The Best Episodes of Independent Lens Season 25

Filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes wants to document Sansón's story, an immigrant serving life in prison. Unable to film Sansón, the documentary creatively shares his narrative through reenactments of his letters, featuring his own family as actors.

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Legendary U.S. anthropologist Dr. Clyde Snow sets out to train a new group of Latin American students in the use of forensic anthropology. Their goal: to investigate disappearances in Argentina during the “dirty war”. The group expands its horizons, traveling to El Salvador, Bolivia and Mexico, doggedly working behind the scenes to establish the facts for the families of the victims.

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Muslim chaplains uphold the First Amendment and vow to protect service members' right to practice their faith freely, despite facing long-held prejudice and disapproval from their own communities. The Muslim chaplains work hard to ensure that all service members have access to religious materials, services, and resources regardless of the religious beliefs they hold.

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A south Texas town is thrown into the national spotlight when a local mosque is burned down in an apparent hate crime. After the media moves on, the community is left to reflect on its complex history with racism.

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With the arson trial near, the suspect’s family argues his innocence. Meanwhile, facets of Victoria reveal the ingredients that might have turned him to hate and support for the town’s Muslim community begins to wane.

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

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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.

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Were trees intentionally planted to exclude and segregate a Black neighborhood? Racial tensions ignite in this documentary, when a historically Black neighborhood in Palm Springs, California, fights to remove a towering wall of tamarisk trees. The trees form a barrier, believed by some to segregate the community, frustrating residents who regard them as an enduring symbol of racism.

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Liberty City, Miami, is home to one of the oldest segregated public housing projects in the U.S. Now with rising sea levels, the neighborhood’s higher ground has become something else: real estate gold. Wealthy property owners push inland to higher ground, creating a speculators’ market in the historically Black neighborhood previously ignored by developers and policy-makers alike.

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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.

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Who decides which stories get told? A scrappy group of women and LGBTQ+ journalists buck the white male-dominated status quo, banding together to launch The 19th*, a digital news startup aiming to combat misinformation. A story of an America in flux, and the voices often left out of the narrative, the documentary Breaking the News shows change doesn’t come easy.

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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.

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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.

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In Matter of Mind: My Parkinson's, three people navigate their lives with resourcefulness and determination in the face of a degenerative illness, Parkinson’s disease. An optician pursues deep brain stimulation surgery; a mother raising a pre-teen daughter becomes a boxing coach and an advocate for exercise; and a cartoonist contemplates how he will continue to draw as his motor control declines.

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Hunting whales is a matter of life or death for the residents of St. Lawrence. When a shy Alaska Native teen becomes the youngest person ever to harpoon a whale for his village, his family is blindsided by thousands of keyboard activists brutally attacking him online—without full perspective on the importance of the hunt to his community's well-being.

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NASA's goal to send astronauts to Mars would require a three-year absence from Earth, during which communication in real time would be impossible due to the immense distance. Meet the psychologists whose job is to keep astronauts mentally stable in outer space, as they are caught between their dream of reaching new frontiers and the basic human need to stay connected to home.

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What is the role of sound and what does it mean to listen? Hard of hearing filmmaker Alison O’Daniel uses a series of tuba thefts in Los Angeles high schools as a jumping-off point to explore these questions. Through several d/Deaf people telling stories in a unique game of telephone, the central mystery of The Tuba Thieves isn’t about theft of instruments; it’s about the nature of sound itself.

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