|
|
|
|
Independent Lens is broadcast on most PBS stations on Tuesdays at 10:00 p.m.
Please check the broadcast schedule. Dates and times may vary.
Biographies & Profiles
|
|
|
|
As Duke Ellington's co-composer, arranger, and right-hand man, Billy Strayhorn wrote some of the greatest American music of the 20th century. But as a gay man in the '40s and '50s, Strayhorn had to lead a discreet existence, while Ellington played to thunderous applause on center stage. BILLY STRAYHORN: Lush Life tells the story of the unheralded man who changed jazz and popular music forever, maintaining artistic and personal integrity, while challenging prejudice along the way.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
She's a best-selling author with dreadlocks. A single mother and "sober alcoholic" who is both a born-again Christian and a liberal activist. Anne Lamott shares her own moving story of a survivor and iconoclast, offering wise and funny insights into everything from loss and faith to retail therapy and gorillas.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
Eighty-year-old Jimmy Mirikitani survived the trauma of internment camps, Hiroshima and homelessness by creating art. But when 9/11 threatens his life on the New York City streets and a local filmmaker brings him to her home, the two embark on a journey to confront Jimmy's painful past. THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI is an intimate exploration of the lingering wounds of war and the healing powers of friendship and art. Produced in association with ITVS and CAAM.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
|
DEEP WATER
by Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell
June 15, 2008
|
The compelling story of the fateful voyage of Donald Crowhurst, an amateur yachtsman who entered the most daring nautical challenge ever—the very first solo, non-stop, round-the-world boat race. Through re-enactments and interviews DEEP WATER reveals Crowhurst's maritime inexperience and an ending that shocked a nation.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
|
|
DOC
by Immy Humes
December 9, 2008
|
A biography of literary figure Harold Louis "Doc" Humes by his daughter, DOC tells the story of a life crammed full of ideas about politics, literature and protest. Exploring Doc's paranoia and mental illness, this homemade, improvisational piece sheds light on an original mind as well as the cultural history of postwar America.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
In his life and his work, acclaimed Afro-Cuban-Puerto Rican poet Piri Thomas has used creative expression as a means to confront and overcome poverty, racism, violence and isolation. Author of the acclaimed autobiographical novel Down These Mean Streets, Thomas, through poetry, stories and performances, chronicles his journey from Spanish Harlem to prison to life as an author, educator and activist.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
Her Depression-era pictures stunned 1930s audiences with their beauty, intimacy and unflinching visions of the poor, the unlucky and the oppressed. HANSEL MIETH traces the journey of one of America's great photographers from provincial Germany to the pages of Life magazine, where she set the standard for socially concerned artists.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
|
|
HEART OF THE SEA
by Charlotte Lagarde & Lisa Denker
A Pacific Islanders in Communications and KHET/Hawaii co-presentation
May 6, 2003
|
On a surfboard, she carved the way for women in a sport dominated by men. But at the age of 32, Rell Kapolioka'ehukai Sunn was diagnosed with breast cancer. HEART OF THE SEA is a portrait of "Auntie Rell," who inspired those who knew her as an athlete, survivor and activist.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
|
|
IMELDA
by Ramona Diaz
Co-presented with the Center for Asian American Media
May 10, 2005
|
How has the former first lady of the Philippines managed to court, coddle, use and abuse power—for nearly four decades? Watch news clips, propaganda films, home movies, vérité footage and revealing interviews with Marcos herself as well as with her friends and her enemies.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
|
|
IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA
by Daniel Junge, Siatta Scott-Johnson, Henry Ansbacher and Jonathan Stack
March 18, 2008
|
With unprecedented access, this intimate documentary goes behind the scenes with Africa's first freely elected female head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia. The film explores the challenges facing the new president and the extraordinary women surrounding her as they develop and implement policy to rebuild their ravaged country and prevent a descent back into civil war.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
Jazz balladeer Jimmy Scott informs his art with lessons learned from 78 hard-lived years of failure and redemption. Through international concert footage, portraiture and intimate interviews, this oft-sidelined jazz immortal, whose soft sensuality and impossibly high voice are legendary, recounts his stranger-than-fiction odyssey through poverty and obscurity to worldwide recognition as one of the most distinctive and revered vocalists of our time.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
Legendary jazz bassist Milt Hinton (1910–2000) was also a skilled photographer and storyteller. Using archival footage, hundreds of photographs and interviews with Hinton and fellow musicians such as Branford Marsalis and Quincy Jones, KEEPING TIME is an insider’s view of jazz and life in 20th-century America.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
Legendary Afro-Cuban pop singer Lupe Victoria Yoli, was crowned "The Queen of Latin Soul" by New York's Latin music scene in the 1960s. Renowned for her emotional performances, La Lupe remains the quintessential bad girl, dying tragically, virtually unknown in 1992. Shot in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the U.S., LA LUPE tells her story through interviews and rare archival footage from the groundbreaking musical era. Produced in assocation with ITVS and LPB.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
Vernon Sager is a cowboy struggling to survive in Porcupine, South Dakota, where winters reach 30 degrees below zero and summers with prairie fires and frying-pan heat have pushed most of his family and friends off the land. But Vernon still gets up at 3 A.M. to saddle his horse and count calves. THE LAST COWBOY is the real-deal Rawhide, the story of people fighting to preserve a vanishing way of life.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
A frustrated filmmaker who is captivated by Emily Dickinson’s poetry searches for “flashes of insight” beyond those offered by experts such as actress Julie Harris and U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. He turns to shrinks, a stand-up comic, a rock band and dozens of actresses who recite poems and improvise Dickinsonian answers to questions about God, death and love—resulting in a playful rethinking of the elusive belle of Amherst.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
In 1978, Oakley Hall was a promising playwright on the verge of national recognition when a mysterious fall violently transformed his life. THE LOSS OF NAMELESS THINGS is the haunting story of a young man's decline, the vibrant artists who surrounded him and what happens when—decades later—a theater company discovers the very play he was writing the night he fell.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
A “troublesome property” for his master, Nat Turner has remained a “troublesome property” for historians, novelists, dramatists and others who have struggled to understand the leader of the famous 1831 slave rebellion. Using an innovative approach that combines documentary techniques, dramatic filmmaking and historical methodology, this program explores how the many meanings of Nat Turner remain critical to understanding the racial history of our country.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
Credited with inspiring the Black Power Movement, Robert Williams led his North Carolina hometown to defend itself against the Ku Klux Klan and challenge repressive Jim Crow laws. NEGROES WITH GUNS follows Williams's journey from southern community leader to his exile in Cuba and China—a journey that brought the issue of armed self-defense to the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
Greg Smith and his family bare all in this unflinching portrait of a 65-pound man striving for the American Dream. In 1992, fueled by discrimination, Smith created On a Roll Talk Radio from his wheelchair. The father of three travels the globe but finds his own nation’s capital inaccessible—a minor challenge compared with living independently and having safe intimate relationships.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
George Clinton: mastermind behind the band Parliament Funkadelic. Find out how he expressed the cultural alienation of young African Americans, creating an alternate universe of “aliens” who brought the redemptive power of funk to a world sorely in need of a new point of view.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad has drawn and quartered 11 presidents in a remarkable career spanning half a century. Narrated by Tom Brokaw, PAUL CONRAD: Drawing Fire pays tribute to a legendary journalist and artist who epitomizes the fiercely independent voice that has been vanishing from American news media in recent years.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
Most Americans don’t know that Dr. Seuss (1904-1991) drew editorial cartoons for a left-wing New York newspaper during World War II. How many of his readers know that Yertle the Turtle was modeled on Hitler, or that Horton Hears a Who! is a parable about postwar Japan? This film explores a little-known side of Dr. Seuss and his works.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
When Harvard expelled faculty members Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary in 1963 for LSD experimentation, Alpert traveled to India and returned transformed into the beloved guru Ram Dass. Now in his 70s, the author of the best-seller Be Here Now continues to inspire people all over the world as he deals with the effects of a massive stroke.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
The epic tale of Farmer John, a maverick Midwestern farmer who—in spite of the condemnation from his community—bravely transforms his farm amidst a failing economy, vicious rumors and arson. In doing so, he creates a bastion of free expression and a revolutionary form of agriculture in rural America.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
|
|
SHERIFF
by
Daniel Kraus
January 3, 2006
|
With the help of God, guns and the hundreds of blood relatives that populate his jurisdiction, Sheriff Ronald E. Hewett oversees Brunswick County, North Carolina—a rural region fraught with murder, robbery and the occasional theft of ceramic lawn ornaments. SHERIFF is pure cinema verité, an unexpected portrait of a man trying to do good in a bad world.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
This autobiographical Peabody Award-winning film traces Paul Fierlinger’s tumultuous life from Stalinist Czechoslovakia to the U.S., as seen through his relationships with his dogs. Sustained by loyalty and caring for these animals—even in an atmosphere of oppression and suspicion—each dog serves as a marker of its master's personal growth, from a misanthrope to an artist who appreciates the divine powers of nature.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
They faced death threats on the job—some from the men they worked alongside. With the story of Captain Brenda Berkman of the Fire Department of New York at its core, TAKING THE HEAT explores the history of women firefighters in America and the price they paid to serve their communities.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
TODAY'S MAN tells the story of Nicky Gottlieb—a former child genius who, at age 21, is diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome—a high functioning form of Autism. The film follows Nicky as he struggles to leave the safety of his family's home and find his place in the world.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
In an era when Dick, Jane and discipline ruled America's schools, Albert Cullum allowed Shakespeare, Sophocles and Shaw to reign in his fifth grade classroom. Weaving stunning archival footage together with interviews of Cullum and his former students, this is a portrait of the lives transformed by a maverick teacher who enabled children to embrace their own inner greatness.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
|
|
TRUDELL
by Heather Rae
Co-presentation with Native American Telecommunications Association
April 11, 2006
|
Native American activist and poet John Trudell fuses his radical politics with music, writing and art. Combining images and archival footage with interviews and performances, this biography reveals the philosophy and motivations behind Trudell's work and his relationship to contemporary Indian history.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
For over 40 years, Ralph Nader has worked tirelessly as a consumer advocate, building a legislative record to rival that of any contemporary president. Yet today, many consider him merely an egomaniac and a "spoiler." AN UNREASONABLE MAN takes an unsparing look at one of the most important and controversial political figures our time.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
WATER FLOWING TOGETHER offers an intimate portrait of a remarkable dancer, Jock Soto, who retired from the New York City Ballet at age 40, after a 24-year career. Soto's journey as an openly gay man of Navajo Indian and Puerto Rican descent provides a rare glimpse into the life of a dancer and the disparate worlds which have shaped this important artist.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL tells the true story of a bohemian St. Francis and his remarkable relationship with a flock of wild red and green parrots. Former street musician and San Francisco dharma bum Mark Bittner falls in with the flock as he searches for meaning in his life, unaware that the parrots will bring him everything he seeks.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
An exhilarating look at the work of the Brazilian-born contemporary conceptual artist and rising star Vik Muniz — sculptor, photographer and self-proclaimed magician. Muniz, best known for his book Seeing Is Believing, uses his knowledge of and interest in the history of photography to demonstrate how we, as viewers, can easily be deceived by the images around us.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
WRIT WRITER reveals a little-known battle of the Civil Rights Movement, led by an indigent, under-educated prisoner. Texas-born, Mexican American Fred Cruz came of age and found his life's calling in prison, where the sanctioned cruelty and brutality among inmates and guards moved him to fight the state prison system in the court of law.
|
|
Inside the Web site:
|
|
|
|
 |
|
the National Endowment for the Arts