List of ''POV'' (TV series) episodes
The following is a list of episodes from PBS series POV, a production of American Documentary, Inc.. Since 1988, POV has presented over 400 independently produced documentary films to public television audiences across the country.[1] The series will start its 30th season in mid-2017.
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Seasons: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 |
Season 1
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| American Tongues | July 5, 1988 | Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker | 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. |
| Acting Our Age | July 5, 1988 | Michal Aviad | "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. |
| Fire From the Mountain | July 12, 1988 | Deborah Shaffer | 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. |
| Living With AIDS | July 19, 1988 | Tina DiFeliciantonio | A graceful, moving film about a community that provides both compassion and care to a courageous 22-year-old man with AIDS. |
| Knocking on Armageddon's Door | July 19, 1988 | Torv Carlsen, John Magnus | 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. |
| Rate It X | July 26, 1988 | Paula de Koenigsberg | Two filmmakers interview men 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. |
| Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo | August 2, 1988 | Susana Munoz, Lourdes Portillo | 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. |
| The Good Fight | August 9, 1988 | Noel Buckner, Mary Dore, Sam Sills | 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. |
| Metropolitan Avenue | August 16, 1988 | Christine Noschese | Metropolitan Avenue is an inspiring contemporary story about women who strive to combine new roles and old values in our rapidly changing society. A group of "traditional" homemakers in a lively Brooklyn neighborhood rise to the challenge to become leaders in the effort to save their community. |
| Louie Bluie | August 23, 1988 | Terry Zwigoff | A lively portrait of 76-year-old Harold "Louie Bluie" Armstrong, musician, artist, raconteur and rogue. |
| Gates of Heaven | August 30, 1988 | Errol Morris | 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. |
| Best Boy | September 6, 1988 | Ira Wohl | 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 from his elderly parents. |
Season 2
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who Killed Vincent Chin? | July 16, 1989 | Christine Choy, Renee Tajima | 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. |
| Coming Out | July 23, 1989 | Ted Reed | Coming Out reveals that the debutante tradition is alive and well. |
| Wise Guys! | July 23, 1989 | David Hartwell | 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. |
| The Family Album | July 30, 1989 | Alan Berliner | 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. |
| Dark Circle | August 6, 1989 | Christopher Beaver, Judy Irving, Ruth Landy | 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. |
| Jack Levine: Feast Of Pure Reason | August 13, 1989 | David Sutherland | 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. |
| No Applause, Just Throw Money | August 20, 1989 | Karen Goodman | 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. |
| Whatever Happened to Zworl Quern? | August 20, 1989 | Deborah Matlovsky | "Zworl Quern" was a stage name for Janet Wolfe, whose brief but bizarre acting career including being sawed in half by Orson Wells. Friends and family tell stories about this irrepressible woman who has fearlessly traveled the world in search of love, art and adventure. |
| Partisans Of Vilna | August 27, 1989 | Aviva Kempner | This riveting film recounts the untold story of a handful of Jewish youth who organized an underground resistance against the Nazis in the Vilna Ghetto. |
| The Fighting Ministers | September 3, 1989 | Bill Jersey, Richard Wormser | 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. |
| Binge | September 17, 1989 | Lynn Hershman | In Binge, videomaker Lynn Hershman places herself center-screen for an intimate, humorous and piercing narrative about her efforts to control her weight. |
| Cowboy Poets | September 17, 1989 | Kim Shelton | 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. |
| Doug And Mike, Mike And Doug | September 17, 1989 | Cindy Kleine | 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. |
| Lost Angeles | September 24, 1989 | Tom Seidman | 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. |
| Girltalk | November 15, 1989 | Kate Davis | Girltalk is Kate Davis' heartbreaking yet hopeful portrait of three runaway girls with histories of abuse and neglect. Music, humor, and intimate conversations play against the disturbing reality of these girls' lives. |
Season 3
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Through the Wire | June 26, 1990 | Nina Rosenblum | In 1986, three women convicted of politically motivated nonviolent offenses were transferred to a secret, subterranean prison where they were kept in constantly lit near isolation, watched 24 hours a day and strip-searched routinely for nearly two years. The women were not imprisoned in Turkey or Iran or Chile, but in Lexington, Ky. |
| Police Chiefs | June 30, 1990 | Alan Raymond, Susan Raymond | How can we curb crime? Three big city police chiefs reveal sharply differing philosophies of law enforcement. From Daryl Gates, who introduced SWAT to Los Angeles, to Anthony Bouza, who ruffled feathers in Minneapolis, to Lee P. Brown, who recently left Houston for New York, these top cop's ideas about the causes and cures of crime are as varied as their personalities. |
| 'Metamorphosis: Man Into Woman | July 3, 1990 | Lisa Leeman | Gary, a 39-year-old successful animation artist and devout Christian, is pursuing a lifelong dream — to become a woman. Metamorphosis is a candid, non-sensational and sometimes humorous journey of nearly three years as Gary prepares physically and emotionally for sex reassignment surgery. Along the way, the film raises provocative questions about what really makes us men and women. |
| Larry Wright | July 10, 1990 | Ari Marcopoulos, Maja Zrnic | 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. Larry Wright is a rousing tribute to the Harlem youth and the rich culture of the urban streets. |
| On Ice | July 10, 1990 | Grover Babcock and Andrew Takeuchi | 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. With commentary from Timothy Leary, a theologian and skeptical scientists, On Ice is alternately deadpan and dead serious. |
| Letter To The Next Generation | July 17, 1990 | Jim Klein | Are college students today apathetic and self-centered? Twenty years after National Guardsmen opened fire on student antiwar demonstrators, Jim Klein, a 60's 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 90's. |
| Salesman | July 24, 1990 | Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin | 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. |
| Kamala And Raji | August 7, 1990 | Michael Camerini | The textures and complexities of everyday life in India unfold in Michael Camerini's richly observed story of two poor women and their efforts to improve their lives. |
| Golub | August 14, 1990 | Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn | 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. |
| Days of Waiting | August 15, 1990 | Steven Okazaki | Artist Estell 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. |
| Going Up (TV episode) | August 21, 1990 | Gary Pollard | In Going Up, 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. |
| Green Streets | August 21, 1990 | Maria De Luca | 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. |
| Motel | August 28, 1990 | Christian Blackwood | 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. |
| ¡Teatro! | September 4, 1990 | Ed Burke and Ruth Shapiro | 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. |
| Ossian: American Boy, Tibetan Monk | September 4, 1990 | Thomas R. Anderson | 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. |
| 'People Power | September 11, 1990 | Ilan Ziv | After years of witnessing first hand 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. |
Season 4
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Absolutely Positive | June 18, 1991 | Peter Adair | Filmmaker Peter Adair asks 11 people — women and men, gay and straight, from all walks of life — to share their stories about living with the HIV virus. |
| Marc and Ann | June 25, 1991 | Les Blank, Maureen Gosling, Chris Simon | Legendary filmmaker Les Blank's toe-tapping film treats us to a portrait of a musical Louisiana couple committed to celebrating and preserving Cajun culture. |
| Plena Is Work, Plena Is Song | June 25, 1991 | Pedro Rivera, Susan Zeig | "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. |
| Twinsburg, OH: Some Kind of Weird Twin Thing | June 25, 1991 | Sue Marcoux | 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. |
| Honorable Nations | July 2, 1991 | Chana Gazit, David Steward | For 99 years, the residents of Salamanca, N.Y. have rented the land under their homes for an average of $1/year form 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. Chana Gazit and David Steward's film captures the unfolding drama as the survival of an American town and justice for the Senecas appear to be in conflict. |
| Sea of Oil | July 9, 1991 | M.R. Katzke | 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. |
| Turn Here Sweet Corn | July 9, 1991 | Helen De Michiel | 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, Turn Here Sweet Corn searches for meaning beyond cliches and nostalgia, as a family farm is lost to speculative suburban real estate developers. |
| Chemical Valley | July 9, 1991 | Mimi Pickering, Anne Lewis Johnson | A West Virginia community is deeply divided over potentially life and death questions over a local chemical plant that fuels the area's fragile economy. |
| Tongues Untied | July 16, 1991 | Marlon Riggs | Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied rises above the 'deeply personal' — far above it — in exploring what it means to be black and gay. |
| Berkeley in the Sixties | July 23, 1991 | Mark Kitchell | 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. |
| A Little Vicious | July 30, 1991 | Immy Humes | In A Little Vicious, a pit bull, his elderly master and a dog trainer/philosopher form a curious love triangle. |
| Where The Heart Roams | July 30, 1991 | George Csicsery | 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. |
| The Big Bang | August 6, 1991 | James Toback | 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. |
| Maria's Story | August 13, 1991 | Pamela Cohen, Monona Wali, and Catherine M. Ryan | Filmmakers Pamela Cohen, Catherine Ryan and Monona Wali profile a female guerrilla leader in El Salvador's rebel army. |
| Homes Apart: The Two Koreas | August 20, 1991 | Christine Choy, JT Takagi | 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, award-winning filmmakers Christine Choy (Who Killed Vincent Chin?) and JT Takagi reveal the personal, social and political dimensions of the last divided nation on earth. |
| Short Notice: A Series of Short Films | September 3, 1991 | Various | Some of the best examples of the recent crop of provocative short films, with films by Jim Harden, Cathryn Garland, Carolyn Grifel, Chris Riback, Leigh Marcous-Devine and Pam Grant, Jan Krawitz and Joe Murphy. |
| Casting The First Stone | September 3, 1991 | Julie Gustafson | 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. Julie Gustafson's groundbreaking 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. |
Season 5
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Color Adjustment | June 15, 1992 | Marlon Riggs | From Amos 'n' Andy to Nat King Cole, from Roots to The Cosby Show, blacks have played many roles on primetime television. Brilliantly weaving clips from classic TV shows with commentary from TV producers, black actors and scholars, Marlon Riggs blends humor, insight, and thoughtful analysis to explore the evolution of black/white relations as reflected by America's favorite addiction. |
| Intimate Stranger | June 22, 1992 | Alan Berliner | Berliner puts his late grandfather at the center of a personal, single-family saga that shines a light into the silent, shadowy corners present in all families. |
| Finding Christa | June 29, 1992 | Camille Billops, James Hatch | In 1961, Camille Billops made a painful decision: to put her four-year-old daughter, Christa, up for adoption. In Finding Christa, Billops is both filmmaker and subject as she tells the story of their separation and ultimate reconciliation. |
| Last Images of War | July 6, 1992 | Stephen Olsson, Scott Andrews | The searing story of four freelance photographers — American, Russian, British and Japanese — all determined to uncover the horrors of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. |
| The Longest Shadow | July 6, 1992 | Kalina Ivanov | A Bulgarian refugee chronicles her family's struggle against Communist rule and tries to uncover the long-suppressed facts behind the arrests of both of her grandfathers. |
| A Season in Hell | July 20, 1992 | Walter Brock, Stephen Roszell | A haunting portrait of a young woman who begins to starve herself in search of the "perfect" body. The film follows four years in the life of Regina Hatfield as she struggles with bulimia. |
| Promise Not to Tell | July 27, 1992 | Rhea Gavry | A respected member of a middle-class community is accused by his children of sexual abuse. He denies the charges. Whom do we believe? Rhea Gavry uses a gut-wrenching case set in a comfortable suburb of Salt Lake City as a context for a timely reexamination of our attitudes toward the accused and the accuser when sex is part of the equation. |
| Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance Vs. Judas Priest | August 3, 1992 | David Van Taylor | In 1995, a teenager claimed the heavy metal music of Judas Priest prompted him to attempt suicide. The drama of the ensuing trial provides the framework for David Van Taylor's disturbing look at teenagers today. |
| Fast Food Women | August 10, 1992 | Anne Lewis Johnson | Anne Lewis Johnson documents the low-wage, no-benefit jobs of the 'working poor' in America's new 'service economy'. |
| Takeover | August 10, 1992 | Pamela Yates and Peter Kinoy | Homeless people simultaneously take over empty houses in eight cities. |
| Faith Even to the Fire | August 21, 1992 | Sylvia Morales, Jean Victor | Three American nuns (who signed A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion), inspired by the Civil Rights movement and encouraged by the internal reforms of Vatican II, accuse the Catholic Church of racism and sexism. A revealing portrait of a 2,000-year-old organization struggling to reconcile authority and conscience, tradition and the need for change. |
| Louisiana Boys -- Raised on Politics | August 31, 1992 | Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker, Paul Stekler | In Louisiana, Mardi gras and elections run neck and neck as the number one pastime. Here is a cast of characters only Louisiana could produce: Huey P. Long, his excellency, the dictator of Louisiana; Uncle Earl K. Long, committed to an asylum while he was still governor; and Jimmie Davis singing his farewell speech to the state legislature. |
| Pets or Meat | September 28, 1992 | Michael Moore | Filmmaker Michael Moore revisits his now famous hometown in a new film, Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint. |
| Roger and Me | September 28, 1992 | Michael Moore | Michael Moore embarks upon a filmic odyssey to meet General Motors Chairman Roger Smith and convince him to visit Flint, Michigan for a first-hand look at how massive layoffs had devastated the local economy. |
Season 6
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silverlake Life: The View From Here | June 15, 1993 | Tom Joslin, Peter Friedman | At the heart of this ground-breaking video diary is a powerful tale of love, commitment, mortality and AIDS. |
| Who's Going To Pay For These Donuts, Anyway? | June 22, 1993 | Janice Tanaka | When Japanese-American filmmaker Janice Tanaka reaches out to find her father — interned during WWII and separated form his family for decades — her discoveries both haunt and redefine her life. |
| When Your Head's Not A Head, It's A Nut | June 29, 1993 | Garth Stein | Garth Stein's Hi 8 camera captures family drama and unexpected humor as his quirky, yet determined, older sister prepares to undergo brain surgery to cure her epilepsy. |
| Compassion in Exile: The Life of the 14th Dalai Lama | July 6, 1993 | Mickey Lemle | The richly textured story of the Dalai Lama of Tibet — spiritual leader, Nobel Laureate — interweaves an inspiring portrayal with the urgent plight of his homeland under Chinese occupation. |
| For Better or For Worse | July 13, 1993 | David Collier | They still find romance in the most unexpected places. They still argue about the smallest things. Five couples, still together after more than 50 years have a few choice words for a divorce-prone generation. |
| Motel | July 20, 1993 | Christian Blackwood | In tribute to the late Christian Blackwood, a special reprise of one of his most memorable films. Behind the faded signs of three motels in the American Southwest, Blackwood's film reveals entire worlds of passion, loyalty, adventure and fate. |
| Money Man | August 3, 1993 | Philip Haas | J.S.G. Boggs makes money the artistic way. He draws it. Then, to complete the process, he spends it. Is it art or is it counterfeit? Inquiring minds — at the Secret Service — want to know. |
| Building Bombs: The Legacy | August 10, 1993 | Mark Mori, Susan Robinson | An updated, point-of-view investigation by Mark Mori and Susan Robinson of the environmental legacy and social impact of South Carolina's Savannah River Plant, the nation's largest manufacturer of hydrogen bomb materials during the Cold War. |
| Miami-Havana | August 17, 1993 | Estela Bravo | Award-winning filmmaker Estela Bravo visits families split between Miami and Havana who tell of the personal costs of the 30-year conflict between the United States and Cuba. |
| The Women Next Door | August 24, 1993 | Michal Aviad | Personal perspectives on both sides of the camera are revealed when Michal Avaid, directing a three-woman Israeli/Palestinian film crew, travels throughout the West Bank to collect women's stories. |
| Cousin Bobby | August 24, 1993 | Jonathan Demme | Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) catches up with his long-lost cousin, Robert Castle, a fiery Harlem-based white Episcopalian priest. |
| Sa-I-Gu | September 10, 1993 | Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Christine Choy and Elaine Kim | "Sa-I-Gu", Korean for April 29, opens a window on Korean American women in Los Angeles whose stores — and lives — were devastated in the aftermath of the Rodney King Trial. |
Season 7
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time Indefinite | June 7, 1994 | Ross McElwee | In Ross McElwee's 1986 cult hit, Sherman's March, an idealist searches for love, happiness — and a wife. Now he's turning 40, getting married, and heading out on yet another quest. |
| One Nation Under God | June 14, 1994 | Teodoro Maniaci and Francine Rzeznik | Can homosexuality be cured? From exorcisms to shock therapy, from Homosexuals Anonymous to beauty make-overs for lesbians, many have tried. While some of these methods may seem comical, filmmakers Teodoro Maniaci and Francine Rzeznik pose serious questions about who's asking gay men and lesbians to change and why. |
| Passin' It On | June 19, 1994 | Peter Miller and John Valadez | This film offers a bold new perspective on the Black Panther Party from the point of view of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, an eloquent party leader who served 19 years before his conviction was overturned. |
| Memories of Tata | June 28, 1994 | Sheldon Schiffer | Are machismo, infidelity and violence inseparable? In a tragically common family saga, Sheldon Schiffer reflects on his legacy and reexamines what it means to be a man. |
| The End of the Nightstick | July 5, 1994 | Peter Kuttner, Cyndi Moran and Eric Scholl | This startling expose unravels a history of abuse of suspects by the Chicago police. |
| The Heart of the Matter | July 12, 1994 | Gini Reticker and Amber L. Hollibaugh | This gripping story of one HIV-positive African American woman opens a window on understanding women's sexuality in the age of AIDS. |
| Escape From China | July 21, 1994 | Iris F. Kung | A Chinese journalist returns to her homeland to retrace the underground railroad that helped the last of China's most wanted Tiananmen Square leaders escape to freedom. |
| Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse | July 26, 1994 | Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper | Francis Ford Coppola nearly lost his fortune — and his sanity — making Apocalypse Now. Martin Sheen nearly lost his life. A celebrated behind-the-scenes look at Coppola's struggle to finish his epic film — from cajoling an irascible Marlon Brando to negotiating shots amid hurricanes and a Filipino rebel war. |
| Dialogues with Madwomen | August 2, 1994 | Allie Light | Seven women, including the filmmaker, describe their experiences with manic depression, multiple personalities, schizophrenia, euphoria and recovery. |
| The Times of a Sign: A Folk History of the Iran-Contra Scandal | August 9, 1994 | David Goldsmith and Steven Day | A quirky look at the Iran-contra affair through the exploits of an eloquent and off-beat minister who ends up in jail when big-time politics come to a small town in Indiana. |
Season 8
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leona's Sister Gerri | June 1, 1995 | Jane Gillooly | A provocative film about abortion. |
| Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter | June 6, 1995 | Deborah Hoffmann | Deborah Hoffmann's poignant, sometimes funny account of coping with her mother's Alzheimer's disease. Nominated for a 1994 Academy Award. |
| No Place Like Home | June 13, 1995 | Kathryn Hunt | The story of 10-year-old Barbara Wilson's search, through cheap motels and homeless shelters, for permanence and security. |
| Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy | June 14, 1995 | Ellen Bruno | The personal testimonies of the courageous Buddhist nuns who have led the nonviolent resistance against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. |
| Out of Sight | June 20, 1995 | David Sutherland | The unpredictable trials of blind horse-woman Diane Starin who wonders "if America is ready for a blind girl who isn't a goody two-shoes." |
| The Uprising of '34 | June 25, 1995 | George Stoney, Judith Helfand and Susanne Rostock | Textile workers recall with pride the long- suppressed story of the General Textile Strike of 1934 when 500,000 Southern mill laborers walked off their jobs. |
| Lighting the 7th Fire | July 4, 1995 | Sandra Sunrising Osawa | The story of how the Chippewa Indians of Northern Wisconsin have struggled to restore the centuries- old tradition of spearfishing, and the heated opposition they have encountered. |
| Twitch and Shout | July 11, 1995 | Laurel Chiten | An irreverent and humorous portrayal of people with the often misunderstood neurological disorder, Tourette Syndrome. |
| Home Economics: A Documentary of Suburbia | July 18, 1995 | Jenny Cool | Jenny Cool interviewed women in a suburban housing development outside Los Angeles, discovering a fragile lifestyle dominated by social pressures and the daily commuter grind. |
| Dealers Among Dealers | July 25, 1995 | Gaylen Ross | Filmmaker Gaylen Ross takes us inside the virtually impenetrable world of diamond and precious stone trading. |
| Carmen Miranda: Bananas is My Business | October 5, 1995 | Helena Solberg | A bowl of soup and the freedom to sing is all Carmen Miranda wanted in life. Helena Solberg's song-filled movie reveals how Hollywood transformed a talented entertainer into a Latin Lollapalooza. |
Season 9
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taking on the Kennedys | May 28, 1996 | Joshua Seftel | It's baptism by fire when a political underdog takes on the closest thing to American royalty. Get a behind-the-scenes look at modern politics in this 1996 POV Classic. |
| ¡Palante Siempre Palante!: The Young Lords | June 1, 1996 | Iris Morales | They were leaders of the Young Lords Party, the militant Puerto Rican civil rights organization based in New York. Today, many are notable mainstream journalists, including Juan Gonzalez, Felipe Luciano and Pablo Guzman. Iris Morales makes history come alive as veterans of the movement recall their fight for equality, jobs, health care, and education. |
| Personal Belongings | June 11, 1996 | Steven Bognar | Bela Bognar is no ordinary American dad. Now a suburbanite, he once fought against Soviet domination during the Hungarian revolution. Ever since, his life has been a longing for the glories of the past. Steven Bognar crafts a moving portrait of his father's 40-year quest for identity and home. |
| A Litany For Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde | June 18, 1996 | Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson | Poet, lover, mother, warrior — Audre Lorde wrote passionately of love and anger, civil rights and sexuality, family politics and the glories of nature. |
| a.k.a. Don Bonus | June 25, 1996 | Spencer Nakasako and Sokly Don Bonus Ny | A raw and revealing video diary by a Cambodian-born teenager who now lives in San Francisco's inner city. |
| No Loans Today | July 2, 1996 | Lisanne Skyler | The ABC Loan Co. of South Central Los Angeles, a successful black-owned pawnshop, is a unique entree to inspiring stories of economic and emotional survival. |
| The Transformation | July 9, 1996 | Carlos Aparicio and Susana Aiken | Ricardo was once Sara, a homeless HIV positive transvestite, living in the underbelly of Manhattan. Today he is a churchgoing, married man, saved by a Dallas ministry. |
| The Women Outside | July 16, 1996 | J.T.Orinne Takagi and Hye Jung Park | A provocative, emotional journey into the lives of women who work in the brothels, bars and nightclubs around U.S. military bases in South Korea. |
| Just For The Ride | July 23, 1996 | Amanda Micheli | The world of cowgirls and the rough and tumble of women's rodeo in the 1990s. |
| Remembering Wei Yi-fang, Remembering Myself | July 30, 1996 | Yvonne Welbon | Yvonne Welbon presents a witty and original coming-to-terms with race, culture and self. A six-year stay in Taiwan transforms her understanding of what it means to be an African American and illuminates her connection to her Honduran-born grandmother. |
| Xich-lo (Cyclo) | July 30, 1996 | M. Trinh Nguyen | A meditative journey of a Vietnamese woman, now a U.S. citizen, who returns to her homeland and wonders where she really belongs. |
| Taken for a Ride | August 6, 1996 | Martha Olson and Jim Klein | A startling expose of General Motors' role in dismantling street car transportation in the 1930s and in catapulting the automobile to the center of our national culture. |
| Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision | November 27, 1996 | Freida Lee Mock | The Vietnam War Memorial was one of the most controversial monuments of its time. Thrust in to the eye of the storm was architect-sculptor Maya Lin, whose design for the memorial was chosen when she was a 21-year-old college student. Withstanding bitter attacks, she held her ground with clarity and grace. |
Season 10
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nobody's Business | June 3, 1997 | Alan Berliner | Alan Berliner drags his reluctant father kicking and screaming down memory lane to probe the swirls of conflict and affection that bind every family. |
| Battle for the Minds | June 10, 1997 | Steven Lipscomb | While chronicling his mother's recent struggle to become a Southern Baptist pastor, filmmaker Steven Lipscomb uncovered a whirlwind of change and a rising tide of opposition to women as senior church leaders. |
| A Healthy Baby Girl | June 17, 1997 | Judith Helfand | Battling personal grief, corporate power, and her mother's guilt, Helfand turns the camera on herself and her family to document her battle with DES-related cancer. |
| Jesse's Gone | June 24, 1997 | Michael Smith | An excruciatingly tender look at the frayed lives of the family and friends of Jesse Rahim Hall, a promising young hip hop artist from East Oakland, California killed in a drive-by shooting. |
| Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary | July 1, 1997 | Laura Simon | Teacher/filmmaker Laura Simon takes us inside her school's classrooms and faculty lounge, where a California law will deny public education to the children of undocumented immigrants. |
| Who is Henry Jaglom? | July 8, 1997 | Alex Rubin and Jeremy Workman | Obsessively confusing and abusing the lines between life and art, writer-director Henry Jaglom challenges the boundaries of filmmaking and viewer endurance. |
| In Whose Honor? | July 15, 1997 | Jay Rosenstein | Charlene Teters, a Spokane Indian, evolves from mother and student into a leading voice against the merchandising of Native American sacred symbols as sports mascots. |
| Girls Like Us | July 22, 1997 | Jane Wagner and Tina DiFeliciantonio | This POV classic film offers a rare and disarming peek into the very real lives of teenage girls in South Philly in the early 1990s. |
| Blacks and Jews | July 29, 1997 | Deborah Kaufman, Bari Scott and Alan Snitow | Why is the mere mention of Blacks and Jews in the same breath so riddled with complexity? |
| A Perfect Candidate | August 5, 1997 | R.J. Cutler and David Van Taylor | What does it take to be a perfect candidate in a cynical age? A Perfect Candidate Is an up-to-the-minute critique of our campaign process — and a twisted journey into the underbelly of American politics. |
Season 11
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baby It's You | June 2, 1998 | Anne Makepeace | When forty-something filmmaker Anne Makepeace "can't get pregnant the fun way," she turns the camera on herself, her husband and their idiosyncratic siblings and embarks on a tender and tumultuous journey through the complex maze of contemporary fertility science. |
| The Band | June 16, 1998 | David Zeiger | When filmmaker David Zeiger decides to film his son Danny's high school band for a year, he gets a crash course in love, life and marching in formation. This poignant portrait celebrates the hormones, havoc and hope of the teen years and ultimately allows Zeiger to deepen his connection with one son, while paying tribute to the loss of another. |
| Tobacco Blues | June 19, 1998 | Eren McGinnis and Christine Fugate | Can a good person grow tobacco? As the cigarette war rages, small American tobacco farmers have been the often overlooked casualties. Dynamic filmmaking duo Eren McGinnis and Christine Fugate travel across Kentucky to meet the families who have been growing this crop for generations, as they face the consequences of this fuming controversy in their own backyards. |
| Licensed to Kill | June 23, 1998 | Arthur Dong | Arthur Dong goes inside prison to probe the minds and souls of men whose attitudes towards homosexuality have led them to murder. |
| Kelly Loves Tony | June 30, 1998 | Spencer Nakasako | She's a straight-A student; he's trying to leave gang life behind. A camcorder becomes both witness and confidante for these markedly singular yet utterly typical teens as they self-document the trials of growing up too fast and too soon in urban America. |
| If I Can't Do It | July 7, 1998 | Walter Brock | Arthur Campbell, Jr. doesn't want your sympathy, he just wants what most people do: a living wage, a meaningful social life, a few good laughs and the means to get around. |
| Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour | July 14, 1998 | Susan Stern | "Everybody has a Barbie story...but the stories are really about us," says reporter turned filmmaker Susan Stern as she rips the roof off Barbie's "Dreamhouse" and explores the history and fantasy behind this unlikely cultural icon. |
| The Vanishing Line | July 21, 1998 | Maren Monsen | When does life become a fate worse than death? In this age of medical "miracles," increasing numbers of doctors, patients and their families are forced to face this question. |
| Sacrifice | July 28, 1998 | Ellen Bruno | Burmese girls, lured into prostitution with promises of a better life for themselves and their families, give voice to their experiences in this poetic tribute to their struggles for survival. |
| She Shorts | August 4, 1998 | Various | A selection of hypnotically engaging short films by and about women offers vivid and lyrical pictures of joy, endurance and inspiration. |
| Family Name | September 15, 1998 | Macky Alston | This winner of the 1997 Sundance Freedom of Expression Award follows filmmaker Macky Alston from New York to the South, as he embarks on an excavation to unearth the history of his white slave-owning family, and explores the link to the black families that shared his name. |
Season 12
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Legacy: Murder & Media, Politics & Prisons | June 1, 1999 | Michael J. Moore | Shocking murders, massive manhunts and win-at-all-cost political campaigns propel this extraordinary story behind the enactment of the nation's toughest mandatory sentencing law. |
| Golden Threads | June 8, 1999 | Lucy Winer and Karen Eaton | Shocking murders, massive manhunts and win-at-all-cost political campaigns propel this extraordinary story behind the enactment of the nation's toughest mandatory sentencing law. |
| In My Corner | June 22, 1999 | Ricki Stern | Two teenagers seek refuge and respect in a boxing gym in the South Bronx. |
| The Green Monster | June 29, 1999 | David Finn, David Hess and A.C. Weary | Art Arfons is an American original. Without a high school diploma, engineers, or even blueprints, this small town Midwestern prodigy of practical mechanics designed, built, drove and broke land speed records in a series of supercharged automobiles he dubbed The Green Monster. In this coming-of-age story for the senior set, director David Finn offers an unvarnished portrait of a flinty, single-minded, slyly charming, obsessive man literally driven to continue his race against time long after he has established himself as a living legend. |
| Rabbit in the Moon | July 6, 1999 | Emiko Omori | Fifty years after World War II, Japanese Americans recall their years in the internment camps of WWII. From the exuberant recollections of a typical teenager, to the simmering rage of citizens forced to sign loyalty oaths, filmmaker Emiko Omori renders a poetic and illuminating picture of a deeply troubling chapter in American history. |
| Corpus: A Home Movie About Selena | July 13, 1999 | Lourdes Portillo | Tejana singer Selena was on the brink of blockbuster crossover fame when her murder at age 23 catapulted her into mainstream celebrity. Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo gazes beyond the tabloids and points a sensitive lens on the cultural sensation that emerged around Selena's life and death. |
| School Prayer: A Community at War | July 20, 1999 | Slawomir Grünberg and Ben Crane | The battle cry on both sides is "religious freedom" when a Mississippi mother takes a stand on prayer in her children's public school. While most of Pontotoc County rally together to preserve a cornerstone of their faith, Lisa Herdahl is a lone voice calling for separation of church and state. |
| The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez | July 27, 1999 | Catherine Ryan and Gary Weimberg | A son of Puerto Rican revolutionaries learns of his parents' past. A chronicle of his turbulent journey of self-discovery, offering a striking account of the costs of fiercely held convictions and the binding force of a son's love. |
| Regret To Inform | January 4, 2000 | Barbara Sonneborn and Janet Cole | Exploring the meaning of war and loss with Vietnamese and American widows into a vivid testament to the chilling legacy of war. |
| Well-Founded Fear | June 5, 2000 | Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini | Political asylum — who deserves it? Who gets it? With unprecedented access, filmmakers Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson enter the closed corridors of the INS to reveal the dramatic real-life stage where human rights and American ideals collide with the nearly impossible task of trying to know the truth. |
Season 13
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| La Boda | June 27, 2000 | Hannah Weyer | Elizabeth is marrying Artemio in Nuevo León, Mexico and you are cordially invited to the wedding. Meet these two young people from the U.S.-Mexican border region whose lives are framed by the challenges of migrant life. |
| Butterfly | June 30, 2000 | Doug Wolens | In December 1997, Julia Hill climbed a 1000-year-old redwood tree vowing to not come down until it was saved from being clear-cut. |
| Stranger with a Camera | July 11, 2000 | Elizabeth Barret | In the coal-mining heart of Appalachia's "poverty belt," where residents have felt alternately aided and assaulted by media exposure, the 1967 murder of filmmaker Hugh O'Connor still stirs strong community feelings. |
| Blink | July 18, 2000 | Elizabeth Thompson | Witness the testimony of Greg Withrow, once a fanatical rising star in the white supremacist movement, as he struggles with the legacy of hatred handed down across generations. |
| Our House in Havana | July 25, 2000 | Stephen Olsson | After 40 years, Silvia Morini returns to the palatial house of her youth in Cuba, where her nostalgia for a pre-Castro world confronts modern Cuban reality. Yet as Silvia discovers an evolving Cuba, she herself undergoes a surprising change-not entirely altering her political outlook but becoming, as she puts it, "more human." |
| Dreamland | August 22, 2000 | Lisanne Skyler | With a roll of the dice, 75-year-old Lou stakes everything to retire and start a new life in Las Vegas. But beneath the glittering surface of the city, Lou discovers a world quite different from his dreams. |
| American Gypsy: A Stranger in Everybody's Land | August 29, 2000 | Jasmine Dellal | 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. |
| KPFA On the Air | September 19, 2000 | Veronica Selver and Sharon Wood | This riveting film takes us through KPFA's passionate 50-year history, including its founding by pacifists and poets, through its defiance of Cold War conformity, to the present day challenges that confront this on-going experiment in democratic media. |
| Live Free or Die | September 26, 2000 | Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt | New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” motto acquires tense contemporary meaning when abortion politics play out in a quiet New England town. |
| First Person Plural | December 18, 2000 | Deann Borshay Liem | A young Korean girl grows up with an American family: but years later, Deann Borshay Liem discovers that her Korean mother is still very much alive. |
Season 14
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scout's Honor | June 19, 2001 | Tom Shepard | "To be physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight" - this is the Boy Scout pledge. Since 1910, millions of boys have joined. But today, if you are openly gay, you can't. A 12-year-old Boy Scout named Steven Cozza launches a campaign to overturn the Boy Scouts' anti-gay policy. |
| The Sweetest Sound | June 26, 2001 | Alan Berliner | What's in a name? Berliner dives headfirst into the American name pool and discovers the power and mystery embedded in every name. |
| My American Girls: A Dominican Story | July 3, 2001 | Aaron Matthews | In vivid vérité detail, My American Girls: A Dominican Story captures the joys and struggles over a year in the lives of the Ortiz family, first generation immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Matthews' film captures the rewards — and costs — of pursuing the American dream. |
| Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story | July 10, 2001 | Eric Paul Fournier | Of Civil Wrongs and Rights is the untold history of the 40-year legal fight to vindicate Fred Korematsu — who resisted the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II — one that finally turned a civil injustice into a civil rights victory. |
| True-Hearted Vixens | July 17, 2001 | Mylène Moreno | These women want to play professional football. Make that full contact, NFL-style, smash-mouth football. |
| Take It From Me | July 24, 2001 | Emily Abt | As shown in the experiences of several women and their families, the new welfare system, with its recent controversial reforms, may make it easier to ignore rather than confront the complexities of poverty amidst plenitude. |
| In the Light of Reverence | August 14, 2001 | Christopher McLeod | In the Light of Reverence is 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. |
| Life and Debt | August 21, 2001 | Stephanie Black | 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. |
| High School | August 28, 2001 | Frederick Wiseman | Remember high school? Renowned filmmaker Frederick Wiseman's classic documentary High School renders this nearly universal American experience in unforgettable terms. |
| 5 Girls | October 2, 2001 | Maria Finitzo | 5 Girls presents a real-life portrait of growing up female today through the eyes of five thoughtful and articulate young women. Join Corrie, Toby, Amber, Aisha and Haibinh as they take us on a journey through their teenage years. |
| Promises | December 13, 2001 | B. Z. Goldberg and Justine Shapiro | What is it really like to live in Jerusalem? Promises offers touching and fresh insight into the Middle East conflict through the eyes of seven Palestinian and Israeli children. |
Season 15
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Smith Family | June 25, 2002 | Tasha Oldham | On her ninth wedding anniversary, Kim's perfect life is shattered when she learns that her husband Steve has been having affairs with men. Three years later, she discovers she is HIV-positive. |
| Boomtown | July 2, 2002 | Bryan Gunnar Cole | In Washington State, there are 26 Indian tribes — all of them trading in fireworks. "Boomtown" follows the Suquamish tribe during fireworks season — a chaotic five-week sales period — while exploring life, liberty and the politics of Indian sovereignty in America. |
| Hybrid | July 9, 2002 | Monteith McCollum | Welcome to the Midwest, land of visionary farmers like Milford Beeghly. Hybrid combines interviews, animation and rare dry wit to create a meditative portrait. |
| Refrigerator Mothers | July 16, 2002 | David E. Simpson, J.J. Hanley and Gordon Quinn | Explore the traumatic legacy of blame, guilt and self-doubt suffered by a generation of mothers who were told they were responsible for their child's autism and learn more about this increasingly common disorder. |
| Fenceline: A Company Town Divided | July 23, 2002 | Slawomir Grünberg and Jane Greenberg | Named after a refinery now owned by Shell Oil, Norco, Louisiana, is home to two distinct communities — one black and one white. Though separated by mere blocks, their realities are worlds apart. A modern David and Goliath story, Fenceline shows how one small community and one big corporation struggle to come to terms. |
| Sweet Old Song | July 30, 2002 | Leah Mahan | Ninety-one-year-old Howard 'Louie Bluie' Armstrong has two great loves: his music and artist Barbara Ward. Their stories are captured in Mahan's engaging film. |
| Mai's America | August 6, 2002 | Marlo Poras | A spunky Vietnamese teenager named Mai gets the chance of a lifetime — to study in the United States. From cosmopolitan Hanoi to the heart of the Deep South, Mai’s unforgettable journey offers an outsider’s glimpse inside America. |
| Señorita Extraviada | August 20, 2002 | Lourdes Portillo | Someone is killing the young women of Juárez, Mexico. Since 1993, over 270 women have been raped and murdered. Señorita Extraviada is a haunting investigation into an unspeakable crime wave amid the chaos and corruption of one of the world's biggest border towns. |
| Escuela | August 27, 2002 | Hannah Weyer | Liliana Luis is a Mexican-American teenager rushing headlong into the turbulence of puberty as she tries to finish high school. The saga of the Luis family started in P.O.V.'s 2000 film, La Boda, continues in this story of one family's drive towards a better future. |
| Afghanistan Year 1380 | September 9, 2002 | Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Alberto Vendemmiati and Giuseppe Petitto | In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the plight of ordinary Afghans is seen through the prism of the independent medical relief group, Emergency. |
| Two Towns of Jasper | January 22, 2003 | Whitney Dow and Marco Williams | In 1998 James Byrd, Jr., a black man, was chained to a truck and dragged to death by three white men. Two film crews, one black and one white, document the aftermath of the murder. |
Season 16
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin | January 20, 2003 | Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer | During his 60-year career as an activist, Bayard Rustin formulated many of the strategies that propelled the movement. But his open sexuality forced him to remain in the background. |
| Flag Wars | June 17, 2003 | Linda Goode Bryant and Linda Poitras | 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. |
| Georgie Girl | June 20, 2003 | Annie Goldson and Peter Wells | 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. |
| Larry v. Lockney | July 1, 2003 | Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck | What happens when a father goes against the grain to uphold the democratic rights of his son? Meet Larry Tannahill. He was the only parent in Lockney, TX to object to the school board's new mandatory drug-testing policy. |
| Discovering Dominga | July 8, 2003 | Patricia Flynn and Mary Jo McConahay | Living in Iowa, Denese Becker was haunted by memories of her Mayan childhood. A quest for her lost identity in Guatemala turns into a searing journey of political awakening that reveals a genocidal crime and the still-unmet cry for justice from the survivors. |
| The Flute Player | July 22, 2003 | Jocelyn Glatzer | When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975, Arn Chorn-Pond was nine years old. He was separated from his family and thrust into the darkness of Cambodia's ghastly Killing Fields for four years. Now, after living in the U.S. for 20 years, Arn returns to Cambodia to save its once outlawed traditional music from extinction. |
| 90 Miles | July 29, 2003 | Juan Carlos Zaldívar | Cuban American filmmaker Juan Carlos Zaldívar, once a 13-year-old loyalist of the Cuban Revolution, recounts the strange twist of fate that took him across one of the world's most treacherous stretches of water in 90 Miles. |
| American Aloha: Hula Beyond Hawai'i | August 5, 2003 | Lisette Marie Flanary and Evann Siebens | 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. |
| West 47th Street | August 19, 2003 | Bill Lichtenstein and June Peoples | Life on the streets of New York City for the poor and homeless is an unforgiving struggle. For those who also battle mental illness, it is marked by the additional pressures of fear, isolation and misunderstanding. West 47th Street reveals the human face of mental illness — and the faith and courage with which its victims fight to recover control of their lives. |
| Family Fundamentals | August 26, 2003 | Arthur Dong | What happens when conservative Christian families have children who are homosexual? Family Fundamentals goes to the heart of today's debate over homosexuality, where the personal is inextricably — and dramatically — bound up in the political. |
| The Sixth Section | September 2, 2003 | Alex Rivera | The Sixth Section captures the dynamic form of cross-border organizing through the story of 'Grupo Union,' a small band of Mexican immigrants in upstate New York who devote themselves to raising money in order to rebuild the town they left behind. |
| Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam | September 2, 2003 | Charley Trujillo and Sonya Rhee | Author Charley Trujillo guides us through the war and post-war experiences of a group of Mexican-American soldiers who fought in Vietnam. The young soldiers could hardly guess just how profoundly the insulated life they knew in their hometown of Corcoran, California would be changed by their experiences in Southeast Asia |
| State of Denial | September 16, 2003 | Elaine Epstein | State of Denial takes viewers into the lives of six people struggling to survive with HIV in the face of social stigma, a severe lack of access to lifesaving treatments, and their president Thabo Mbeki's controversial stance on the connection between HIV and AIDS. |
| What I Want My Words To Do To You | December 16, 2003 | Madeleine Gavin, Judith Katz and Gary Sunshine | What I Want My Words To Do To You focuses on a writing group led by playwright and activist Eve Ensler at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Ensler's classes have given birth to a powerful writing community in which women from strikingly different strata of society, all of whom are serving long sentences, help each other tell their stories. |
| Love & Diane | April 21, 2004 | Jennifer Dworkin | Love & Diane is a frank and astonishingly intimate real-life drama of a mother and daughter desperate for love and forgiveness, but caught in a devastating cycle. During the 1980s, a crack cocaine epidemic ravaged and impoverished many inner city neighborhoods. As parents like Diane succumbed to addiction, a generation of children like Love entered the foster care system. Shot over ten years, the film centers on Love and Diane after the family is reunited and is struggling to reconnect. |
Season 17
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Farmingville | June 22, 2004 | Carlos Sandoval and Catherine Tambini | The shocking hate-based attempted murders of two Mexican day laborers catapult a small Long Island town into national headlines, unmasking a new front line in the border wars: suburbia. |
| Bill's Run: A Political Journey in Rural Kansas | June 29, 2004 | Richard Kassebaum | When documentary filmmaker Richard Kassebaum learned that his younger brother, Bill, a rancher and country lawyer, had decided to run for the Kansas House of Representatives, he left Los Angeles and spent seven weeks on the campaign trail chronicling his brother's first run for public office. |
| War Feels Like War | July 6, 2004 | Esteban Uyarra | This film documents the lives of reporters and photographers who circumvent military media control to get access to the real Iraq War. As the invading armies sweep into the country, some of the journalists in Kuwait decide to travel in their wake, risking their lives to discover the true impact of war on civilians. |
| Thirst | July 13, 2004 | Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman | Population growth, pollution, and scarcity are turning water into "blue gold," the oil of the 21st century. |
| Last Man Standing: Politics Texas Style | July 20, 2004 | Paul Stekler | Asking what the politics are that launched George W. Bush to national office, award-winning filmmaker Paul Stekler takes his camera to Texas for a lively, behind-the-scenes look at a pair of 2002 elections — one for state representative in a district that includes Lyndon Johnson's hometown, and a polarizing race for governor. |
| A Family Undertaking | August 3, 2004 | Elizabeth Westrate | Prior to the 20th century, most Americans prepared their dead for burial with the help of family and friends, but today most funerals are part of a multimillion-dollar industry. |
| Every Mother's Son | August 17, 2004 | Tami Gold and Kelly Anderson | In the late 1990s, three victims of police brutality made headlines around the country: Amadou Diallo, the young West African man whose killing sparked intense public protest; Anthony Baez, killed in an illegal choke-hold; and Gary (Gidone) Busch, a Hasidic Jew shot and killed outside his Brooklyn home. Every Mother's Son tells of the victims' three mothers who came together to demand justice and accountability. |
| Speedo: A Demolition Derby Love Story | August 24, 2004 | Jesse Moss | Trapped in a failing marriage, demolition-derby driver Ed "Speedo" Jager channels life's frustrations onto the track, hoping to parlay his talents into a "real" racing career. |
| Wattstax | September 7, 2004 | Mel Stuart | P.O.V. brings back the cult favorite Wattstax, the 1973 documentary directed by Mel Stuart. In August 1972, seven years after the Watts riots, the legendary Stax recording label staged a benefit concert in Los Angeles for 90,000 people. As time went by, it became known as the Black Woodstock. |
| Freedom Machines | September 14, 2004 | Jamie Stoble and Janet Cole | Freedom Machines takes a new look at disability through the lens of assistive technology. |
| A Panther in Africa | September 21, 2004 | Aaron Matthews | On October 30, 1969, Pete O'Neal, a young Black Panther in Kansas City, Missouri, was arrested for transporting a gun across state lines. One year later, O'Neal fled the charge, and for over 30 years, he has lived in Tanzania as one of the last American exiles from an era when activists considered themselves at war with the U.S. government. |
| Lost Boys of Sudan | September 28, 2004 | Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk | Follow two young refugees from the Dinka tribe, Peter and Santino, through their first year in America. Nearly 4,000 'lost boys' have emigrated to the United States |
Season 18
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed | February 7, 2005 | Shola Lynch | In 1972, Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman to run for president. Her wit, spirit and charisma reminds all Americans of their power as citizens. |
| The Education of Shelby Knox | June 21, 2005 | Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt | A self-described "good Southern Baptist girl," 15-year-old Texan Shelby Knox becomes an unlikely advocate for comprehensive sex education. |
| Big Enough | June 28, 2005 | Jan Krawitz | In this intimate portrait, Jan Krawitz revisits some of the subjects who appeared in her 1982 award-winning film Little People. Through a prism of 'then and now,' she contrasts the youth of these individuals affected with dwarfism with their lives 20 years later. From navigating everyday life to dating and marrying, they confront physical and emotional challenges with humor, grace and sometimes, frustration. |
| Street Fight | July 5, 2005 | Marshall Curry | The Academy Award-nominated film covers the turbulent campaign of Cory Booker, a 32-year-old Rhodes Scholar running for mayor of Newark against a four-term incumbent. |
| The Fire Next Time | July 12, 2005 | Patrice O'Neill | Over a stormy two-year period, The Fire Next Time follows a deeply divided group of Flathead Valley, Montana citizens caught in a web of conflicts intensified by rapid growth and the power of talk radio. |
| The Brooklyn Connection | July 19, 2005 | Klaartje Quirijns | The Brooklyn Connection shows the terrifying ease with which a charming Brooklyn businessman raised $30 million during the Kosovo War, purchased weapons across the USA, and shipped them legally to Albania to be smuggled into Kosovo. |
| The Self-Made Man | July 26, 2005 | Susan Stern | On Independence Day at Stern Ranch in central California, 77-year-old solar-energy pioneer Bob Stern finds out he is seriously ill — possibly dying. Part King Lear, part Western, The Self-Made Man is a true-life family drama about a controversial issue: Should we control how we die? |
| In the Realms of the Unreal | August 2, 2005 | Jessica Yu | Reclusive janitor by day, visionary artist by night, outsider artist Henry Darger moved through life virtually unnoticed. But after his death, a treasure trove was discovered in his one-room Chicago apartment: a staggering 15,000-page novel and hundreds of illustrations that continue to inspire artists around the world. |
| A Thousand Words | August 16, 2005 | Melba Williams | A Vietnam veteran who has suffered a stroke tries to recapture his war experience for his children through photography and moving images. |
| Hardwood | August 16, 2005 | Hubert Davis | The Academy Award-nominated Hardwood is a deeply personal filmic journey by director Hubert Davis, the son of former Harlem Globetrotter Mel Davis. Mel, now a coach for young basketball players in Vancouver, fell in love at first sight with Hubert's mother, a white woman, at a time when racism seemed to make their union impossible. |
| I Used to Be a Filmmaker | August 16, 2005 | Jay Rosenblatt | Filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt and his newborn daughter, Ella, are the main protagonists as the filmmaker documents the first 18 months of her life, showing the progression from newborn to infant to toddler (and budding filmmaker herself). |
| A Song for Daniel | August 23, 2005 | Jason DaSilva | A Song for Daniel compares a routine day of two nine-year-old boys — one living in Baghdad and the other, born and raised in New York City — and offers a profound examination of culture and place through the eyes of two Iraqi youth living on opposite sides of the world. |
| Bright Leaves | August 23, 2005 | Ross McElwee | What legacy is passed down to generations when a family is a giant tobacco producer? Filmmaker Ross McElwee (Sherman's March, Time Indefinite — POV 1994), whose great-grandfather created the famous Bull Durham brand in his native North Carolina, takes viewers on an autobiographical journey across that state's social, economic and psychological tobacco terrain. |
| Hiding and Seeking | August 30, 2005 | Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum | Is it possible to heal wounds and bitterness passed down through generations? An Orthodox Jewish father tries to alert his adult sons to the dangers of creating impenetrable barriers between themselves and those outside their faith. He takes them on an emotional journey to Poland to track down the family who risked their lives to hide their grandfather for more than two years during World War II. |
| The Hobart Shakespeareans | September 6, 2005 | Mel Stuart | The Hobart Shakespeareans discovers how one teacher's uncommon commitment and resourcefulness have opened up worlds of opportunity for his "disadvantaged" students — and perhaps have demonstrated a way forward for America's beleaguered public education system. |
| Omar & Pete | September 13, 2005 | Tod Lending | Omar and Pete are determined to change their lives. Both have been in and out of prison for more than 30 years — never out longer than six months. This intimate and penetrating film follows these two longtime African-American friends after what they hope will be their final release. |
Season 19
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| No More Tears Sister | June 27, 2006 | Helene Klodawsky | Set during the violent ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, No More Tears Sister explores the price of truth in times of war. The film recreates the courageous and vibrant life of renowned human rights activist Dr. Rajani Thiranagama. |
| Kokoyakyu: High School Baseball | July 4, 2006 | Kenneth Eng | In Japan, baseball is not a pastime — it's an obsession epitomized by the national high school baseball tournament known simply as "Koshien." |
| Tintin and I | July 11, 2006 | Anders Østergaard | Why does the comic strip The Adventures of Tintin, about an intrepid boy reporter, continue to fascinate us decades after its publication? "Tintin and I" highlights the potent social and political underpinnings that give Tintin's world such depth, and delves into the mind of Hergé, Tintin's work-obsessed Belgian creator, to reveal the creation and development of Tintin. |
| The Fall of Fujimori | July 18, 2006 | Ellen Perry | In 1990, an unknown candidate named Alberto Fujimori rode a wave of popular support to become the president of Peru. He fought an all-out 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. |
| The Tailenders | July 25, 2006 | Adele Horne | Global Recordings Network (GRN), founded in Los Angeles in 1939, has produced audio versions of Bible stories in over 5,500 languages. GRN 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. GRN calls their target audience "the tailenders" because they are the last to be reached by worldwide evangelism. |
| Al Otro Lado (To the Other Side) | August 1, 2006 | Natalia Almada | The proud Mexican tradition of corrido music provides both heartbeat and backbone to this rich examination of songs, drugs and dreams along the U.S./Mexico border. |
| Lomax the Songhunter | August 22, 2006 | Rogier Kappers | Alan Lomax was "the song hunter," devoting his life to recording the world's folk tunes before they would permanently disappear with the rise of the modern music industry. |
| Waging a Living | August 29, 2006 | Roger Weisberg | The term "working poor" should be an oxymoron. For 30 million Americans, it's reality. Waging a Living chronicles the day-to-day battles of four low-wage earners. |
| The Boys of Baraka | September 12, 2006 | Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady | The Boys of Baraka follows four boys from Baltimore to rural Kenya, where a teacher-student ratio of one to five, a strict disciplinary program and a comprehensive curriculum form the core of an extraordinary journey in their transformation to men. |
| Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela | September 19, 2006 | Thomas Allen Harris | As part of the first wave of black South African exiles, Harris's stepfather, B. Pule Leinaeng, and his 11 comrades left their home in Bloemfontein in 1960. |
| No Bigger Than a Minute | October 3, 2006 | Steven Delano | Size matters: Filmmaker Steve Delano explores his identity as a dwarf with heart and humor. 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. |
| Maquilapolis | October 10, 2006 | Vicky Funari & Sergio De La Torre | Carmen and Lourdes work at maquiladoras just over the border in Tijuana, Mexico, where each day they confront labor violations, environmental devastation and urban chaos. |
| My Country, My Country | October 25, 2006 | Laura Poitras | Working alone in Iraq over eight months, filmmaker Laura Poitras takes an unforgettable journey into the heart of war-ravaged Iraq in the months leading up to the January 2005 elections. |
Season 20
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rain in a Dry Land | June 19, 2007 | Anne Makepeace | Two Somali Bantu families are transported by relief agencies from years of civil war and refugee life to settle in Springfield, Massachusetts and Atlanta, Georgia. |
| Massacre at Murambi | June 26, 2007 | Sam Kauffman | During the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, a newly built secondary school on a hill named Murambi was the site of one of the world’s most horrifying mass murders. |
| Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars | June 27, 2007 | Banker White and Zach Niles | Traumatized by physical injuries and brutal losses in Sierra Leone's civil war, a group of refugees fight back with the only means they have — music. |
| Standing Silent Nation | July 3, 2007 | Suree Towfighnia and Courtney Hermann | 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. 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. |
| Revolution '67 | July 10, 2007 | Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno | Revolution '67 is an illuminating account of events too often relegated to footnotes in U.S. history — the black urban rebellions of the 1960s. |
| Lawn | July 11, 2006 | Monteith McCollum | "Your lawn is a reflection of your character," a woman says in a phone conversation at the beginning of the film. Lawn explores our relationship with nature and our desire to control it. |
| The Chances of the World Changing | July 17, 2007 | Eric Daniel Metzgar & Nell Carden Grey | An extraordinary chronicle of two years in the life of Richard Ogust, whose life turns into strange territory as he shares his Manhattan loft with 1,200 turtles he is trying to save. |
| Prison Town, USA | July 24, 2007 | Katie Galloway and Po Kutchins | 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. |
| No Angels in the Outfield | July 24, 2007 | Larry Warner | This is a baseball team where you can say it's three strikes and you're in. The San Quentin Prison baseball team is the subject of this documentary, which goes inside the walls of the maximum-security prison to show the team, called the Giants, playing ball. |
| Following Sean | July 31, 2007 | Ralph Arlyck | Ralph Arlyck goes back to San Francisco to find out what happened to the precocious four-year-old he'd met during the height of the '60s. |
| Alice Sees the Light | August 21, 2007 | Ariana Gerstein | In the dark outside of our cities, there are lights that we have forgotten how to see. Alice laments the loss of her view of the universe, one of her reasons for living in the country. |
| Arctic Son | August 21, 2007 | Andrew Walton | A clash of tradition and modernity puts a Native father and son at odds in the remote village of Old Crow, 80 miles above the Arctic Circle. |
| Libby, Montana | August 28, 2007 | Doug Hawes-Davis and Drury Gunn Carr | In the small town of Libby, many hundreds are sick or have already died from exposure to asbestos, a notorious industrial toxin that many Americans consider long banned or under control. |
| Made in L.A. | September 4, 2007 | Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar | Follow the remarkable journey of three Latina immigrants working in L.A.'s garment factories and their long battle to bring a major clothing retailer to the negotiating table. |
| Keeping House | September 4, 2007 | May Lin Au Yong | A reflection on a mother's resolute love as she confronts the fragile promise of life through the eyes of her son. |
| Bullet Proof Vest | September 4, 2007 | May Lin Au Yong | Nine-year-old Jyeshria wants a bullet proof vest – and she's dead serious. In Richmond, California, children don't walk to school; not if they want to live past the age of 18. |
| The Camden 28 | September 11, 2007 | Anthony Giacchino | How far would you go to stop a war? The Camden 28 recalls a 1971 raid on a draft board office by activists protesting the Vietnam War and its effects on urban America. |
| Lumo | September 18, 2007 | Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Nelson Walker III, Co-directed by Louis Abelman and Lynn True | Lumo Sinai was raped by marauding soldiers in the Congo, which resulted in a fistula, a medical condition that renders her incontinent and threatens her ability to bear children. |
| 49 Up | October 9, 2007 | Michael Apted | In one of documentary cinema's more remarkable enterprises, 49 Up is the seventh in a series of films that has profiled a group of English children every seven years, beginning in 1964. |
| Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner | December 12, 2007 | Freida Lee Mock | Tony Kushner, whose epochal Angels in America won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award, begins a revival run in New York this week, is one of the country's leading playwrights — and one of its fiercest moral critics. |
| Scaredycat | December 12, 2007 | Andy Blubaugh | Scaredycat takes as a point of departure the beating of the filmmaker at the hands of a gang of young men who called themselves "The Portland Riders." |
Season 21
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ars Magna | March 1, 2008 | Cory Kelley | "Ars Magna," which means "great art" in Latin, is an anagram of the word "anagrams." This Emmy-nominated short enters the obsessive and fascinating world of anagrams. |
| Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North | June 24, 2008 | Katrina Browne | First-time filmmaker Katrina Browne makes a troubling discovery — her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. |
| Election Day | July 1, 2008 | Katy Chevigny | Forget the pie charts, color-coded maps and hyperventilating pundits. What's the street-level experience of voters in today's America? |
| The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez | July 8, 2008 | Kieran Fitzgerald | In 1997, U.S. Marines patrolling the Texas-Mexico border as part of the War on Drugs shot and killed Esequiel Hernández Jr. |
| The Last Conquistador | July 15, 2008 | John J. Valadez and Cristina Ibarra | Renowned sculptor John Houser has a dream: to build the world's tallest bronze equestrian statue for the city of El Paso, Texas. |
| 9 Star Hotel | July 22, 2008 | Ido Haar | Young construction laborers in the Israeli city of Modi'in are caught between Israeli security laws and a Palestinian Authority they see as having failed them. |
| Campaign | July 29, 2008 | Kazuhiro Soda | This is democracy — Japanese style: the story of a man plucked from obscurity by the ruling political party to run for a critical city council seat. |
| Johnny Cash! The Man, His World, His Music | August 5, 2008 | Robert Elfstrom | Fresh on the heels of his Folsom Prison album, Cash revealed the dark intensity and raw talent that made him a country music star and cultural icon. |
| Belarusian Waltz | August 12, 2008 | Andrzej Fidyk | The story of Alexander Pushkin, whose audacious, comical exploits against totalitarianism find him facing the hostility of the police and the consternation of his family. |
| The Judge and the General | August 19, 2008 | Elizabeth Farnsworth & Patricio Lanfranco | Chile's former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, is brought to justice by one of his own in this cautionary tale about violating human rights in the name of "higher ideals." |
| Calavera Highway | September 16, 2008 | Renee Tajima-Pena & Evangeline Griego | A sweeping story of seven Mexican-American men grappling with the meaning of masculinity, fatherhood and a legacy of rootless beginnings. |
| Critical Condition | September 30, 2008 | Roger Weisberg | What happens if you get sick and are one of 47 million Americans without health insurance? |
| In the Family | October 1, 2008 | Joanna Rudnick | 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, but she didn't know what to do about it. |
| Up the Yangtze | October 8, 2008 | Yung Chang | 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. |
| Soldiers of Conscience | October 16, 2008 | Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan | When is it right to kill? In the midst of war, is it right to refuse? Eight U.S. soldiers, some whom have killed and some who have said no, reveal their inner moral dilemmas. |
| City of Cranes | December 10, 2008 | Eva Weber | City of Cranes takes the viewer hundreds of feet above the ground to hear the insights of crane drivers, and see a glimpse of the poetic, mesmerizing world of cranes. |
| Inheritance | December 10, 2008 | James Moll | Inheritance is the story of Monika Hertwig, the daughter of mass murderer Amon Goeth, and her efforts to come to terms with her "inheritance." |
Season 22
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Muslim Cool | June 23, 2009 | Jennifer Maytorena Taylor | Puerto Rican-American rapper Hamza Pérez pulled himself out of street life 12 years ago and became a Muslim. Now he must confront the realities of the post-9/11 world. |
| Beyond Hatred | June 30, 2009 | Olivier Meyrou | The story of a family's struggle to seek justice for their murdered son while trying to transcend hatred and the desire for revenge. |
| Life. Support. Music. | July 7, 2009 | Eric Daniel Metzgar | When a guitarist suffers a brain hemorrhage onstage, doctors doubt he will emerge from a coma. The story of a family's astonishing struggle in the face of tragedy. |
| The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court | July 14, 2009 | Paco de Onis, Peter Kinoy and Pamela Yates | Over 120 countries have united to form the International Criminal Court to prosecute perpetrators of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. |
| The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) | July 21, 2009 | Ellen Kuras & Thavisouk Phrasavath | This Academy Award-nominated film chronicles Thavisouk Phrasavath and his family’s escape from Laos after the Vietnam War. In America, they find a different kind of war. |
| Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go | July 28, 2009 | Kim Longinotto | An unblinking look inside a British school for emotionally disturbed kids captures what happens when a community of determined adults envelops them in love rather than force. |
| Nutkin's Last Stand | August 18, 2009 | Nicholas Berger | Immortalized in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, the red is the island nation’s only native species of squirrel. But it is being driven to extinction by the invading greys. |
| 34x25x36 | August 18, 2009 | Jesse Epstein | Go behind the scenes at the Patina V Mannequin Factory in City of Industry, Calif., of the artistry, craft and marketing that go into creating "the ideal woman of the moment" — in plastic. |
| Utopia, Part 3: The World’s Largest Shopping Mall | August 18, 2009 | Sam Green and Carrie Lozano | Is nothing American sacred anymore? The largest mall in the world turns out not to be the famous Mall of America. It’s the South China Mall outside of Guangzhou. |
| This Way Up | August 25, 2009 | Georgi Lazarevski | The security wall being built by Israel on the West Bank has isolated a nursing home, leaving its residents to face old age in the throes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. |
| Ella Es el Matador (She Is the Matador) | September 1, 2009 | Gemma Cubero and Celeste Carrasco | Two women matadors in Spain have a passion for bullfighting and are determined to pursue their dreams. What is it like for women to enter into this male-dominated arena? |
| The English Surgeon | September 8, 2009 | Geoffrey Smith | 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. |
| The Principal Story | September 15, 2009 | Tod Lending and David Mrazek | Over the course of a school year, two public school principals with unique styles and similar passions make a difference in the lives of their students. |
| Jennifer | September 22, 2009 | Stewart Copeland | Filmmaker Stewart Copeland explores his relationship with his late mother and the distance spaces between memory and history. |
| So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away | September 22, 2009 | Annie P. Waldman | A determined group of teenagers return to New Orleans two years after Hurricane Katrina to finish high school. Since Katrina, one out of five teens live without parents. |
| Bronx Princess | September 22, 2009 | Yoni Brook and Musa Syeed | Rocky Otoo is the sassy teenage daughter of Ghanaian parents. After she rebels against her mother's rule in the Bronx, she flees to her father, a chief in Ghana. |
| The Way We Get By | November 11, 2009 | Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly | Over 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. |
| Patti Smith: Dream of Life | December 30, 2009 | Steven Sebring | Shot over 11 years by renowned fashion photographer Steven Sebring, this is an intimate portrait of the legendary rocker, poet and artist Patti Smith. |
Season 23
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Food, Inc. | April 21, 2010 | Robert Kenner | This 2010 Oscar-nominated film lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that's been hidden from the American consumer. |
| Notes on Milk | April 21, 2010 | Ariana Gerstein and Monteith McCollum | A poetic look at some lesser-known aspects of America’s favorite drink: the industry’s spiritual underpinnings, politics and the struggle of independent farmers. |
| William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe | June 22, 2010 | Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler | In this intimate biography, Kunstler's daughters seek to recover the real story of what made their late father one of the most beloved, and hated, lawyers in America. |
| The Beaches of Agnès | June 29, 2010 | Agnès Varda | In this delightful memoir, the award-winning French filmmaker employs all the magic of cinema to juxtapose the real and the imagined, the past and the present, pain and joy. |
| A Different Color Blue | June 29, 2010 | Melanie Vi Levy | Charles Curtis Blackwell, a semi-blind artist, lost most of his eyesight in an accident during his youth, but this adversity has only heightened his artistic gifts. |
| Promised Land | July 6, 2010 | Yoruba Richen | Though apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994, economic injustices between blacks and whites remain unresolved — and the most potentially explosive issue is land. |
| Good Fortune | July 13, 2010 | Landon Van Soest and Jeremy Levine | 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. |
| Bye | July 13, 2010 | Anthony Morrison | Bye follows Jayden, a two and half year old diagnosed with autism, through his first months of school in the Bronx. |
| El General | July 20, 2010 | Natalia Almada | Past and present collide as the daughter of Plutarco Elías Calles, a revolutionary general who became Mexico’s president in 1924, reflects on his legacy. |
| Presumed Guilty | July 27, 2010 | Roberto Hernández, Layda Negrete and Geoffrey Smith | 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. |
| A Healing Art | August 17, 2010 | Ellen Frick | Artificial eye makers combine artistry, skill and compassion, making eyes that are masterful works of art, and rekindling hope for their patients. |
| The Archive | August 17, 2010 | Sean Dunne | This is the story of a man and his records. Paul Mawhinney has amassed what has become the world's largest record collection. |
| Salt | August 17, 2010 | Michael Angus and Murray Fredericks | Made in collaboration with documentary filmmaker Michael Angus, SALT is the film extension of Murray Fredericks’ photography at the desolate yet beautiful Lake Eyre. |
| Trash-Out | August 17, 2010 | Maria Fortiz-Morse | This deeply affecting and simple short shows workers cleaning out a house that has been foreclosed upon. What does an empty house say that was once a home? |
| Danny and Annie: Parts I & II | August 17, 2010 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | In an intimate and heartbreaking glimpse into a marriage, this animated short witnesses true love as it braves the finality of loss. |
| Q&A | August 24, 2010 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | This four-minute animated short from the producers of StoryCorps features Joshua Littman, a 12-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome, interviewing his mother, Sarah. |
| Seltzer Works | August 24, 2010 | Jessica Edwards | The last bottler in Brooklyn fends off the supermarket seltzer take-over and honors this simple drink's place in history. |
| The Edge of Dreaming | August 24, 2010 | Amy Hardie | Can dreams predict the future? A filmmaker explores dreams, neuroscience and the realm of spirituality in this fascinating investigation of the human subconscious. |
| Wo Ai Ni (I Love You) Mommy | August 31, 2010 | Stephanie Wang-Breal | 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? |
| Germans in the Woods | August 31, 2010 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | Joseph Robertson was an infantryman in the U.S. Army during World War II, and he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. |
| Off and Running | September 7, 2010 | Nicole Opper | Avery is one of three children adopted by a Jewish lesbian couple in Brooklyn. Though it may not look typical, Avery’s is like most families — until she writes to her birth mother. |
| The Human Voice | September 7, 2010 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | Studs Terkel talks about what has been lost in modern life and where he sees hope for our future. |
| The Icing on the Cake | September 7, 2010 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | The daughter of two Mexican immigrants reveals how much she saw of her parents' lives as a child — and the inspiration she drew from their struggles. |
| In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee | September 14, 2010 | Deann Borshay Liem | 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. |
| The Oath | September 21, 2010 | Laura Poitras | Filmed in Yemen and Guantánamo, The Oath interweaves the stories of Abu Jandal, Bin Laden's former bodyguard and Salim Hamdan, a man facing war crimes charges. |
| The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers | October 5, 2010 | Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith | Forty years ago, a whistleblower's daring act of conscience led directly to Watergate, President Nixon’s resignation and the end of the Vietnam War. |
Season 24
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kings of Pastry | June 21, 2011 | Chris Hegedus & D. A. Pennebaker | Pastry chefs whip up the most gravity-defying concoctions and edge-of-your-seat drama as they deliver their desserts for the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France competition. |
| My Perestroika | June 28, 2011 | Robin Hessman | My Perestroika is an intimate look at the last generation of Soviet children searching for their places in today’s Moscow. |
| Sweetgrass | July 5, 2011 | Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor | Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into the breathtaking and often dangerous mountains for summer pasture. |
| Enemies of the People | July 12, 2011 | Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath | The Khmer Rouge slaughtered nearly two million people in the late 1970s, yet the Killing Fields of Cambodia remain largely unexplained. Until now. |
| Biblioburro: The Donkey Library | July 19, 2011 | Carlos Rendón Zipagauta | Colombian grade-school teacher Luis Soriano brings books, via two hard-working donkeys, to the children of Magdalena Province’s poor and violence-ridden interior. |
| Mugabe and the White African | July 26, 2011 | Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson | In Zimbabwe, de facto dictator Robert Mugabe has unleashed a "land reform" program aimed at driving whites from the country through violence and intimidation. |
| Steam of Life | August 2, 2011 | Joonas Berghäll and Mika Hotakainen | In Finland, the sauna is a national obsession - a place to come together and sweat out not only the grime of contemporary life, but also grief, hopes, joys and memories. |
| Flawed | August 23, 2011 | Andrea Dorfman | The story of a long-distance relationship with a man whose profession - plastic surgery - gives the woman plenty of fodder. |
| Miss Devine | August 23, 2011 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | Cousins James Ransom and Cherie Johnson recall their inimitable Sunday school teacher, Miss Lizzie Devine. |
| Big Birding Day | August 23, 2011 | David Wilson | 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. |
| Tiffany | August 23, 2011 | Alix Lambert | 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. |
| No More Questions! | August 23, 2011 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | A grandmother who shared her entertaining life stories with StoryCorps is remembered by her son and granddaughter. |
| Six Weeks | August 23, 2011 | Marcin Janos Krawczyk | Six weeks is the period in which parents of newborn babies in Poland may decide to give up a child for adoption. |
| Armadillo | August 30, 2011 | Janus Metz | A platoon of Danish soldiers fight the Taliban at Armadillo, a combat operations base in southern Afghanistan. |
| Better This World | September 6, 2011 | Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie Galloway | The story of two men who were accused of intending to firebomb the 2008 Republican National Convention, is a dramatic tale of idealism, loyalty, crime and betrayal. |
| StoryCorps Shorts: September 11 Stories | September 6, 2011 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | In this special collection of shorts from the Peabody Award-winning StoryCorps, family and loved ones remember the people they lost in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. |
| If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front | September 13, 2011 | Marshall Curry | This provocative film lifts the veil on a radical environmental group that the FBI calls America’s "number one domestic terrorism threat." |
| The Learning | September 20, 2011 | Ramona Diaz | Four Filipino women leave their families and schools to teach in the U.S. The women bring idealistic visions of the teacher’s craft and of American life. |
| Last Train Home | September 27, 2011 | Lixin Fan | 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. |
| Where Soldiers Come From | November 10, 2011 | Heather Courtney | From a snowy town in northern Michigan to the mountains of Afghanistan, follow the four-year journey of childhood friends who join the National Guard. |
| Racing Dreams | February 23, 2012 | Marshall Curry | In Racing Dreams, three "tweens" dream of becoming NASCAR drivers. A humorous and heartbreaking portrait of racing, young love and family struggle. |
Season 25
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| To R.P. Salazar, with Love | January 26, 2012 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | Rachel P. Salazar and Ruben P. Salazar were living 9,000 miles apart, unaware of each other's existence, until a stroke of luck brought them together. |
| My Reincarnation | June 21, 2012 | Jennifer Fox | As Chögyal Namkhai Norbu rises as a Buddhist teacher in the West, his son Yeshi, recognized as the reincarnation of a Buddhist master, breaks away to embrace the modern world. |
| Granito: How to Nail a Dictator | June 28, 2012 | Peter Kinoy, Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís | The extraordinary story of how a film, aiding a new generation of human rights activists, became a granito — a tiny grain of sand — that helped tip the scales of justice. |
| The City Dark | July 5, 2012 | Ian Cheney | Is darkness becoming extinct? Exploring the physical and psychological effects of light pollution, The City Dark is a portrait of the world after dusk, and a meditation on the human relationship to the stars. ( |
| Guilty Pleasures | July 12, 2012 | Julie Moggan | Five heroes, four continents, one dream of true love. Because real life begins where romance novels end. |
| The Light in Her Eyes | July 19, 2012 | Julia Meltzer and Laura Nix | Houda al-Habash, a conservative woman preacher in Damascus, Syria, calls girls to the practice of Islam, teaching them that pursuing their ambitions is a way of worshipping God. |
| Up Heartbreak Hill | July 26, 2012 | Erica Scharf | Up Heartbreak Hill follows two Native teens torn between the lure of opportunities outside their remote reservation community and the cultural ties that bind them to home. |
| The Barber of Birmingham | August 9, 2012 | Gail Dolgin and Robin Fryday | James Armstrong, whose Alabama barbershop has been a hub for haircuts and civil rights for 50 years, celebrates the election of the first black president. |
| Sin País | August 9, 2012 | Theo Rigby | Winner of a Student Academy Award®, Sin País (Without Country) explores one family’s complex and emotional journey involving deportation. |
| Eyes on the Stars | August 9, 2012 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | Carl McNair tells the story of his brother Ronald, an African-American kid in the 1950s who set his sights on the stars. |
| Facundo the Great | August 9, 2012 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | The new kid at school becomes a hero when his teachers cannot find a way to anglicize his name. |
| A Family Man | August 9, 2012 | Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | Sam Black talks to his wife about his father, an enduring lesson and the power of a look. |
| I'm Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful | September 20, 2012 | Jonathan Demme | 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. |
| El Velador (The Night Watchman) | September 27, 2012 | Natalia Almada | From dusk to dawn, a guard watches over the extravagant mausoleums of some of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords. |
| Give Up Tomorrow | October 4, 2012 | Michael Collins and Marty Syjuco | A riveting exposé of corruption and injustice in the Philippines, chronicling a sensational murder case that ends a nation’s use of capital punishment — but fails to free an innocent man. |
| Sun Kissed | October 18, 2012 | Maya Stark and Adi Lavy | 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. |
| Nostalgia for the Light | October 25, 2012 | Patricio Guzmán | In the Atacama Desert, earthly and celestial quests meld. Archaeologists dig for ancient civilizations, women search for their loved ones and astronomers scan the skies for new galaxies. |
| Reportero | January 7, 2013 | Bernardo Ruiz | A veteran reporter and his colleagues at an independent newsweekly defy powerful drug cartels and corrupt officials to continue publishing the news. |
| Girl Model | March 24, 2013 | A. Sabin and David Redmon | The provocative film is a lyrical exploration of youth, beauty and ambition, seen through the eyes of a conflicted American modeling scout and the 13-year-old girl she discovers. |
Season 26
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homegoings | June 24, 2013 | Christine Turner | Through the eyes of Harlem funeral director Isaiah Owens, the beauty and grace of African-American funerals are brought to life. Homegoings paints a portrait of grieving families and a man who sends loved ones "home." |
| Special Flight (French: Vol spécial) | July 1, 2013 | Fernand Melgar | The plight of undocumented immigrants at a detention center in Geneva, Switzerland, points up contradictions between compassionate social policies and intractable immigration laws. |
| Herman's House | July 8, 2013 | Angad Singh Bhalla | 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. |
| Only the Young | July 15, 2013 | Jason Tippett and Elizabeth Mims | Three teens in a Southern California town wrestle with questions of love and friendship along with adult realities of financial uncertainty. |
| High Tech, Low Life | July 22, 2013 | Stephen Maing | 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. |
| Neurotypical | July 29, 2013 | Adam Larsen | 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. |
| The Law in These Parts | August 19, 2013 | and Liran Atzmor | 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. |
| 5 Broken Cameras | August 26, 2013 | Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi | 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. |
| Ping Pong | September 9, 2013 | Hugh Hartford and Anson Hartford | 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. |
| The World Before Her | September 16, 2013 | Nisha Pahuja | 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. |
| Best Kept Secret | September 23, 2013 | Samantha Buck | 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. |
| Brooklyn Castle | October 7, 2013 | Katie Dellamaggiore | 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. |
| 56 Up | October 14, 2013 | Michael Apted | 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. |
| Listening Is an Act of Love: A StoryCorps Special | November 28, 2013 | StoryCorps by Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | Celebrate the transformative power of listening with this animated special from the oral history project StoryCorps, which captures intimate conversations among everyday people. |
| American Promise | February 3, 2014 | Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson | In American Promise, African-American parents Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson film their son and his friend, who attend one of the country’s most prestigious private schools. |
Season 27
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| When I Walk | June 23, 2014 | Jason DaSilva | Jason DaSilva was 25 and a rising filmmaker when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and inspired to film this forthright — and surprisingly uplifting — look at his new life. He searches for a cure, yet a different miracle comes his way. |
| American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs | June 30, 2014 | Grace Lee | Meet Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American philosopher in Detroit who has been waging a revolution for 75 years. Her story unfurls to portray an evolving city and to examine the power of ideas and imagination to propel change. |
| My Way to Olympia | July 7, 2014 | Niko von Glasow | Who better to cover the Paralympics than a disabled filmmaker who hates sports and deems the games "stupid?" When Niko von Glasow meets the Rwandan sitting volleyball team and an American archer without arms, his notions get blown away. |
| Getting Back to Abnormal | July 14, 2014 | Louis Alvarez, Andrew Kolker, Peter Odabashian and Paul Stekler | Election time in New Orleans: Corruption. Racism. Dancing in the streets. And one in-your-face politician trying to get re-elected. Let the good times roll. |
| Dance for Me | July 21, 2014 | Katrine Philp | At 15, Russian ballroom dancer Egor leaves everyone and everything he knows for a chance to team up with 14-year-old Mie, one of Denmark's most promising young performers. Will his choice be worth the sacrifices he must make? |
| A Good Man | July 21, 2014 | by StoryCorps and Mike Rauch and Tim Rauch | Bryan Wilmoth and his seven younger siblings were raised in a strict, religious home. In this StoryCorps Animated Short, he talks to his brother Mike about reconnecting years after their dad kicked Bryan out for being gay. |
| Fallen City | July 28, 2014 | Qi Zhao | After an earthquake levels Beichuan, China, a modern replica rises with astounding speed, but while a city can be rebuilt quickly, reconstructing a community’s heart and soul is a long, emotional journey for the survivors. |
| 15 to Life: Kenneth's Story | August 4, 2014 | Nadine Pequeneza | Does sentencing a teenager to life without parole serve society? Following a Florida man who received four life sentences at age 15, this eye-opening film reveals a justice system that routinely condemns young Americans to die in prison. |
| A World Not Ours | August 18, 2014 | Mahdi Fleifel | A passionate, bittersweet account of one family’s multi-generational experience living as permanent refugees at the Ain el-Helweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon. |
| Big Men | August 25, 2014 | Rachel Boynton | Big Men, executive produced by Brad Pitt, goes to Ghana to provide an unprecedented look at the global deal making and dark underside of oil development — a contest for money and power that is reshaping the world. |
| After Tiller | September 1, 2014 | Martha Shane and Lana Wilson | Since the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in 2009, only four doctors in the country openly provide late abortions. With unprecedented access, After Tiller goes inside the lives of these physicians working at the center of the storm. |
| The Genius of Marian | September 8, 2014 | Banker White and Anna Fitch | When Pam White is diagnosed at age 61 with early-onset Alzheimer’s, her family grapples with the disease alongside her, and her eldest son attempts to recover her memories by recording conversations in this visually rich, poignant film. |
| Koch | September 22, 2014 | Neil Barsky | Meet Ed Koch, the quintessential New Yorker. Combative, funny and blunt, he was mayor from 1978 to 1989, an era of graffiti, near-bankruptcy and crime. Before his death in 2013, the intensely private man recalled his life and legacy. |
| The Act of Killing | October 6, 2014 | Joshua Oppenheimer | An Oscar nominee and the most honored documentary of 2013, this dreamlike, terrifying film asks Indonesian death-squad leaders to dramatize their roles in genocide. In a mind-bending twist, they play both themselves and their victims. |
| Cutie and the Boxer | November 11, 2014 | Zachary Heinzerling | 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. |
Season 28
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Out In The Night | June 22, 2015 | blair dorosh-walther | An account of four women sensationalized by the media as a "Gang of Killer Lesbians" reveals the role that race, gender identity and sexuality play in our criminal justice system. |
| The Overnighters | June 29, 2015 | Jesse Moss | Desperate, broken men chase their dreams and run from their demons in the North Dakota oil fields. A local pastor risks everything to help them. |
| Tough Love | July 6, 2015 | Stephanie Wang-Breal | Having lost custody of their children to Child Protective Services, two parents fight to win back the trust of the courts and reunite their families. |
| Web Junkie | July 13, 2015 | Shosh Shlam, Hilla Medalia | A look into an internet addiction rehab in Beijing, China, the first country in the world to classify this evolving diagnosis. |
| Return to Homs | July 20, 2015 | Talal Derki | A look behind the barricades of the besieged Syrian city of Homs, where, for 19-year-old Basset and his ragtag group of comrades, the audacious hope of revolution is crumbling like the buildings around them. |
| Tea Time | July 27, 2015 | Maite Alberdi | A look at how a seemingly mundane, monthly routine of tea and pastries has helped five Chilean women commemorate life's joys and cope with infidelity, illness, and death. |
| Beats of the Antonov | August 3, 2015 | hajooj kuka | Sudanese civilians facing government bombing campaigns celebrate their heritage through music, finding hope and a common identity. |
| Neuland | August 17, 2015 | Anna Thommen | One teacher prepares his students for their new life in Switzerland as they struggle to learn a new language, prepare themselves for employment and reveal their innermost hopes and dreams. |
| Point and Shoot | August 24, 2015 | Marshall Curry | In 2006, Matt VanDyke left his home in search of a "crash course in manhood" and ended up amidst a revolution in the Middle East. |
| The Storm Makers | August 31, 2015 | Guillaume Suon | An eye-opening look at the cycle of poverty, despair and greed that fuels human trafficking in Cambodia. |
| Cutie and the Boxer | September 18, 2015 | Zachary Heinzerling | 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. |
| Don't Tell Anyone (No Le Digas a Nadie) | September 21, 2015 | Mikaela Shwer | 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. |
| Art and Craft | September 25, 2015 | Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman; co-directed by Mark Becker | 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. |
| Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case | October 2, 2015 | Andreas Johnsen | 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. |
Season 29
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Return | May 23, 2016 | Kelly Duane de la Vega, Katie Galloway | In 2012, California amended its Three-strikes law, shortening the sentences of thousands of "lifers." See this unprecedented reform through the eyes of those on the front lines - prisoners suddenly freed, families turned upside down and attorneys and judges wrestling with an untested law. |
| Of Men and War | May 30, 2016 | Laurent Bécue-Renard | 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. |
| The Look of Silence | June 27, 2016 | Joshua Oppenheimer | In this Oscar-nominated film, winner of more than 50 awards, 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. |
| Pervert Park | July 11, 2016 | Frida Barkfors, Lasse Barkfors | 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. |
| Iris | August 1, 2016 | Albert Maysles | 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. |
| The Birth of Saké | September 5, 2016 | Erik Shirai | 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. |
| All the Difference | September 12, 2016 | Tod Lending | Accompany two African-American teens from the South Side of Chicago on their journey to achieve their dream of graduating from college. |
| Kingdom of Shadows | September 19, 2016 | Bernardo Ruiz | 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. |
| Marathon (short) | September 19, 2016 | Theo Rigby, Kate McLean | In Theo Rigby and Kate McLean's short film Marathon, an undocumented immigrant, Julio Sauce, competes in the New York City Marathon. |
| From This Day Forward | October 10, 2016 | Sharon Shattuck | 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. |
| Pink Boy (short) | October 10, 2016 | Eric Rockey | An intimate portrait of a gender-nonconforming boy growing up in conservative rural Florida. |
| Hooligan Sparrow | October 17, 2016 | Nanfu Wang | 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. |
| Thank You for Playing | October 24, 2016 | David Osit, Malika Zouhali-Worrall | 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. Thank You for Playing follows 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. |
| What Tomorrow Brings | October 31, 2016 | Beth Murphy | 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. |
Season 30
| Title | Premiere | Director | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dalya's Other Country | June 26, 2017 | Julia Meltzer | A family displaced by the Syrian conflict remakes themselves after the parents separate. 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. |
| 4.1 Miles | June 26, 2017 | Daphne Matziaraki | 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. |
| The War Show | July 3, 2017 | Obaidah Zytoon, Andreas Dalsgaard | Through the lens of a small circle of friends and journalists living in Syria, The War Show begins with the peaceful Arab Spring protests of 2011 and offers a four-year look at how the country spiraled into a bloody civil war. |
| Last Men in Aleppo | July 10, 2017 | Firas Fayyad, Steven Johannessen | After five years of war in Syria, the remaining citizens of Aleppo are getting ready for a siege. The film shows their daily life, death, and struggle for sanity in the streets of a city where war has become the norm. |
| Presenting Princess Shaw | July 17, 2017 | Ido Haar | Samantha Montgomery is an aspiring musician down on her luck who inspired the internationally famous musician, composer, and video artist Ophir "Kutiman" Kutiel to collaborate with her, bringing her talent to a whole new audience. |
| Shalom Italia | July 24, 2017 | Tamar Tal Anati | Three Italian Jewish brothers set off on a journey through Tuscany, in search of a cave where they hid as children to escape the Nazis. Their quest straddles the boundary between history and myth, exploring individual and communal memory. |
| Joe's Violin | July 24, 2017 | Kahane Cooperman, Raphaela Neilhausen | A musical instrument forges a friendship between 91-year-old Holocaust survivor Joe Feingold and 12-year-old Bronx school girl Brianna Perez. |
| Memories of a Penitent Heart | July 31, 2017 | Cecilia Aldarondo | The film explores the death of Aldarondo's uncle, Miguel, who faced disapproval from his family during a time when having AIDS was synonymous with sin, and a search for Miguel's partner decades later. |
| Tribal Justice | August 21, 2017 | Anne Makepeace | Two Native American judges reach back to traditional concepts of justice to address the root causes of crime. Mainstream courts across the country are taking notice. |
| Raising Bertie | August 28, 2017 | Margaret Byrne | A portrait of three African American boys as they face a coming of age in rural Bertie County, North Carolina, navigating complex relationships, institutional racism, violence, poverty, and educational inequity. |
| The Grown-Ups | September 4, 2017 | Maite Alberdi | In a school for individuals with Down Syndrome, four middle-aged friends yearn for a life of greater autonomy in a society that marginalizes them as disabled. |
| My Love, Don't Cross That River | September 11, 2017 | Jin Mo-young | A couple has been married and has lived together for 76 years. While they spend every day like a newlywed couple, they now much face the reality of their aging romance. |
| Swim Team | October 2, 2017 | Lara Stolman | Parents of a boy on the autism spectrum form a competitive swim team, recruiting teens on the spectrum and training them with high expectations and zero pity. |
| The Islands and The Whales | October 9, 2017 | Mike Day | On the isolated North Atlantic archipelago of the Faroe Islands, the longtime hunting practices of the Faroese are threatened. The islanders consider their tale a warning to the rest of the world. |
| Motherland | October 16, 2017 | Ramona S. Diaz | A look at the busiest maternity hospital in the world, in one of the poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. |
| Cameraperson | October 23, 2017 | Kirsten Johnson | Footage captured over the twenty-five-year career of cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. |
| Almost Sunrise | November 13, 2017 | Michael Collins & Marty Syjuco | In an attempt to put haunting combat experiences behind them, two friends embark on a 2,700-mile trek on foot across America. |
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