Every season of POV ever, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best seasons of POV!

"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.

Acting Our Age

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.

American Tongues

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.

Fire From the Mountain

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.

Knocking on Armageddon's Door

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.

Living with AIDS

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.

Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo

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.

The Good Fight

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

Louie Bluie

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.

Gates of Heaven

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.

Best Boy

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.

Rate It X

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.

Metropolitan Avenue

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

Girltalk

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.

Who Killed Vincent Chin?

Coming Out reveals that the debutante tradition is alive and well. Follow Miss Mary Stuart Montague Price, founder and chairman (sic) of the annual Debutante Cotillion in Washington, DC, through the meticulously planned ritual where networking and meeting people who can help you later are as important to todays debs as the style of the gown or the height of the escort.

Coming Out

In Wise Guys!, 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. David Hartwell's fast-paced, sometimes poignant film is a peek behind the scenes and into the fact-filled minds of contestants in one of America's favorite game shows.

Wise Guys!

Watching The Family Album is like coming across a long-lost box of family photos: it's enchanting, humorous and sometimes even eerie. Director Alan Berliner spent years blending home movies and tape recordings collected from 60 different American families to assemble a composite lifetime which moves from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience.

The Family Album

The Bomb is killing ordinary Americans, even in the absence of a nuclear war. That's the thesis of this chilling — but ultimately hopeful — film which explores in evocative, personal and immediate terms how all of us have been affected by the nuclear age. Denounced by officials and shunned by broadcasters when it was first released, many of the issues it raised have become today's front page headlines. 

Dark Circle

David Sutherland's bold and unconventional film portrait reveals 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.

Jack Levine: Feast Of Pure Reason

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. Karen Goodman's No Applause, Just Throw Money is a delightful mixture of music and magic moments, celebrating some joyful encounters in New York City streets.

No Applause, Just Throw Money

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

Partisans of Vilna

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.

The Fighting Ministers

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

Binge

For more than a hundred years cowboys have written with feeling about the life and land they love. Kim Shelton's Cowboy Poets is a fascinating portrait of several contemporary poet lariats who keep that tradition alive — even on the Johnny Carson show.

Cowboy Poets

In Doug And Mike, Mike And Doug, Cindy Kleine probes 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.

Doug And Mike, Mike And Doug

A uniquely powerful and intimate look at the lives and struggles of a group of homeless people who've been moved into an "urban campground" in Los Angeles. Made by Tom Seidman with the help of a crew that included camp "residents," Lost Angeles graphically and unsentimentally portrays the complicated realities of life on the streets

Lost Angeles

Produced in association with Amnesty International, THROUGH THE WIRE examines a controversial, underground high security isolation unit located in the Federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, built to house three female inmates convicted of politically-motivated crimes, and the international campaign to close the unit on humanitarian grounds.

Through the Wire

Metamorphosis: Man Into Woman

Larry Wright

On Ice

Salesman

Police Chiefs

Kamala And Raji

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. Vividly recreated from Ishigo's own memoirs, photos and paintings, Days of Waiting reveals the shattering relocation experience from an "outsider's" perspective.

Days of Waiting

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

Golub

If a tree can grow in Brooklyn, can an eggplant flourish in the Bronx? Maria De Luca's Green Streets charts the spontaneous emergence of community gardens in New York City and how they've helped to nourish neighborhood pride, racial tolerance and a budding sense of hope for hundreds of enthusiastic gardeners in the urban jungle.

Green Streets

The creation of a skyscraper is transformed by director Gary Pollard 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.

Going Up

Motel

Ossian: American Boy, Tibetan Monk

¡Teatro!

People Power

Letter To The Next Generation

Absolutely Positive

Marc And Ann

Plena Is Work, Plena Is Song

Twinsburg, OH: Some Kind of Weird Twin Thing

Marlon Rigg' "Tongues Untied" rises above the 'deeply personal' - far above it - in exploring what it means to be black and gay. Angry, funny, erotic and poetic by turns ( and sometimes all at once), it jumps from interview to confession, music video to documentary to poem. Craig Seligman, San Francisco Examiner A daring, visionary work that speaks with the eloquence of barbed wire. Steve Dollar, Atlanta Journal Constitution

Honorable Nations

Chemical Valley

Sea Of Oil

Turn Here Sweet Corn

Tongues Untied

Berkeley In The Sixties

A Little Vicious is a 1991 short documentary film directed by Immy Humes. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

A Little Vicious

The Big Bang

Maria's Story: A Documentary Portrait of Love and Survival in El Salvador's Civil War

Homes Apart: The Two Koreas

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.

Where the Heart Roams

Short Notice: A Series of Short Films

Casting The First Stone

Intimate Stranger

Finding Christa

Last Images of War

The Longest Shadow

A Season in Hell

Promise Not to Tell

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

Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance Vs. Judas Priest

Fast Food Women

Takeover

Faith Even to the Fire

Louisiana Boys: Raised on Politics

Pets or Meat

Roger and Me

Silverlake Life: The View From Here

Who's Going To Pay For These Donuts, Anyway?

When Your Head's Not A Head, It's A Nut

Compassion in Exile: The Story of the 14th Dalai Lama

For Better Or For Worse

Money Man

Building Bombs: The Legacy

Miami-Havana

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.

Cousin Bobby

The Women Next Door

Sa-I-Gu

Time Indefinite

One Nation Under God

Memories of Tata

The End of the Nightstick

The Heart of the Matter

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

Passin' It On

Hearts of Darkness

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

Dialogues with Madwomen

The Times of a Sign: A Folk History of the Iran-Contra Scandal

Escape From China

Leona's Sister Gerri

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.

Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter

No Place Like Home

Out of Sight

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

Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy

Lighting the 7th Fire

Since its 1988 premiere, this critically acclaimed documentary series has presented hundreds of films that put a human face on contemporary social issues by relating a compelling story in an intimate fashion. "POV" has won virtually every major film and broadcasting award available, including 38 Emmys, 22 Peabody Awards and three Oscars.

The Best Seasons of POV

The Best Seasons of POV

Season 23

Season 22

Season 29

Season 26

Season 31

Season 25

Season 27

Season 24

Season 28

Season 19

Season 20

Season 13

Season 17

Season 33

Season 35

Season 34

Season 12

Season 16

Season 36

Season 18

Season 37

Season 1

Season 2

Season 3

Season 4

Season 5

Season 6

Season 7

Season 8

Season 9

Season 10

Season 11

Season 14

Season 15

Season 21

Season 30

Season 32