Vote for the Audience Award
“It’s so rewarding for me, for my production team to find the audience so in love with our hero, Cheryl Haworth, and for the film to receive recognition from such a broad and wonderful base as the Indy Lens audience.”— Julie Wyman, filmmaker, Strong!,
one of the winners of the 2012 Independent Lens Audience Award
“It has been such a terrific experience to share our story of the most globalized human rights struggle in history with the Independent Lens audience and to have them honor us with the audience award.”— Connie Field, filmmaker, Have You Heard From Johannesburg,
one of the winners of the 2012 Independent Lens Audience Award
At film festivals, the award that often matters most to filmmakers and their subjects alike is the Audience Award. They know they’ve struck a chord when the audience applauds their efforts.
The Independent Lens audience has the opportunity to stand up and be counted by rating each film throughout the season. At the end of the season, the highest rated film is honored.
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Spring Films
To many African Americans, soul food is sacrament, ritual, and a key expression of cultural identity. But does this traditional cuisine do more harm to health than it soothes the soul?
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Raised in the mountains of Tennessee, Wayne White found success as one of the creators of the TV show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which led to more work designing some of the most arresting and iconic images in pop culture.
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There is an ongoing culture war raging in Texas, and it is a tempest in a textbook. The state’s Board of Education has been engaged in a pitched, years-long battle over what belongs (and doesn’t) in a public school textbook with the next generation’s education held hostage in the struggle.
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Whitney Young was one of the most powerful, controversial, and largely forgotten leaders of the civil rights movement, who took the fight directly to the powerful white elite, gaining allies in business and government.
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Ai Weiwei is arguably the most internationally celebrated Chinese artist of the modern era. But at heart, he’s a troublemaker who challenges the government — often done with a wink, but not without serious risk to his own freedom and personal safety.
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Robin Charboneau, a magnetic Oglala Sioux woman in North Dakota, struggles to negotiate single motherhood, tenuous sobriety, and a labyrinthine justice system to emerge intact after years of domestic abuse.
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The war on drugs is the longest conflict in U.S. history — and the least winnable. It has had a particularly destructive, devastating impact on black America. And still, drugs are cheaper, stronger, and more plentiful than ever.
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Follow the fascinating evolution and legacy of Wonder Woman. From the birth of the comic book superheroine in the 1940s to today, see how popular representations of powerful women often reflect society's anxieties about women's liberation.
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Follow the story of former President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, a man confronting a problem greater than any other world leader has ever faced: the literal survival of his country and everyone in it as the rise in sea level threatens to submerge the islands.
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Thousands of migrants have perished in recent years while trying to cross the unforgiving Sonora desert in search of a better life in the United States. The film gives a face to some of the dead, and follows them on their long journey home.
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Two strangers — an aging white man and a young Chinese woman — pursue a marriage brokered by the Internet. They get more than they bargained for when she moves to America to be his bride in this quirky, appealing documentary.
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Can the Motor City rise from its ashes? A dynamic cluster of local innovators, entrepreneurs, and proud, self-proclaimed "hustlers” are poised to resurrect Detroit. The result could be a radically new city for the postindustrial age.
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The most shameful and best-kept secret in the U.S. Military? The epidemic of rape and sexual assault within the ranks. An American female soldier in a combat zone is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire.
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Amlan Ganguly, a lawyer-turned social entrepreneur, has sewn hope in the poorest neighborhoods of Calcutta by empowering children to become leaders in improving health, health, transforming their communities for the better.
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Fall Films
From the day the GM factory closes through a showdown with national resonance at the state capitol, As Goes Janesville traces the impact of the economic crisis on the people of Janesville, Wisconsin.
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Love Free or Die is about a man whose two defining passions the world cannot reconcile: his love for God and for his partner Mark. The film is about church and state, love and marriage, faith and identity — and one man’s struggle to dispel the notion that God’s love has limits.
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Jordanian wife and mother Rafea is leaving home for the first time — to attend a college in India that is training rural women to become solar energy engineers.
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Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) presents his examination of how the gap between rich and poor Americans has become so stark, as illustrated by this famous boulevard in New York City.
the National Endowment for the Arts