POV

by Jennifer Dworkin

Premiere: April 21, 2004

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.

by Madeleine Gavin, Judith Katz, Gary Sunshine

Premiere: December 16, 2003

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.

by Elaine Epstein

Premiere: September 16, 2003

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.

by Charley Trujillo, Sonya Rhee

Premiere: September 3, 2003

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.

by Alex Rivera

Premiere: September 2, 2003

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.

by Arthur Dong

Premiere: August 26, 2003

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.

by Bill Lichtenstein, June Peoples

Premiere: August 19, 2003

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.

by Lisette Marie Flanary, Evann Siebens

Premiere: August 5, 2003

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. Now, after years of being shadowed by stereotypes, the hula is experiencing a rebirth that celebrates Hawaiian culture.

by Juan Carlos Zaldívar

Premiere: July 29, 2003

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.