Related Films
Up Heartbreak Hill follows two Native teens torn between the lure of opportunities outside their remote reservation community and the cultural ties that bind them to home.
As Chögyal Namkhai Norbu rises as a Buddhist teacher in the West, his son Yeshi, recognized as the reincarnation of a Buddhist master, breaks away to embrace the modern world.
I'm Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful
Jonathan Demme’s portrait of post-Katrina New Orleans tells the story of Carolyn Parker, a lifelong resident of the Lower Ninth Ward, who is fighting for the right to rebuild her home and community.
From a snowy town in northern Michigan to the mountains of Afghanistan, follow the four-year journey of childhood friends who join the National Guard.
In Finland, the sauna is a national obsession - a place to come together and sweat out not only the grime of contemporary life, but also grief, hopes, joys and memories.
All Films in This Topic
Short is sweet as POV presents brief documentary encounters — including an Academy Award nominee, a Student Academy Award winner and the return of StoryCorps.
Up Heartbreak Hill follows two Native teens torn between the lure of opportunities outside their remote reservation community and the cultural ties that bind them to home.
In the Atacama Desert, earthly and celestial quests meld. Archaeologists dig for ancient civilizations, women search for their loved ones and astronomers scan the skies for new galaxies.
As Chögyal Namkhai Norbu rises as a Buddhist teacher in the West, his son Yeshi, recognized as the reincarnation of a Buddhist master, breaks away to embrace the modern world.
I'm Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful
Jonathan Demme’s portrait of post-Katrina New Orleans tells the story of Carolyn Parker, a lifelong resident of the Lower Ninth Ward, who is fighting for the right to rebuild her home and community.
Rachel P. Salazar and Ruben P. Salazar were living 9,000 miles apart, unaware of each other's existence, until a stroke of luck brought them together.
StoryCorps Shorts: September 11 Stories
In this special collection of shorts from the Peabody Award-winning StoryCorps, family and loved ones remember the people they lost in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
On September 11, 2001, the Vigiano brothers responded to the call from the World Trade Center, and both were killed while saving others. Their father remembers them and copes with his loss.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Michael Trinidad called his ex-wife, Monique Ferrer, from the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower to say goodbye.
Think you know about the people who square dance? Think again. Not So Square follows as community of dancers who realize that square dance is a fading art form.
A one-hour collection of documentary shorts by established and emerging filmmakers, including: Big Birding Day, Flawed, Miss Devine, No More Questions, Six Weeks and Tiffany.
Six weeks is the period in which parents of newborn babies in Poland may decide to give up a child for adoption.
In Racing Dreams, three "tweens" dream of becoming NASCAR drivers. A humorous and heartbreaking portrait of racing, young love and family struggle.
Every spring, China’s cities are plunged into chaos as 130 million migrant workers journey to their home villages for the New Year in the world’s largest human migration.
Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into the breathtaking and often dangerous mountains for summer pasture.
My Perestroika is an intimate look at the last generation of Soviet children searching for their places in today’s Moscow.
Beverly Morris tells of her ongoing struggle to hold on to the most contested object in her divorce — the Tiffany lamp, in this animated short.
The story of a long-distance relationship with a man whose profession - plastic surgery - gives the woman plenty of fodder.
Her passport said she was Cha Jung Hee. She knew she was not. So began a 40-year deception for a Korean adoptee who came to the United States in 1966.
The daughter of two Mexican immigrants reveals how much she saw of her parents' lives as a child — and the inspiration she drew from their struggles.
Studs Terkel talks about what has been lost in modern life and where he sees hope for our future.
Avery is one of three children adopted by a Jewish lesbian couple in Brooklyn. Though it may not look typical, Avery’s is like most families—until she writes to her birth mother.
What is it like to be torn from your Chinese foster family, put on a plane with strangers and wake up in a new country, family and culture?
Can dreams predict the future? A filmmaker explores dreams, neuroscience and the realm of spirituality in this fascinating investigation of the human subconscious.
The last bottler in Brooklyn fends off the supermarket seltzer take-over and honors this simple drink's place in history.
This four-minute animated short from the producers of StoryCorps features Joshua Littman, a 12-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome, interviewing his mother, Sarah.
In an intimate and heartbreaking glimpse into a marriage, this animated short witnesses true love as it braves the finality of loss. Watch now »
This deeply affecting and simple short shows workers cleaning out a house that has been foreclosed upon. What does an empty house say that was once a home?
POV features three films about adoption — Wo Ai Ni (I Love You) Mommy by Stephanie Wang-Breal; Off and Running by Nicole Opper; and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee by Deann Borshay Liem — and has launched a national public awareness campaign to examine issues facing adoptees and families who choose to adopt. Watch all three films online through November, 2010.
In 2012, StoryCorps returns to POV for a third season of its Peabody Award-winning storytelling. Watch animated shorts from past seasons.
Past and present collide as the daughter of Plutarco Elías Calles, a revolutionary general who became Mexico’s president in 1924, reflects on his legacy.
Bye follows Jayden, a two and half year old diagnosed with autism, through his first months of school in the Bronx.
Charles Curtis Blackwell, a semi-blind artist, lost most of his eyesight in an accident during his youth, but this adversity has only heightened his artistic gifts.
William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
In this intimate biography, Kunstler's daughters seek to recover the real story of what made their late father one of the most beloved, and hated, lawyers in America.
A poetic look at some lesser-known aspects of America’s favorite drink: the industry’s spiritual underpinnings, politics and the struggle of independent farmers.
This 2010 Oscar-nominated film lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that's been hidden from the American consumer.
Scaredycat takes as a point of departure the beating of the filmmaker at the hands of a gang of young men who called themselves "The Portland Riders."
Nine-year old Jyeshria wants a bullet proof vest — and she's dead serious. In Richmond, California, children don't walk to school; not if they want to live past the age of 18.
A reflection on a mother's resolute love as she confronts the fragile promise of life through the eyes of her son.
Over the past five years, a group of senior citizens has made history by greeting over 900,000 American troops at a tiny airport in Bangor, Maine.
Rocky Otoo is the sassy teenage daughter of Ghanaian parents. After she rebels against her mother's rule in the Bronx, she flees to her father, a chief in Ghana.
When a guitarist suffers a brain hemorrhage onstage, doctors doubt he will emerge from a coma. The story of a family's astonishing struggle in the face of tragedy.
Puerto Rican-American rapper Hamza Pérez pulled himself out of street life 12 years ago and became a Muslim. Now he must confront the realities of the post-9/11 world.
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
A determined group of teenagers return to New Orleans two years after Hurricane Katrina to finish high school. Since Katrina, one out of five teens live without parents.
Filmmaker Stewart Copeland explores his relationship with his late mother and the distance spaces between memory and history. (Short film shown with Bronx Princess.)
Over the course of a school year, two public school principals with unique styles and similar passions make a difference in the lives of their students.
An unblinking look inside a British school for emotionally disturbed kids captures what happens when a community of determined adults envelops them in love rather than force.
The security wall being built by Israel on the West Bank has isolated a nursing home, leaving its residents to face old age in the throes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
What happens if you get sick and are one of 47 million Americans without health insurance?
How much would you sacrifice to survive? When Chicago filmmaker Joanna Rudnick tested positive for the "breast cancer gene" at age 27, she knew the information could save her life, but she didn't know what to do about it.
"Ars Magna," which means "great art" in Latin, is an anagram of the word "anagrams." This Emmy-nominated short enters the obsessive and fascinating world of anagrams. (8 minutes)
First-time filmmaker Katrina Browne makes a troubling discovery — her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history.
In one of documentary cinema's more remarkable enterprises, 49 Up is the seventh in a series of films that has profiled a group of English children every seven years, beginning in 1964.
A clash of tradition and modernity puts a Native father and son at odds in the remote village of Old Crow, 80 miles above the Arctic Circle.
Ralph Arlyck goes back to San Francisco to find out what happened to the precocious four-year-old he'd met during the height of the '60s.
Revolution '67 is an illuminating account of events too often relegated to footnotes in U.S. history — the black urban rebellions of the 1960s.
Two Somali Bantu families are transported by relief agencies from years of civil war and refugee life to settle in Springfield, Massachusetts and Atlanta, Georgia.
Size matters: Filmmaker Steve Delano explores his identity as a dwarf with heart and humor. Brimming with bright colors, bold images, surreal reenactments, and an original score composed from Steven's very own mutated DNA sequence, No Bigger than a Minute finds the dignity of dwarfs in an exposé of the delightful, fulfilling and sometimes shocking realities that define a tip-toe life.
The Boys of Baraka follows four boys from Baltimore to rural Kenya, where a teacher-student ratio of one to five, a strict disciplinary program and a comprehensive curriculum form the core of an extraordinary journey in their transformation to men.
The term "working poor" should be an oxymoron. For 30 million Americans, it's reality. Waging a Living chronicles the day-to-day battles of four low-wage earners.
In this intimate portrait, Jan Krawitz revisits some of the subjects who appeared in her 1982 award-winning film Little People. Through a prism of 'then and now,' she contrasts the youth of these individuals affected with dwarfism with their lives 20 years later. From navigating everyday life to dating and marrying, they confront physical and emotional challenges with humor, grace and sometimes, frustration.
Omar and Pete are determined to change their lives. Both have been in and out of prison for more than 30 years — never out longer than six months. This intimate and penetrating film follows these two longtime African-American friends after what they hope will be their final release.
What legacy is passed down to generations when a family is a giant tobacco producer? Filmmaker Ross McElwee (Sherman's March, Time Indefinite — P.O.V. 1994), whose great-grandfather created the famous Bull Durham brand in his native North Carolina, takes viewers on an autobiographical journey across that state's social, economic and psychological tobacco terrain.
A Song for Daniel compares a routine day of two nine-year-old boys — one living in Baghdad and the other, born and raised in New York City — and offers a profound examination of culture and place through the eyes of two Iraqi youth living on opposite sides of the world.
Filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt and his newborn daughter, Ella, are the main protagonists as the filmmaker documents the first 18 months of her life, showing the progression from newborn to infant to toddler (and budding filmmaker herself).
The Academy Award-nominated Hardwood is a deeply personal filmic journey by director Hubert Davis, the son of former Harlem Globetrotter Mel Davis. Mel, now a coach for young basketball players in Vancouver, fell in love at first sight with Hubert's mother, a white woman, at a time when racism seemed to make their union impossible.
A Vietnam veteran who has suffered a stroke tries to recapture his war experience for his children through photography and moving images.
On Independence Day at Stern Ranch in central California, 77-year-old solar-energy pioneer Bob Stern finds out he is seriously ill — possibly dying. Part King Lear, part Western, The Self-Made Man is a true-life family drama about a controversial issue: Should we control how we die?
A self-described "good Southern Baptist girl," 15-year-old Texan Shelby Knox becomes an unlikely advocate for comprehensive sex education. Watch now »
Trapped in a failing marriage, demolition-derby driver Ed "Speedo" Jager channels life's frustrations onto the track, hoping to parlay his talents into a "real" racing career.
In the late 1990s, three victims of police brutality made headlines around the country: Amadou Diallo, the young West African man whose killing sparked intense public protest; Anthony Baez, killed in an illegal choke-hold; and Gary (Gidone) Busch, a Hasidic Jew shot and killed outside his Brooklyn home. Every Mother's Son tells of the victims' three mothers who came together to demand justice and accountability.
Prior to the 20th century, most Americans prepared their dead for burial with the help of family and friends, but today most funerals are part of a multimillion-dollar industry.
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.
What I Want My Words To Do To You
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.
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.
What happens when a father goes against the grain to uphold the democratic rights of his son? Meet Larry Tannahill. He was the only parent in Lockney, TX to object to the school board's new mandatory drug-testing policy.
Flag Wars is a poignant account of the politics and pain of gentrification. Working-class black residents in Columbus, Ohio fight to hold on to their homes. Realtors and gay home-buyers see fixer-uppers. The clashes expose prejudice and self-interest on both sides, as well as the common dream to have a home to call your own.
Liliana Luis is a Mexican-American teenager rushing headlong into the turbulence of puberty as she tries to finish high school. The saga of the Luis family started in P.O.V.'s 2000 film, La Boda, continues in this story of one family's drive towards a better future.
Explore the traumatic legacy of blame, guilt and self-doubt suffered by a generation of mothers who were told they were responsible for their child's autism and learn more about this increasingly common disorder.
Welcome to the Midwest, land of visionary farmers like Milford Beeghly. Hybrid combines interviews, animation and rare dry wit to create a meditative portrait.
On her ninth wedding anniversary, Kim's perfect life is shattered when she learns that her husband Steve has been having affairs with men. Three years later, she discovers she is HIV-positive.
5 Girls presents a real-life portrait of growing up female today through the eyes of five thoughtful and articulate young women. Join Corrie, Toby, Amber, Aisha and Haibinh as they take us on a journey through their teenage years.
In the Light of Reverence is a beautifully rendered account of the struggles of the Lakota in the Black Hills, the Hopi in Arizona and the Wintu in California to protect their sacred sites.
Remember high school? Renowned filmmaker Frederick Wiseman's classic documentary High School renders this nearly universal American experience in unforgettable terms.
As shown in the experiences of several women and their families, the new welfare system, with its recent controversial reforms, may make it easier to ignore rather than confront the complexities of poverty amidst plentitude.
In vivid vérité detail, My American Girls: A Dominican Story captures the joys and struggles over a year in the lives of the Ortiz family, first generation immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Matthews' film captures the rewards — and costs — of pursuing the American dream.
What's in a name? Berliner dives headfirst into the American name pool and discovers the power and mystery embedded in every name.
"To be physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight" - this is the Boy Scout pledge. Since 1910, millions of boys have joined. But today, if you are openly gay, you can't. A 12-year-old Boy Scout named Steven Cozza launches a campaign to overturn the Boy Scouts' anti-gay policy.
A young Korean girl grows up with an American family: but years later, Deann Borshay Liem discovers that her Korean mother is still very much alive.
New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” motto acquires tense contemporary meaning when abortion politics play out in a quiet New England town.
There are over one million Gypsies living in America today, and most people don’t know anything about them. It is one man’s obsessive pursuit of justice and dignity that led filmmaker Jasmine Dellal into their hidden thousand-year-old culture.
With a roll of the dice, 75 year-old Lou stakes everything to retire and start a new life in Las Vegas. But beneath the glittering surface of the city, Lou discovers a world quite different from his dreams.
After 40 years, Silvia Morini returns to the palatial house of her youth in Cuba, where her nostalgia for a pre-Castro world confronts modern Cuban reality. Yet as Silvia discovers an evolving Cuba, she herself undergoes a surprising change-not entirely altering her political outlook but becoming, as she puts it, "more human."
In the coal-mining heart of Appalachia's "poverty belt," where residents have felt alternately aided and assaulted by media exposure, the 1967 murder of filmmaker Hugh O'Connor still stirs strong community feelings.
Elizabeth is marrying Artemio in Nuevo Leon, Mexico and you are cordially invited to the wedding. Meet these two young people from the U.S.-Mexican border region whose lives are framed by the challenges of migrant life.
The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez
A son of Puerto Rican revolutionaries learns of his parents' past. A chronicle of his turbulent journey of self-discovery, offering a striking account of the costs of fiercely held convictions and the binding force of a son's love.
The battle cry on both sides is "religious freedom" when a Mississippi mother takes a stand on prayer in her children's public school. While most of Pontotoc County rally together to preserve a cornerstone of their faith, Lisa Herdahl is a lone voice calling for separation of church and state.
Fifty years after World War II, Japanese Americans recall their years in the internment camps of WWII. From the exuberant recollections of a typical teenager, to the simmering rage of citizens forced to sign loyalty oaths, filmmaker Emiko Omori renders a poetic and illuminating picture of a deeply troubling chapter in American history.
Art Arfons is an American original. Without a high school diploma, engineers, or even blueprints, this small town Midwestern prodigy of practical mechanics designed, built, drove and broke land speed records in a series of supercharged automobiles he dubbed The Green Monster. In this coming-of-age story for the senior set, director David Finn offers an unvarnished portrait of a flinty, single-minded, slyly charming, obsessive man literally driven to continue his race against time long after he has established himself as a living legend.
If ever someone has embodied the maxim, age is a state of mind, it's 90-year-old Christine Burton. After decades of personal struggle, she reinvented her own life at age 80 by founding Golden Threads, an international network for older gay women.
This winner of the 1997 Sundance Freedom of Expression Award follows filmmaker Macky Alston from New York to the South, as he embarks on an excavation to unearth the history of his white slave-owning family, and explores the link to the black families that shared his name.
A selection of hypnotically engaging short films by and about women offers vivid and lyrical pictures of joy, endurance and inspiration.
When does life become a fate worse than death? In this age of medical "miracles," increasing numbers of doctors, patients and their families are forced to face this question.
Half comedy, half horror story, this disturbing film focuses on several spokesmen for America's survivalist movement as they reveal the way they think, the way they play, and the way they prepare for the next world war.
"Everybody has a Barbie story...but the stories are really about us," says reporter turned filmmaker Susan Stern as she rips the roof off Barbie's "Dreamhouse" and explores the history and fantasy behind this unlikely cultural icon.
Arthur Campbell, Jr. doesn't want your sympathy, he just wants what most people do: a living wage, a meaningful social life, a few good laughs and the means to get around.
"There's nobody that's not going to get old — unless they die," says Enola Maxwell at the beginning of this engaging and refreshing film. Through the eyes of six women, aged 65-75, we are treated to a variety of new perspectives on aging, along with such complex and emotional subjects as changing body image, sexuality, family life and dealing with death.
She's a straight-A student; he's trying to leave gang life behind. A camcorder becomes both witness and confidante for these markedly singular yet utterly typical teens as they self-document the trials of growing up too fast and too soon in urban America.
When filmmaker David Zeiger decides to film his son Danny's high school band for a year, he gets a crash course in love, life and marching in formation. This poignant portrait celebrates the hormones, havoc and hope of the teen years and ultimately allows Zeiger to deepen his connection with one son, while paying tribute to the loss of another.
Can a good person grow tobacco? As the cigarette war rages, small American tobacco farmers have been the often overlooked casualties. Dynamic filmmaking duo Eren McGinnis and Christine Fugate travel across Kentucky to meet the families who have been growing this crop for generations, as they face the consequences of this fuming controversy in their own backyards.
When forty-something filmmaker Anne Makepeace "can't get pregnant the fun way," she turns the camera on herself, her husband and their idiosyncratic siblings and embarks on a tender and tumultuous journey through the complex maze of contemporary fertility science.
Why is the mere mention of Blacks and Jews in the same breath so riddled with complexity?
This POV classic film offers a rare and disarming peek into the very real lives of teenage girls in South Philly in the early 1990s.
Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary
Teacher/filmmaker Laura Simon takes us inside her school's classrooms and faculty lounge, where a California law will deny public education to the children of undocumented immigrants.
Battling personal grief, corporate power, and her mother's guilt, Helfand turns the camera on herself and her family to document her battle with DES-related cancer.
While chronicling his mother's recent struggle to become a Southern Baptist pastor, filmmaker Steven Lipscomb uncovered a whirlwind of change and a rising tide of opposition to women as senior church leaders.
Alan Berliner drags his reluctant father kicking and screaming down memory lane to probe the swirls of conflict and affection that bind every family.
A meditative journey of a Vietnamese woman, now a U.S. citizen, who returns to her homeland and wonders where she really belongs.
Remembering Wei Yi-fang, Remembering Myself
Yvonne Welbon presents a witty and original coming-to-terms with race, culture and self. A six year stay in Taiwan transforms her understanding of what it means to be an African American and illuminates her connection to her Honduran-born grandmother.
A provocative, emotional journey into the lives of women who work in the brothels, bars and nightclubs around U.S. military bases in South Korea.
The ABC Loan Co. of South Central Los Angeles, a successful black-owned pawnshop, is a unique entree to inspiring stories of economic and emotional survival.
A raw and revealing video diary by a Cambodian-born teenager who now lives in San Francisco's inner city.
Bela Bognar is no ordinary American dad. Now a suburbanite, he once fought against Soviet domination during the Hungarian revolution. Ever since, his life has been a longing for the glories of the past. Steven Bognar crafts a moving portrait of his father's 40-year quest for identity and home.
Jenny Cool interviewed women in a suburban housing development outside Los Angeles, discovering a fragile lifestyle dominated by social pressures and the daily commuter grind.
An irreverent and humorous portrayal of people with the often misunderstood neurological disorder, Tourette Syndrome.
The story of 10-year-old Barbara Wilson's search, through cheap motels and homeless shelters, for permanence and security.
Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter
Deborah Hoffmann's poignant, sometimes funny account of coping with her mother's Alzheimer's disease. Nominated for a 1994 Academy Award.
This film offers a bold new perspective on the Black Panther Party from the point of view of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, an eloquent party leader who served 19 years before his conviction was overturned.
This gripping story of one HIV-positive African American woman opens a window on understanding women's sexuality in the age of AIDS.
Are machismo, infidelity and violence inseparable? In a tragically common family saga, Sheldon Schiffer reflects on his legacy and reexamines what it means to be a man.
In Ross McElwee's 1986 cult hit, Sherman's March, an idealist searches for love, happiness — and a wife. Now he's turning 40, getting married, and heading out on yet another quest.
"Sa-I-Gu", Korean for April 29, opens a window on Korean American women in Los Angeles whose stores — and lives — were devastated in the aftermath of the Rodney King Trial.
Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) catches up with his long-lost cousin, Robert Castle, a fiery Harlem-based white Episcopalian priest.
They still find romance in the most unexpected places. They still argue about the smallest things. Five couples, still together after more than 50 years have a few choice words for a divorce-prone generation.
Who's Going To Pay For These Donuts, Anyway?
When Japanese-American filmmaker Janice Tanaka reaches out to find her father — interned during WWII and separated form his family for decades — her discoveries both haunt and redefine her life.
Michael Moore embarks upon a filmic odyssey to meet General Motors Chairman Roger Smith and convince him to visit Flint, Michigan for a first-hand look at how massive layoffs had devastated the local economy.
Three American nuns, inspired by the Civil Rights movement and encouraged by the internal reforms of Vatican II, accuse the Catholic Church of racism and sexism. A revealing portrait of a 2,000 year old organization struggling to reconcile authority and conscience, tradition and the need for change.
Anne Lewis Johnson documents the low-wage, no-benefit jobs of the 'working poor' in America's new 'service economy'.
A respected member of a middle-class community is accused by his children of sexual abuse. He denies the charges. Whom do we believe? Rhea Gavry uses a gut-wrenching case set in a comfortable suburb of Salt Lake City as a context for a timely reexamination of our attitudes toward the accused and the accuser when sex is part of the equation.
A haunting portrait of a young woman who begins to starve herself in search of the "perfect" body. The film follows four years in the life of Regina Hatfield as she struggles with bulimia.
In 1961, Camille Billops made a painful decision: to put her four-year-old daughter, Christa, up for adoption. In Finding Christa, Billops is both filmmaker and subject as she tells the story of their separation and ultimate reconciliation.
Berliner puts his late grandfather at the center of a personal, single-family saga that shines a light into the silent, shadowy corners present in all families.
Abortion has been at the center of one of the most dramatic and wrenching debates of our times. But the social forces and the changing lives behind the rhetoric are rarely explored. Julie Gustafson's groundbreaking film draws complex portraits of individuals on both sides of the controversy in a small town in Pennsylvania, where very different life experiences have shaped conflicting values and beliefs.
Ten million families were separated between North and South Korea when the Korean War ended in 1953. Beginning with the story of one man's journey to reunite with his sister in North Korea, award-winning filmmakers Christine Choy (Who Killed Vincent Chin?) and JT Takagi reveal the personal, social and political dimensions of the last divided nation on earth.
Whether the subject is sex, death, madness or God, The Big Bang never lets up in its weird and wonderful search for the meaning of it all.
In A Little Vicious, a pit bull, his elderly master and a dog trainer/philosopher form a curious love triangle.
From the Free Speech Movement to the anti-war protests to the last stand over People's Park, Berkeley California became synonymous with a generation's quest for social, political, and cultural transformation.
Every year 2,500 sets of twins gather in Twinsburg, Ohio for Twins Days. Most are dressed alike, many live together, and all seem to have rhyming names. Standing out amidst the lighthearted contests and games are filmmaker Sue Marcoux and her sister Michele, separated by 3,000 miles and a lifetime of anti-twin behavior.
Filmmaker Peter Adair asks 11 people — women and men, gay and straight, from all walks of life — to share their stories about living with the HIV virus.
Ossian Maclise is not an average American teenager. Born in Massachusetts, he has been living in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery since the age of four. At seven, his monastic order recognized Ossian as a tulku — a reincarnation of a high Tibetan lama.
If a tree can grow in Brooklyn, can an eggplant flourish in the Bronx? Maria De Luca's Green Streets charts the spontaneous emergence of community gardens in New York City and how they've helped to nourish neighborhood pride, racial tolerance and a budding sense of hope for hundreds of enthusiastic gardeners in the urban jungle.
Artist Estell Peck Ishigo went with her Japanese American husband into an internment camp during World War II, one of the few Caucasians to do so. Vividly recreated from Ishigo's own memoirs, photos and paintings, Days Of Waiting reveals the shattering relocation experience from an "outsider's" perspective.
In its national broadcast premiere, this bittersweet classic from pioneering filmmakers follows four door-to-door Bible salesmen as they walk the line between hype and despair.
Are college students today apathetic and self-centered? Twenty years after National Guardsmen opened fire on student antiwar demonstrators, Jim Klein, a 60's radical-turned-filmmaker (Union Maids, Seeing Red) visits the campus of Kent State to probe behind the stereotypes. Together with young patrons of the local tanning salon, activists-turned-professors, and an ROTC captain, Klein ponders the social forces that are changing campuses and the country in the 90's.
Cryonics — the freezing of human beings after death for future revival — is the focus of this off-beat film by two science buffs-turned-film-majors. With commentary from Timothy Leary, a theologian and skeptical scientists, On Ice is alternately deadpan and dead serious.
A uniquely powerful and intimate look at the lives and struggles of a group of homeless people who've been moved into an "urban campground" in Los Angeles. Made by Tom Seidman with the help of a crew that included camp "residents," Lost Angeles graphically and unsentimentally portrays the complicated realities of life on the streets.
Moved by the growing desperation of thousands of laid-off steel workers, a group of ministers in Pittsburgh begins to confront the city's government and powerful corporations. Their passionate, controversial and unorthodox actions lead to profound soul-searching, Church rejection and imprisonment.
The Bomb is killing ordinary Americans, even in the absence of a nuclear war. That's the thesis of this chilling — but ultimately hopeful — film which explores in evocative, personal and immediate terms how all of us have been affected by the nuclear age.
Watching The Family Album is like coming across a long-lost box of family photos: it's enchanting, humorous and sometimes even eerie. Director Alan Berliner spent years blending home movies and tape recordings collected from 60 different American families to assemble a composite lifetime which moves from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience.
Girltalk is Kate Davis' heartbreaking yet hopeful portrait of three runaway girls with histories of abuse and neglect. Music, humor, and intimate conversations play against the disturbing reality of these girls' lives.
Hailed by many critics as a classic, Best Boy is the moving story of Philly, a 53-year-old mentally-disabled man who adapts to an independent life as he prepares to move away form his elderly parents.
On the surface, this is a somewhat unusual film about pet cemeteries and their owners. But then it grows much more complicated and bizarre, until in the end it is about such large issues as love, immorality, failure, and the dogged elusiveness of the American Dream.
On the streets and subways of New York, 101 itinerant performers whirl firesticks, mimic passers-by, imitate Stevie Wonder, tap dance and perform classical music. Karen Goodman's No Applause, Just Throw Money is a delightful mixture of music and magic moments, celebrating some joyful encounters in New York City streets.
Metropolitan Avenue is an inspiring contemporary story about women who strive to combine new roles and old values in our rapidly changing society. A group of "traditional" homemakers in a lively Brooklyn neighborhood rise to the challenge to become leaders in the effort to save their community.
During the late 1970s, tens of thousands of men, women and even children were abducted by the right-wing military government in Argentina. While most of the population was terrorized by these actions, a small group of mothers of the disappeared began staging weekly demonstrations to demand that their children be released and the kidnappers be brought to justice.
A graceful, moving film about a community that provides both compassion and care to a courageous 22-year-old man with AIDS.
Rich in humor and regional color, this sometimes hilarious film uses the prism of language to reveal our attitudes about the way other people speak. From Boston Brahmins to Black Louisiana teenagers, from Texas cowboys to New York professionals, American Tongues elicits funny, perceptive, sometimes shocking, and always telling comments on American English in all its diversity.
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Multimedia Timeline: Adoption in America
Trace the recent history of adoption in America from the dramatic rise in international adoptions in the 1950s during the Korean War to the uptick in the adoption of Chinese girls after the institution of the One Child Policy in 1992 to present day.
Related Film: In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee
My Reincarnation Trailer
As Chögyal Namkhai Norbu rises as a Buddhist teacher in the West, his son Yeshi, recognized as the reincarnation of a Buddhist master, breaks away to embrace the modern world.
Sneak Preview: Watch 'My Reincarnation' on Your iPad or iPhone
We're offering several of this year's films before they broadcast on the PBS Video apps for iPods, iPhones and iPads. Watch My Reincarnation starting Wednesday, June 14, 2012, on your mobile device. Download the PBS app!
The Light in Her Eyes Trailer
Houda al-Habash, a conservative woman preacher in Damascus, Syria, calls girls to the practice of Islam, teaching them that pursuing their ambitions is a way of worshipping God.
Up Heartbreak Hill Trailer
Up Heartbreak Hill follows two Native teens torn between the lure of opportunities outside their remote reservation community and the cultural ties that bind them to home.
Photos from 'The Light in Her Eyes'
The Light in Her Eyes offers an extraordinary portrait of a leader who challenges the women of her community to live according to Islam, without giving up their dreams. Flip through a slideshow of photos from the film.
Photos from 'Up Heartbreak Hill'
Up Heartbreak Hill follows two Native teens torn between the lure of opportunities outside their remote reservation community and the cultural ties that bind them to home. Flip through a slideshow of photos from the film.
Photos from 'My Reincarnation'
My Reincarnation tells a father-son story as a Buddhist teacher rises in the West and his son breaks away to embrace the modern world. Flip through a slideshow of photos from the film.