE TO EXECUTION contribute to a thoughtful examination of the factors that influence who lives and who dies at the hands of the state.

Race to Execution

When AIDS arrived in San Francisco in 1981, it decimated a community, but also brought people together in inspiring and moving ways to support and care for one another and to fight for dignity and a cure.

We Were Here

Two sisters adopted in China as infants by Californian and Norwegian parents grow up knowing they have a twin living on the other side of the world. Although language is a barrier, their bond grows deeper and they arrange to finally meet.

Twin Sisters

In the wake of recent events that have sparked a national dialogue, American Denial explores the power of unconscious biases around race and class. Using Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 investigation of Jim Crow racism as a springboard, the film shows how unrecognized, unconscious attitudes continue to dominate racial dynamics in American life.

American Denial

Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? is a 2006 documentary film written by Matt Coen, Mike Kime and Frank Popper and directed by Frank Popper.

Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?

The portrayal of Native Americans in cinema. / Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond takes an entertaining, insightful, and often humorous look at the Hollywood Indian, exploring the portrayal of North American Natives through a century of cinema and examining the myth of "the Injun." Narrated by Diamond with infectious enthusiasm and good humor, this film is a loving look at cinema through the eyes of the people who appeared in its very first flickering images and have survived to tell their stories their own way.

Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian

This acclaimed film tells the story of ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), two groups whose activism and innovation turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition. Despite having no scientific training, these determined activists infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry to help identify promising new drugs and move them from experimental trials to patients. With unfettered access to a treasure trove of never-before-seen archival footage, the film reveals the controversial actions, heated meetings, heartbreaking failures and exultant breakthroughs of heroes in the making. By David France.

How to Survive a Plague

A Hawaiian transgender woman finds acceptance, but still is searching for love.

Kumu Hina

RaMell Ross's Hale County This Morning, This Evening, one of the year's most critically acclaimed films, is a dreamy and intimate journey through the world of Hale County, Alabama, a richly detailed glimpse into life in America’s Black Belt.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

There is a mental health crisis happening for many American farmers. A combination of climate change and the pandemic have contributed to increasing economic uncertainty and isolation. Following four family farms in the Midwest over several years, the documentary Greener Pastures is a story of perseverance and survival within the farming industry in the heartland.

Greener Pastures

A Hard Straight

This film tells the true story of a bohemian St. Francis and his remarkable relationship with a flock of wild red-and-green parrots. Former street musician and San Francisco dharma bum Mark Bittner falls in with the flock as he searches for meaning in his life, unaware that the parrots will bring him everything he seeks.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

"These Amazing Shadows" focuses on the National Film Registry, an eclectic collection of movies considered to be "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the National Film Preservation Board. Included: clips from many of the films; remarks from Librarian of Congress James Billington; such directors as Barbara Kopple, Christopher Nolan, Rob Reiner, John Singleton and John Waters; such actors as Tim Roth, Debbie Reynolds and Zooey Deschanel; and film critics and historians.

These Amazing Shadows

Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream

Made up of home video footage that reveals a long-kept secret, Sasha Joseph Neulinger’s Rewind is a brave and wrenching look at his childhood and his journey to reconcile his past. By probing the gap between image and reality, the film depicts both how little and how much a camera can capture.

Rewind

When Dolly Parton sang “9 to 5,” she was singing about a real movement that started with a group of secretaries in the early 1970s. Their goals were simple—better pay, more advancement opportunities and an end to sexual harassment—but as seen in 9to5: The Story of a Movement, their fight that inspired a hit would change the American workplace forever.

9to5: The Story of a Movement

Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew is a film portrait of the now famous jazz vocalist who was "rediscovered" decades after he disappeared from the public eye.

The documentary blends concert footage, rare photos and candid interviews with Jimmy Scott, his family and his colleagues.

Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew

After a long career as a commercial and portrait photographer, mischievous San Francisco artist Michael Jang sat for decades on a hidden treasure of pictures taken in his 20s—both candid celebrity shots and a down-to-earth cross-section of Chinese American family life rarely captured so playfully. Then, during the pandemic, Jang set out to share his work with the world, street guerilla-style.

Who is Michael Jang?

This program combines bold and original animation with extraordinary archival footage to explore the build-up to and unraveling of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. Set to the music of revolution, then and now, the film features the vocal talents of Hank Azaria, Mark Ruffalo, Dylan Baker, Liev Schreiber, Nick Nolte, Jeffrey Wright and Roy Scheider. A parable of hope, courage and victory, this program is the story of young Americans speaking out.

Chicago 10

Love Free or Die

Finding love can be hard enough for anyone, but for those on the autism spectrum, the challenges may seem overwhelming. The disorder can jeopardize the core characteristics of a successful relationship — communication and social interaction. Autism in Love offers a warm and stereotype-shattering look at four people with autism as they pursue and manage romantic relationships.

Autism in Love

Residents of Wyoming's isolated Wind River Indian Reservation, a young Arapaho journalist, and a teenage powwow princess travel with a Shoshone elder to search for missing artifacts in the vast archives of Chicago's Field Museum. There they discover a treasure trove of ancestral objects, setting them on a journey to recover what has been lost, and build hope for the future.

What Was Ours

After Kitty Genovese was repeatedly attacked on a street in Queens, New York in 1964, The New York Times published a front-page story asserting that 38 witnesses watched her murder from their apartment windows and did nothing to help. Genovese's death quickly became a symbol of urban apathy. The Witness follows the efforts of her brother Bill as he uncovers the truth buried beneath the story.

The Witness

RUMBLE is the electric story of how Native American influence shaped rock and roll, a missing chapter in music history.

RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked The World

WE WANT THE FUNK! is a syncopated voyage through the history of funk music, spanning from African, soul, and early jazz roots, to its rise into the public consciousness. Featuring James Brown's dynamism, the extraterrestrial funk of George Clinton's Parliament Funkadelic, transformed girl group Labelle, and Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, the story also traces funk's influences on both new wave and hip-hop.

WE WANT THE FUNK!

Phil Sharp's RNA discovery reshaped science, medicine, and the global biotech industry.

Cracking the Code: Phil Sharp and the Biotech Revolution

Legendary Afro-Cuban pop singer Lupe Victoria Yoli, “The Queen of Latin Soul Music,” aka La Lupe or La Yiyiyi, rose to fame in the 1960s and died in 1992 virtually unknown. Beautiful, sexual and the epitome of Afro-Cuban 60s sophistication, La Lupe remains the quintessential bad girl and perpetual outsider, renowned for emotional performances and as the embodiment of female narcissism who stopped at nothing in the name of love and passion. Shot in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the U.S., this film tells her story through interviews and rare archival footage from the groundbreaking musical era.

La Lupe Queen of Latin Soul

Private Felix Longoria fought and died while fighting the Japanese during World War II. When his body was sent back to his small hometown in Texas, the only funeral parlor there refused to hold a wake for the Mexican American GI because "the whites would not like it." The incident would ripple outward, launching the career of Lyndon B. Johnson, landing the undertaker in a mental institution, and launching the Mexican American civil rights movement.

The Longoria Affair

Revenge follows four entrepreneurs from 2007 through the end of 2010 as they fight to bring the electric car back to the world market in the midst of a global recession. The protagonists are Bob Lutz from General Motors, Elon Musk from the American start-up Tesla Motors, Carlos Ghosn from Nissan, and Greg Abbott, an independent electric car converter from California.

Whereas the 2006 film Who Killed the Electric Car? ended with the destruction of nearly 5,000 electric cars from California's clean air program, notably the GM EV1, the new film features the birth of a new generation of electric cars including the Chevrolet Volt, the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla Roadster.

Revenge of the Electric Car

A nine-year-old child in Burma is spurred to leave his village for the first time in his life when his village gets electricity. He walks for over three days to in search of a seeing his first television.

Happiness

The investigation into a spate of church burnings that occured in East Texas during January and February 2010 is chronicled.

Little Hope Was Arson / A City in Flames

Fed up with faith healers, fortune-tellers, and psychics using his beloved magician’s tricks to swindle money out of credulous people, James “The Amazing” Randi dedicated his life to exposing frauds with the wit and style he brought to his stage show. An Honest Liar is part detective story, part biography, and a bit of a magic act itself.

An Honest Liar

Meet Dub Lawrence, a crusading former sheriff whose investigations highlight increasingly militarized state of American police. Dub established Utah’s first SWAT team, only to see that same unit kill his son-in-law in a controversial standoff.

Peace Officer

Filmed during two recent wildfire seasons, Wildland is a sweeping yet deeply personal account of a wildland firefighting crew as they struggle with fear, loyalty, dreams, and demons. This is the story of ordinary people with nothing left to lose — as they trudge through an unforgiving face a test of mind, body, and spirit.

Wildland

Showing Shari’a law in a way we've never seen before--through the story of the first-ever female judge in Palestine’s religious courts--The Judge is a portrait of a remarkable woman that also provides rare insight into both Islamic law and gendered justice.

The Judge

After the birth of her first child, filmmaker Nanfu Wang returns to China to speak with her family and explore the ripple effect of that country's devastating social experiment, the one-child policy. At its core, One Child Nation is a riveting personal story revealing shocking human rights violations and forces us all to reckon with the consequences of blind obedience.

One Child Nation

Shot over the course of five years, Bedlam examines the mental health crisis through intimate stories of those people who are in-and-out of overwhelmed and under-resourced psych emergency rooms, jails and homeless camps in Los Angeles, while psychiatrist and filmmaker Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, M.D. also searches for answers to his own late sister’s mental illness.

Bedlam

An unlikely duo discovers a pattern of illegal sterilizations in women’s prisons, shielded by prison officials and doctors, and wage a near-impossible battle against the Department of Corrections. Belly of the Beast exposes modern-day eugenics and reproductive injustice in California prisons, through intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated people.

Belly of the Beast

When doctors classified homosexuality as a mental illness to be “cured,” they employed cruel treatments like electroshock and lobotomies. LGBTQ+ activists and their allies fought back — and won a momentous victory when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its manual of mental disorders in 1973.

Cured

Is the "American Dream" of home ownership a false promise? While the government’s postwar housing policy created the world’s largest middle class, it also set America on two divergent paths – one of perceived wealth and the other of systematically defunded, segregated communities.

Owned: A Tale of Two Americas

In a male-dominated media landscape, the women journalists of India's all-female Khabar Lahariya ("News Wave") newspaper risk it all, including their own safety, to cover the country's political, social, and local news from a women-powered perspective. From underground network to independent media empire, they defy the odds to redefine power. Nominated for an Academy Award.

Writing With Fire

What is the science behind consciousness? Six brilliant researchers from around the world—a brain scientist, a plant behaviorist, a healer, a philosophy professor, a psychedelics scientist, and a Buddhist monk—take you on a mind-blowing quest to investigate this seemingly unsolvable mystery.

AWARE: Glimpses of Consciousness

In this coming-of-age documentary about generational trauma, follow Sam Harkness from age 11 to 36 as his middle-class Seattle family is heartbroken and unsure of what to do after his mother suddenly leaves them. Woven together with home movies lovingly crafted by Sam’s half brother, director Reed Harkness, witness a boy grow up grappling with the ripple effects of a singular traumatic event.

Sam Now

Following a cancer diagnosis, Sister Úna—a mischievous, rule-breaking Catholic nun dedicated to social justice—chooses to live as she’s dying. In this touching end-of-life documentary, the self-proclaimed “leader of the misfits” plans her funeral in her last nine months to live.

Sister Úna Lived a Good Death

An insider’s look at the rise and fall of the NFT (non-fungible token) phenomenon and how technology transformed the traditional art world, for better and worse. Featuring verité footage and candid interviews with groundbreaking artists—like Beeple, Latasha Alcindor, and Loish— at the center of this phenomenon, Minted delves into the complex world of the $40 billion NFT digital art market.

Minted

This is the story of a group of young men who survived for 72 days after their plane crashed in the Andean Cordillera in October 1972. / The 16 young men (of 45 passengers and crew) of a 1972 plane crash in the Andes recall their ordeal, which found them stranded for 72 days on a snowy peak after the search for the plane's wreckage was called off.

Stranded: The Andes Plane Crash Survivors

Who has the authority to define your identity? Considered one of the most controversial scholars of our time, Melville Herskovits — a Jewish anthropologist — challenged the norm in the 1940s when he wrote that black culture wasn’t pathological, it was African. Leading a seismic shift in the way African American culture is understood, Herskovits’s work raises ideas that still

Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness

What's a child's education worth? For one visionary rookie principal, it's priceless. At the Bronx Center for Science & Mathematics, an innovative public high school in New York City's South Bronx, Principal Edward Tom leads a dedicated group of teachers, students and parents in their biggest gamble yet. Within a community infamous for hardship, can this brand-new school live up to its promise, and inspire new stories of achievement and excellence?

Whatever It Takes

Legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman goes back to school for this intimate yet sprawling film about the University of California at Berkeley, the oldest and most prestigious member of a ten campus public education system.

At Berkeley

An intimate documentary about faith, renewal, and healing, Two Gods follows a Muslim casket maker and ritual body washer in New Jersey, as he takes two young men under his wing to teach them how to live better lives.

Two Gods

"Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” This was the guiding principle that removed thousands of Native American children and placed them in Indian boarding schools. Among the many who died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School were three Northern Arapaho boys. Now, more than a century later, tribal members journey from Wyoming to Pennsylvania to help them finally come home.

Home From School: The Children of Carlisle

Be Good, Smile Pretty

The Political Dr. Seuss is a 2004 documentary film written by Ron Lamothe, Eric Martin and Lois Vossen, and directed by Ron Lamothe.

The Political Dr. Seuss

This film explores the plight of North Korean refugees trying to escape their homeland and China, and tells the story of activists who put themselves in harm's way to save them via a clandestine underground railroad.

Seoul Train

Enron dives from the seventh largest US company to bankruptcy in less than a year in this tale told chronologically. The emphasis is on human drama, from suicide to 20,000 people sacked: the personalities of Ken Lay (with Falwellesque rectitude), Jeff Skilling (he of big ideas), Lou Pai (gone with $250 M), and Andy Fastow (the dark prince) dominate. Along the way, we watch Enron game California's deregulated electricity market, get a free pass from Arthur Andersen (which okays the dubious mark-to-market accounting), use greed to manipulate banks and brokerages (Merrill Lynch fires the analyst who questions Enron's rise), and hear from both Presidents Bush what great guys these are.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

This haunting film about a film examines a classic Nazi propaganda movie used by historians for decades to provide insight into the realities of life in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. The recent discovery of a second reel in an East German archive has thrown the veracity and intent of the Warsaw Ghetto footage into question.

A Film Unfinished

Raised in the Tennessee mountains, Wayne White started his career as a cartoonist in NYC. He quickly found success as one of the creators of the Pee-wee's Playhouse TV show which soon led to more work design some of the most arresting and iconic images in pop culture. Recently his word paintings featuring pithy and and often sarcastic text statements finely crafted onto vintage landscape paintings have made him a darling of the fine art world. The movie chronicles the vaulted highs and crushing lows of an artist struggling to find peace and balance between his professional work and his personal art. This is especially complicated for a man who struggles with the virtues he most often mocks in his art...Vanity, ego and fame.

Beauty Is Embarrassing

Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman's Journey

The portrait of a motorcycle-riding Vietnam veteran. There’s much more to Ron “Stray Dog” Hall than meets the eye. Behind the tattoos and leather vest is a man dedicated to helping his fellow vets and immigrant family as he also comes to terms with his combat experience.

Stray Dog

What happens when love runs out of time? For 92-year-old Mimi, who has spent much of her life caring for 64-year-old Dona, her daughter with an intellectual disability, it means facing the inevitable — the likelihood that she will not outlive her daughter and the need to find her a new home.

Mimi and Dona

A detailed, on-the-ground account of the 2016 standoff between protesters occupying Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and federal authorities.

No Man's Land

More than just a picture-perfect postcard of iconic stone statues, Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, is a microcosm of a planet in flux. Directed by native Rapa Nui filmmaker Sergio Mata’u Rapu, Eating Up Easter explores the challenges his people are facing, and the intergenerational fight to preserve their culture and a beloved environment against a modernizing society and booming tourism trade.

Eating Up Easter

Feels Good Man is the story of how artist Matt Furie, creator of a once-benign comic character named Pepe the Frog, fought an uphill battle to reclaim his iconic creation from those who turned it into a symbol of hate. Feels Good Man is a thought-provoking, wild ride through an Internet that transformed an unlucky cartoon frog, and then the rest of the world.

Feels Good Man

In Milwaukee, a 15-year-old attempted to carjack law student Claude Motley and shot him in the face. Through multiple surgeries and catastrophic health care bills, the effects of gun violence upends Claude’s life. Yet he still finds himself torn between punishment for the young man and the injustice of mass incarceration for Black men and boys. Can he find mercy in his heart for his attacker?

When Claude Got Shot

The prosecution presents shocking evidence. As the trial concludes, the engaged citizens of Victoria seek a way to build a more inclusive community.

A Town Called Victoria | Episode 3

Over the course of a grueling eight months, a crew of Oaxacan guest workers plant trees throughout the United States. This intimate portrait shows how hard it is to balance the physical demands of reforestation and extreme isolation while staying connected to the family back home.

A Thousand Pines

Knowing his dad miraculously recovered from three open-heart surgeries after discovering a passion for cycling, filmmaker Eric D. Seals proposes an ambitious idea: Bike together from St. Louis to Chicago. 350 miles. 4 days. On their journey, the two push each other as they find a deeper connection and a renewed appreciation of their quests for their own health and to reimagine Black health

Bike Vessel

Death of a Shaman

Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.

Objectified

This program examines the creative and commercial value of musical sampling, including the related debates over artistic expression, copyright law and, of course, money. For more than 30 years, innovative hip-hop performers and producers have been re-using portions of previously recorded music. When lawyers and record companies got involved, what was once referred to as a "borrowed melody" became a "copyright infringement."

Copyright Criminals

Beverly May and Terry Ratliff grew up on opposite sides of a mountain ridge in eastern Kentucky. When a mountaintop removal coal mine encroaches on their community, the two find themselves on opposite sides of a debate that divides their community. Who controls, consumes, and benefits from the planet's dwindling supply of natural resources? In a small town in dire economic straits and high unemployment, the coal company's offer to buy land and provide jobs can be hard to resist. How can a community choose between its present and its future? Also: The Virtual Mine.

Deep Down

Decade of Fire covers a shocking but untold piece of American urban history, when the South Bronx was on fire in the 1970s. Left unprotected by the city government, nearly a quarter-million people were displaced as their close-knit, multiethnic neighborhood burned to the ground. Decade of Fire also shows what can happen when a community chooses to fight back and reclaim their neighborhood.

Decade of Fire

Does American democracy survive without the backbone of independent local journalism? Go inside The Storm Lake Times, a newspaper serving an Iowa town that has seen its fair share of changes in the 40 years since Big Agriculture came to the area. Pulitzer-winning editor Art Cullen and his family dedicate themselves to keeping the paper alive as local journalism across the country dies out.

Storm Lake

75-year-old Rebecca loses the only job she's even known. She has no savings, no 401K safety net, and no employment prospects. Rebecca teams up with son Sian-Pierre to take the trip of a lifetime, one bucket list adventure at a time. Her journey uncovers the economic insecurity faced by millions of Americans.

Duty Free

Migrants go missing in rural South Texas more than anywhere else in the U.S. For many families whose loved ones have disappeared after crossing the Mexico border, activist detective Eddie Canales is their last hope. Unlock the mysteries and confront the agonizing facts of life and death in Brooks County, 80 miles north of the border.

Missing in Brooks County

At Lowell High School, San Francisco's academic pressure cooker, the kids are stressed out. With a majority Asian American student body, high-achieving seniors share their dreams and anxieties about getting into a top university. But is college worth the grind?

Try Harder!

What does it mean to be a digital native? TikTok, Boom. dissects the platform along myriad cross-sections—algorithmic, socio-political, economic, and cultural—to explore the impact of the history-making app. Balancing a genuine interest with healthy skepticism, delve into the security issues, global political challenges, and racial biases behind the platform.

TikTok, Boom.

Foto-Novelas 2: `Junkyard Saints' and `Broken Sky'

"Hello. I'm going to read a declaration of a state of war... Within the next 14 days we will attack a symbol or institution of American injustice." -- Bernardine Dohrn Thirty years ago, with these words, a group of young American radicals called The Weathermen announced their intention to overthrow the U.S. government. Fueled by outrage over the Vietnam War and racism in America, they went undergound during the 1970s, bombing targets across the country that they felt symbolized "the real violence" that the U.S. government and capitalist power were wreaking throughout the world.From pitched battles with police on Chicago's city streets, to bombing the U.S. Capitol building, to breaking acid-guru Timothy Leary out of prison, this carefully organized clandestine network attempted to incite a national revolution, while successfully evading one of the largest FBI manhunts in history.One of the top documentaries of the year, this award-winning film interweaves extensive archival material with modern-day interviews to explore the incredible story of "The Weather Underground." As former members reflect candidly about the idealistic passion that drove them to "bring the war home," they paint a compelling portrait of troubled and revolutionary times, with unexpected and often striking connections to the current world situation.

The Weather Underground

Reveals a little-known battle of the Civil Rights Movement, led by an indigent, under-educated prisoner. Texas-born, Mexican American Fred Cruz came of age and found his life's calling in prison, where the sanctioned cruelty and brutality among inmates and guards moved him to fight the state prison system in the court of law.

Writ Writer

At the age of 16, Cyntoia Brown, who had suffered a long history of abuse, killed a man who picked her up for sex. The filmmaker has unprecedented access to Cyntioa in prison, and spends two years with her and her family as they await her eventual sentencing to life in prison in Tennessee. This film challenges our assumptions about violence and explores how a young person can be predestined for tragedy by life circumstances.

Me Facing Life: Cyntoia's Story

Three young people living in the Pine Ridge Reservation try to forge a better future. When the first female president of Oglala Lakota defies a South Dakota law criminalizing abortion by vowing to build a women’s clinic in their sovereign territory, the three young tribe members are faced with difficult choices.

Young Lakota

Powerless tracks the battle between an Indian electric company and a renegade electrician who illegally connects poor families to the grid.

Powerless

This acclaimed Emmy Award-winning anthology series features documentaries and a limited number of fiction films united by the creative freedom, artistic achievement and unflinching visions of their independent producers and featuring unforgettable stories about a unique individual, community or moment in history.

All Episodes of Independent Lens

Season 1

Wannabe: Life and Death in a Small Town Gang

Season 1 Episode 1 - Aired 8/9/1999

The Man Who Drove with Mandela

Season 1 Episode 4 - Aired 8/30/1999

Nothing but the Truth

Season 1 Episode 2 - Aired 8/16/1999

Visas and Virtues; I Am Viet Hung

Season 1 Episode 3 - Aired 8/23/1999

The Jew in the Lotus

Season 1 Episode 5 - Aired 9/6/1999

Holy Tortilla/Lock and Key

Season 1 Episode 6 - Aired 9/13/1999

Secret People

Season 1 Episode 7 - Aired 10/4/1999

I Can't Believe I Married a Lesbian

Season 1 Episode 8 - Aired 10/11/1999