POV

Picture this: You're a high school social studies teacher, trying to raise issues of social injustice in a way that resonates with your students. How do you get them to connect with an issue in such a way that the ideas behind your lessons stay with them beyond the midterm?

A documentary might just do the trick.

Consider Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars (POV 2007), a film about a band of refugees who come together to fight back against the brutal civil war in their country with their only weapon: music. On the POV website, there's a lesson plan for the film, "Music as Social Protest," which taps into teenagers' strong connection to music. Students are offered the opportunity to hear how the Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars used music as a means of both cultural and political expression, and then asked to indentify social and political messages — and their implications — in music that means something to them.

At last week's annual Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference, held in New York City, POV and Independent Lens teamed up to present a number of documentaries that educators can use to illuminate global issues of poverty, war and injustice, among others. During the seminar, "The Real World in School: Using Social Issue Documentaries To Encourage Global Awareness In the Classroom," we discussed a variety of films with international themes and their attendant Web resources, such as lesson plans, discussion guides, roundtable discussions and educational podcasts, that are available for teachers to use in their classrooms — all for free. The lesson plans and website features generally highlight skill sets teachers want to target with interactive media:

Expose students to diverse views and voices

Develop media literacy skills

Promote creative expression and use of multimedia resources

Create opportunities for community connections and mentorship

Focus on the idea of experiential features: “walking in someone else’s shoes…”

Involve users in choosing their path through content

POV highlighted a few films from past seasons in addition to Sierra Leone, including The Judge and the General (2008), about Pinochet's legacy of human rights abuse in Chile, and The Boys of Baraka (2006), about an alternative school in Kenya for at-risk youth in Baltimore.

Independent Lens featured Iron Ladies of Liberia, about Liberia's first woman president, and Please Vote for Me, which documents a Chinese school's first election and asks what it could mean for democracy education in China.

For more on the films and the wealth of educational resources that are available, check out the links featured above. And if you're an educator, take advantage of POV's free lending library or sign up on the Independent Lens site to receive educational versions of selected Indie Lens titles.

And if you're a teacher who has used a documentary in the classroom, we'd love to hear from you! How did it go? How did your students respond? Is it something you've tried once, or do on an ongoing basis? Share your story and let us know!

TAGS: celebration of teaching and learning, community engagement, education, students

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Michael Moore scored a big buzz with the online release of his latest doc Slacker Uprising, a kind of concert film of his 2004 efforts to get out the (young Democratic) vote in advance of the election. The release, timed for the '08 contest, functions as a cautionary tale to "not get fooled again" — again and again.

The film is free to download after registering on the website with an email address. The inital online release was handled on the Slacker Uprising website as flash video on September 23, and as bit-torrent download — and judging from the initial download speeds (slow to none), the servers seem to have been overwhelmed by the response. By the end of the day, however, the bandwidth issues were sorted out, spreading out the task to a number of outlets, including Amazon, iTunes, Hypernia.com and Blip.tv. Interestingly, the formats varied from outlet to outlet, from a modest 400 MB QuickTime file from Hypernia.com, to a 1.2 GB monster HD file from iTunes.

Moore is not alone is offering media free online (check out hulu.com or Tom Roston's post on SnagFilms for some other free online media outlets), but he's better than most in getting attention for his work. But how is the film itself? Do you get what you pay for?

Not so much. The power of Moore's oratory is tempered somewhat by the familiarity of the territory the film covers — we've seen Moore's rabble-rousing before. And even if you haven't, you'll see him do it a dozen times throughout the course of the film, and after a dozen times, it's not so rousing anymore.

If you're sympathetic to the message, it's easy to understand what Moore's trying to do from the first minutes of the film; to those who aren't, simply hearing that message over and over probably won't make you change you mind. Repetition does not equal depth, and the message doesn't get deeper or more nuanced as the film goes on. The celebrity fellow travelers Moore takes along with him repeat the same point again and again: the electorate, roused from ignorance, should now know better than to elect Bush to a second term. But hearing that message from Gloria Steinem isn't dramatically different from hearing a similar message from Eddie Vedder or from Viggo Mortensen — three of the celebs Moore recruits for his rallies.

Ditto for the venues. Cities and towns, big and small, across twenty states — over sixty in all — tend to blur after awhile. You get the sense that when Moore shouts out the name of a city at the beginning of a speech, he's almost trying to remind himself where he is — there isn't much else to distinguish one event from another.

Moore is at his best when he's not running off a script. When heckled by a group of Republicans at a rally in West Virginia, his brilliance shines. "I have some good news for you Republicans," he tells them. "When we're in power, we promise not to treat you the way you've treated minorities for the last four years... Even though many of us in here see you as a deviant form of behavior, Republicanism, Right-wing-ism, we'll still let you marry each other."

To be fair, Moore's effort in the film is a national, not local, one; he's trying to influence the outcome of a presidential election. And though the effort comes up short, Moore's spin on the results of the 2004 election is to point out that the only demographic that Kerry won was the "young voter." The timing of the release of Slacker Uprising, just six weeks before the 2008 presidential election, offers Moore the chance to redeem his efforts — depending on the results this time around.

TAGS: election 2008, michael moore

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Roger Weisberg's Critical Condition, which airs this fall on POV, answers the question with the stories of four individuals who struggle with health problems without insurance: together with their loved ones, they are forced to confront difficult financial and emotional decisions as they fight for their lives. It's a problem that faces a sixth of the nation every day, as the ranks of the uninsured swell toward 50 million.

I'll be facilitating a sneak-preview screening and discussion at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, NY (about two hours north of New York City), Saturday, June 21, at 1:30 PM. If you're interested in attending, please do — the screening and discussion are free!

What's your position on health care policy? Come talk about it this weekend at Upstate Films, or post a comment below!

TAGS: healthcare, healthcare reform

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Have you been looking for a reason to take a trip to upstate New York this weekend? Look no further — here's the perfect opportunity to see a great film in one of the prettiest towns in the region.

Katrina Browne's Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North will have a special sneak-preview screening at the indie arthouse cinema Upstate Films, in Rhinebeck, New York, this coming Saturday, June 14, at 1:30 p.m. The screening is free, and will feature a Q&A with Traces co-producer Elizabeth Delude-Dix. Rhinebeck is located about two hours north of New York City.

In the film, Browne and nine other descendants of the DeWolf family grapple with their ancestors' legacy as the largest slave trading family in U.S. They embark on a journey to retrace the Triangle Trade: from their old hometown in Rhode Island to slave forts in Ghana to sugar plantation ruins in Cuba. Step by step, they uncover the vast extent of Northern complicity in slavery while also stumbling through the minefield of contemporary race relations. In this bicentennial year of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade, Traces of the Trade offers powerful new perspectives on the black/white divide.

If you'll be in Rhineback for the event, you'll also have a chance to see another POV film that Upstate will be screening: Yung Chang's Up The Yangtze is about the Three Gorges Dam Project, the largest hydroelectric dam project in history — and life along the Yangtze River, which it will change forever.

How far would you travel for a great film? Let us know below!

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Calling all crossword puzzlers and Scrabble fans!

You know who are — you can't get enough word play. You do crossword puzzles on the train, play games of Scrabble in cafes or in the park, or on Scrabulous. Maybe you've read Marc Romano's Crossworld or Stephen Fatzis' Word Freaks, recent books on the worlds of competitive crossword puzzling, and Scrabble, respectively.

But whether you're a hardcore word player, or have only a passing interest, you probably love — or at least appreciate — anagrams: the beauty, the wit, the puzzling satisfaction of how it all fits together. In that case, here's a great little film for you: POV's latest entry in the Online Short Film Festival, Ars Magna, by Cory Kelley. The seven-mintue gem, presented in glorious full-screen flash (just click the little black full-screen icon at the bottom of the player), is a little loving tribute to one man's obsession with his ars magna, anagrams.

Watch it now, and let us know what you think!

Looking for more word play? Check out the word-lover's website mentioned in the film, Wordsmith.org. And if this little short merely whets your appetite for more word-play docs, take a look at Wordplay, by Patrick Creadon, a funny, affectionate ode to the New York Times Crossword Puzzle, or Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo's Word Wars, about the "tiles and tribulations" of competitive Scrabble. Both are zippy and fun. You can test your anagramming skills while watching, unscrambling the words as the characters on screen do. Do you have any other favorite books, sites or docs on the subject? Let us know — post a comment below!

TAGS: online video, shorts

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In light of Earth Day yesterday, the environment is on everyone's minds. Or is it? How prominent are environmental stories the day after Earth Day?



There's no shortage of docs sounding the environmental crisis alarm. By all accounts we're half way to Armageddon, with the environmental situation so precarious only the swiftest about-face in energy and environmental policy can hope to save us.

Envirodocs are usually long on alarm and short on solutions. David Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth, Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack's Crude Awakening, and Gregory Greene's The End of Suburbia are all great movies for getting the message out, and important films to see. But the reviews for these films start with "frightening" and end with "terrifying"; An Inconvenient Truth's promo says it's the scariest film you'll see this year. That might be true, but is all that fear leading to results or paralysis? Fear-mongering may work for winning elections, but how effective is it in motivating global environmental policy change? Does the environmental crisis become so overwhelming in these films that global change seems hopeless, and personal change, futile?

Well there is hope out there. I can think of two envirodocs that serve up some hope along with crisis — at least as a side dish. Leonardo DiCaprio's 11th Hour, out last November, tries to find solutions to the environmental crisis as an integral part of its mission, and here on our own blog, Judith Helfand wrote about how she and co-director Dan Gold have been able to leverage the message of their film Everything's Cool to spur concrete change.

Are there any films you can think of that offer solutions or hope to environmental perils? Any places where envirodocs are used to change habits, locally or globally?

We'd love to here about it. Post a comment below!

TAGS: environment

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To all those who rail against the media for overzealous reporting, taking advantage of those in crisis, or using underhanded methods to get a cheap scoop, meet your new hero, Alan Abel, whose lifelong pursuit has been to hang the media out to dry. Preying on mainstream media's insatiable thirst for the lurid, the perverse, and the wacky, Abel has gotten the better of every major news outlet in the country.

Take, for example, Walter Cronkite's seven-minute piece for CBS News in 1962 on Abel's "S.I.N.A.," the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, which purportedly sought to clothe naked animals. Meant as satire in response to media censorship, many prominent journalists simply didn't get the joke.

A doc on the self-styled professional media hoaxer, Abel Raises Cain, by Abel's daughter Jenny Abel and Jeff Hockett, is out on DVD this week. Like a reverse Jon Stewart, Abel has been creating fake news that gets reported as truth since the late 1950s, like the story he staged about a fake lottery winner in the early '90s, or, more infamously, when he posed as Jim Rogers, a spokesman for Citizens Against Breastfeeding. He racked up some 200 interviews when he brought his message to the 2000 Republican National Convention — it makes you wonder, was the real message about the perversity of breastfeeding in public, or the perversity of a media so ravenous for a lurid scoop, they'll take a media con man at his word?

Some of the film's whimsical pranks are also inadvertently timely, like the classic 1964 hoax Abel staged with his wife, Jeanne, as the voice of presidential candidate Yetta Bronstein. She did hundreds of interviews promoting her slogan "Vote for Yetta and things will get betta!" to promote a "platform" that included issues like taking members of Congress off salary and putting them on straight commission — an idea whose time has come.

NPR's On The Media has an interview with Alan and Jenny Abel on the meaning of his life's work and its effect on his daughter. It's worth a listen, not only for the news analysis, but for the delicious audio clips from the film.

Fake reporting on real news, or real reporting on fake news? Alan Abel, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert — who's your favorite media prankster? What's your favorite media prank? Post a comment below!

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As we blogged a couple weeks ago in our Arthouse Confidential post about independent theaters, there's a lot of cool stuff going on at local arthouse cinemas around the country. If you're lucky enough to live near one, you can take advantage of all sorts of great opportunities to see films that may be otherwise difficult to catch on the big screen — and maybe even meet the filmmakers. Even if you don't live near one, it can be a fun excuse for a little excursion. If you're in the New York area on March 16, consider a trip up to Upstate Films in Rhinebeck — about two hours from NYC — where you can catch a screening of newly-minted Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, including a Q&A with director Alex Gibney. It's sure to be a great opportunity to ask questions about the film.

Do you know of any other cool events coming up at a local independent theater near you? Leave a comment here to share it with the POV blog community — and if you have suggestions for theaters we should write about, please let us know!

TAGS: academy awards, iraq war

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One summer weekend about 10 years ago, a friend and I were visiting a couple we knew in upstate New York. We wanted to catch a movie before we headed back to New York City that Sunday afternoon, so we asked what the options were. Our friends mentioned the local multiplex, but suggested that if we were interested in checking out some independent fare at a really great theater, we should try Upstate Films, across the river in Rhinebeck. So over the Rhinecliff bridge we went (enjoying a spectacular, panoramic view of the Hudson along the way), into the terminally charming town of Rhinebeck. There lies the Upstate, with two screening rooms, comfy seats, good projection and great snacks — including local brownies and apple cider — a winning combination, and a truly satisfying way to see a film.

Oh, and the films! We saw a quirky Scandinavian movie called Smilla's Sense of Snow. I remember enjoying the contrast between warm, verdant Rhinebeck, and cold, snowy Copenhagen — a delicious disconnect indeed. The film had that hand-picked quality, and just sitting in the theater, I knew that I was in the hands of people who really love film.

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Environmental issues are a hot topic this election year. David Nanasi caught up with POV alum Judith Helfand (A Healthy Baby Girl, POV 1997 and True Lives 2005, and The Uprising of '34, POV 1995) and Daniel B. Gold to hear more about what they've been doing to support their latest film, Everything's Cool.

Both Everything's Cool and your previous film, Blue Vinyl, have centered on environmental themes. What drew you to the subject?

Judith: Sometimes stories and themes choose us. Personally, my focus on the environment as a filmmaker is the result of an unnatural turn of events — when I was 25, I was diagnosed with cancer from in utero exposure to the anti-miscarriage drug and synthetic hormone diethylstilbestrol (DES), which my mom took when she was pregnant with me in 1963. Within minutes of my diagnosis, the "environment" became personal. It was not out there in "nature," but in here — in our bodies, in our homes and apartments, inextricably linked to our relationships with our mothers and fathers, in our ability or inability to reproduce, parent and protect our young.

That experience led me to make A Healthy Baby Girl, an autobiographical film that reframed the toxics issue into a story about family, and how one generation unwittingly poisoned the next.

That film naturally led to its sequel Blue Vinyl, which I was truly fortunate to co-direct and co-produce with Daniel Gold. Dan also shot the film and received a Sundance Excellence in Cinematography award. I think the cinematic and political challenges we faced with Blue Vinyl — and the great feeling that comes from making a movie that has the narrative capacity to both entertain and be in service of a movement — inspired us to tackle global warming, which Dr. Heidi Cullen, the Weather Channel climatologist who is featured in Everything's Cool calls the "mother of all environmental problems."

The challenge is at the heart of the global warming messaging problem, and is in fact at the heart of the story we tell — it is what animates our characters: how do you collapse the future (the real-life threat of an ever-warming world and our short-sighted addiction to oil) into the present and make the message urgent enough to take action before it's too late?

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TAGS: activism, behind the lens, diy, environmental, film festivals, healthcare, how to, online video, p.o.v. alums, youtube

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Eyes on the Prize is the most comprehensive — and moving — civil rights documentary series ever made. The landmark production by Blackside — which runs a formidable 14 hours in total — was first aired on PBS in two parts in 1987 and 1990. The series traces the Civil Rights Movement from the '50s through the '80s, with particular attention to the movement's milestones, including the Emmett Till case, Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery bus boycott, the 1963 March on Washington, the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, riots in Detroit and Watts, and Attica prison. There are segments on the major figures of the period, including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton.

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TAGS: civil rights, education, malcolm x, martin luther king jr., pbs, rosa parks

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From now until New Year's day, the POV Blog will be posting about great documentaries from the POV archives. Rent one at the local video store or via Netflix to watch with your friends and family during the holiday season.

Looking for a quirky "demolition-derby love story" for your holiday movie rental list? Try Jesse Moss' Speedo!

This award-winning documentary looks at the promising racing career and troubled family life of Ed "Speedo" Jager, one of the nation's top demolition-derby drivers. Trapped in a failing marriage, Speedo channels life's frustrations onto the track, hoping to parlay his talents into a "real" racing career. The film captures Speedo's collisions and confrontations during one tumultuous year as he struggles to achieve his dreams on the track and succeed as a husband, a father and a man. When he falls for Liz, a racetrack official from New Jersey, his life takes a surprising turn.

Here's the complete synopsis:

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TAGS: dvd

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From now until New Year's day, the POV Blog will be posting about great documentaries from the POV archives. Rent one at the local video store or via Netflix to watch with your friends and family during the holiday season.

If you're someplace cold this holiday, and are already looking forward to warmer weather, check out Mel Stuart's live concert film Wattstax (POV 2004), filmed in the summer of 1972 in L.A.'s open-air Memorial Coliseum. The benefit concert, staged by the legendary Stax recording label, on the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots, drew 90,000 people for an incredible musical lineup. As time went by, it became known as the Black Woodstock.

The POV Wattstax website includes a 1972 primer with a little context on the film for those too young to remember, a roundtable on the cultural and musical currents in the film, and soundtrack samples. Check it out!

Here's the full synopsis:

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TAGS: dvd, music

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When Netflix's '"Watch Now" feature, which allows users* to watch* movies* instantly*, launched earlier this year, there was some excitement, until all those asterisks reared their ugly heads. And rear they did, and quickly, which is always how things happen on the Internet. Though the promise was great, the delivery proved less so: "users" means only PC users (and then it's recommended only those 1.5 GHz or faster with 1 GB of RAM or more); "watch"-ing is limited to 5-48 hours monthly, depending on your Netflix plan; "movies" is a small subset of the 90,000+ titles offered by Netflix — less than 10%; and "now" requires Windows Media Player 11 be installed, as well as additional Netflix Digital Rights Management (DRM ) software, and a decently fast broadband connection (1.5 mbps recommended, a notch higher than the baseline DSL service). If you can overcome these hurdles — and there's a clamor from the many who can't — the service actually works rather well. The streaming quality is surprisingly good, and though the selection is by no means exhaustive, there is still plenty to see. For those looking for an online resource for great docs, Netflix's "Watch Now" is worth keeping in mind.

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TAGS: netflix, technology

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Just coming back from seeing Jessica Yu's (POV's In the Realms of the Unreal) new doc Protagonist and want to know more about her other work? Rented Sicko and want to hear Michael Moore's opinions on healthcare and the '08 election? Can't stop thinking about the Grey Gardens musical you saw last season and want to know more about the Maysles brothers? You could turn to Google for help.

Want a different place to turn for insight? Turn on the (online) radio. Scores of stations around the country regularly interview doc newcomers and legend alike, and many offer the discussions on their websites for live listening or on-the-go podcast downloads. Here's a smattering for your consideration.

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TAGS: albert maysles, healthcare, michael moore, music, npr, radio

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