Last night's special Veterans Day broadcast of POV's The Way We Get By prompted a tremendous response from PBS viewers — in fact, the most viewer emails, comments, tweets, etc. we've received in a very long time. Many U.S. service men and women and their families wrote to say that the film reminded them of the time they themselves met the Maine Troop Greeters, and how thankful they were that Joan Gaudet, Jerry Mundy, Bill Knight and the other greeters perform this important community service.
Here are a few of our favorite comments from POV viewers.
I would like to thank you for airing your program on the Bangor, Maine "Troop Greeters." It once again stirred the emotions I felt when I returned to US soil after many months of deployment to a war zone. To see those folks there at all hours of the morning there to give us hug, pats on the backs and fellowship after many intense and sometimes traumatic experiences that come from combat let me know: "I'm safe now among people who care about me!" It was one of the major positive memories that I called upon to deal with difficult days that haunt me to this day. I will never forget the wonderful woman whom made me sit down with a cell phone and call my mother, wife and children to let them know I was home safely! After the phone conversation with my mother (who spent many sleepless nights, and cried in relief that I was again home) the greeter allowed me to cry on her shoulder and gently wiped the tears from my eye only as a mother could do. That is a memory I will carry through out my life.
Read more viewer comments after the jump...
There is only about a week left until the launch of the 
Filmmaker Patrice O'Neill encouraged us to stream The Fire Next Time online in response to the recent violence on town halls about health care, so viewers could see how one community successfully dealt with rising tension and threats of extreme violence. Ever since the PBS broadcast of the 1995 film, 
I just got an email from the filmmakers of 
We were thrilled to read in last week's Publisher's Weekly that a multimedia feature commissioned for our POV's Borders series back in 2003 could be the 
Tonight's broadcast of The English Surgeon has received some great advance reviews in both the press and online. Blogger Michael Tully at the Hammer to Nail blog effused, "For all of you television watchers out there, do the right thing tonight and put your sitcoms, one-hour dramas, and sports on hold in order to take in the television premiere of Geoffrey Smith's The English Surgeon." Tully goes on to say that he found the film "inspiring, sobering, humorous, and, in the case of the film's climactic surgery, downright thrilling." Read his
Tonight's 
They had a lot to report. Since Made in L.A. aired on POV, the film has picked up a number of awards, including a News and Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Coverage of a News Story - Long Form (pictured right). The filmmakers have traveled the country and the world with the film, which has been screened in festivals in Spain, Israel, Brazil and Korea, among others. And 
Just a heads up that POV director Jennifer Maytorena Taylor will be joined by 
Five years ago, the POV staff was surprised to discover that the most polluted waterway in America was situated roughly two miles north of our office in New York City on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. What was even more surprising was that none of us had ever heard of this tiny estuary before, even though many of us lived in Brooklyn. We produced a multimedia story about it called "
Last summer I wrote a post riffing off of a 
Last September, POV broadcast 
Acclaimed musician Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong was the subject of not one, but two POV films over the years, Louie Bluie (1988) by Terry Zwigoff and 
Taj Mahal: "Well, I got an album of Howard's way back in the foggy past, probably some time in the 1970s. I can't remember whether I got the album first and then saw them [Howard with Carl Martin and Ted Bogan] play, or the other way around. But when I met them, I was down in Beckley, West Virginia at the John Henry Folk Festival. I just heard this sound coming across the way and I had to find out who it was. It was Howard, Bogan and Carl Martin. It was such a great, beautiful sound, with their voices all together. And I started hanging around with them. As a young black musician taking a different musical path [than some of my contemporaries] it was important to run into older players who had been on that path fifty years before me." 
James "Sparky" Rucker: "I've known Howard for over thirty years... and over that time we've performed in festivals together all over. I believe the first time I met him was at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 1973 or 1974... it was a rare situation for me to find another African-American musician at a folk festival; usually they just booked one and figured they had it covered. At the time Howard was up there playing with Bogan and Martin and I said to myself, 'I gotta meet those guys... Where do I sign up?' At these festivals they'd always put up all the musicians in one hotel and it was one continuous party and jam all night long. Howard and Ted [Bogan] were always the last ones to bed. I thought to myself, 'these guys must be younger than I thought!' They'd be sniping at each other, 'playing the dozens,' you know, ribbing each other back and forth and seeing who could take the joke.
Elijah Wald: "I sort of met Howard through 
Acclaimed musician Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong was the subject of not one, but two POV films over the years, Louie Bluie (1988) by Terry Zwigoff and 
Terry Zwigoff: "I came to meet Howard Armstrong because of an old 78 rpm record he made on the Bluebird label in 1934. I collected 78s of 1920s and '30s blues, jazz, and country music, and dabbled at playing mandolin, trying to learn from listening to these old records. I traded another collector out of his copy of “State Street Rag,” especially intrigued because it featured mandolin. I got the record home, and the more I listened to it, the more I realized just how remarkable it was — an incredible display of dazzling virtuosity and bravado, credited only to the pseudonym “Louie Bluie.” It took on a certain mystique to me. 
Leah Mahan: "Last week I had the pleasure of seeing Sweet Old Song at San Francisco's Castro Theatre, a grand Art Deco movie house from the 1920s. It was the opening film of the First International Film Festival on Aging. After the screening, a man in the audience was nice enough to stand and say he felt the film was a gift. For me, the time I spent with Howard Armstrong and Barbara Ward Armstrong while making the film was a gift that grows more precious with each passing year.
Ahmed has no hope of fulfilling his dream of becoming police officer because he can't read and write. How is the experience of the men in the film like or unlike the experiences of day laborers or undocumented workers in other places? How is their situation like or unlike other places where borders divide areas of wealth and poverty?
Reflecting on Israel's treatment of Palestinians, Muhammad says, "If you shut a cat in a room, won't it jump at you?" If you could recommend to the Israeli government one policy change that would improve the lives of the men in the film, what would you recommend and why? Assume that the Palestinian Authority was not constrained politically. Similarly, what one policy change would you recommend to the Palestinian Authority? 
Israeli director Ido Haar grew up in a village on the edge of a pine forest halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. When he went home to visit his parents, he often saw men running frantically across the highway. He says "the fear in their eyes haunted me, and I wanted to find out where they were running to and whom they were running from." 
Kieran Fitzgerald is the director of 
Houser says about Oñate, "It's not up to me to defend him
or accuse him." What is the role and responsibility of the artist to the community when creating public art?
Maurus Chino says, "Violence is violence; genocide is genocide, and there has to be recognition about what really happened." In response to suggestions that it is time for the Acoma to "let go" of the past or "get over it," a Native American man says, "Our city is thinking about putting up a statue
of an individual that massacred or tried to wipe us off the face of the eart... You're going to tell your
grandchildren, 'I remember 9/11.' Well, we remember Juan de Oñate." 
In response to criticism of the monument's subject, Conchita Lucero asks, "Which one of us hasn't had a benefit of the things that the Spanish brought?"
TV personality Bill O'Reilly dismisses the incident saying "accidents will happen in any military deployment," and challenges viewers asking, "What is the harm in giving us more protection by using the military the way they should be used? If you read the Constitution, the military's primary mandate is to protect the borders of the United States!" 
Congressman Tom Tancredo says of the shooting that such accidents have to be balanced against the need for national security. In what ways does drug interdiction contribute to national security? Is there a difference between "national interest" and "national security"? 
FBI Case Agent Jane Kelly says "If [the Marines] had been any domestic law enforcement personnel, sheriff's deputy, Texas Rangers, FBI, they would have gone to jail." What are the differences between law enforcement and the military? Which is better suited to patrol the border and why?
Bill Moyers Journal previewed POV's Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North last Friday on most PBS stations. Moyers examines racial inequality in America through the prisms of the legacy of slavery and the current socio-economic landscape, and interviews Douglas Blackmon of the Wall Street Journal, historical and cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson and economist Glenn C. Loury.
Speaking of 
Trying to hit the right balance between the frenetic pace of the interactive offerings and the (somewhat) slower pace of the film fest, I headed to the movies on Sunday to see the doc that piqued my personal interest the most. 
I laughed out loud when I read Tom's February 15 Doc Soup column — a 
I'm sad to report that the White Plume family, featured in 
Wrestling with Angels filmmaker 
According to 
Michael Moore's Sicko named Best Documentary at the 17th annual 
The 
Watch daily reports from the International Documentary Film Festival going on this week in Amsterdam, as well as trailers and shorts on 
Check out 
If you live in Milwaukee, you have two chances to catch 
The first video I stumbled across was produced by a group called 
In this podcast interview, Simon shares his thoughts about the role of empathy in documentaries, the trend of longer running times in non-fiction films — along with some ideas about the differences between successful shorts, one-hour and feature length stories. He also talks about licensing fees, budgets and the unique passion of documentary filmmakers.
