“As heart wrenching as it is informative…. You’ll have a pit in your stomach by the end of the show.”
–Families.com

WIDE ANGLE’s unprecedented, award-winning 12-year documentary project, Time for School, returns in 2009 with visits to seven classrooms in seven countries to offer a glimpse into the lives of seven extraordinary children who are struggling to get what nearly all American kids take for granted: a basic education. We started filming in 2002, watching as kids first entered school in Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya and Romania, many despite great odds. Several years later, in 2006, we returned to film an update — and now, three years later, we travel to check in on our young teenagers who are making the precarious transition to middle school. Among the highlights: in Afghanistan we reunite with 16-year-old Shugufa, who resolutely remains in school despite the Taliban’s recent acid attacks on young women her age. “If they continue attacking schools, our country won’t progress. Without an education you can’t get anywhere,” says Shufuga, whose own education was delayed when her family lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan during years when the Taliban ruled her country. We also visit the biggest slum in Nairobi, Kenya, where 15-year-old Joab’s mother has died and his father has abandoned the family. We watch as, incredibly, Joab manages to stay at the top of his class while also raising and feeding his two younger siblings. And in the blazing desert of Rajasthan, India, we encounter Neeraj, 15, only to learn that she has been unable to realize her dream of making it to 10th grade: since our last visit her night school has closed, and she now helps support her family by grazing the livestock full-time while her brothers continue their education.

These children’s stories put a human face on the shocking fact that more than 75 million children are currently out of school; of these, two thirds are girls. One in four children in developing countries does not complete five years of basic education, and there are nearly one billion illiterate adults — one-sixth of the world’s people. WIDE ANGLE plans to continue revisiting all the children, and their peers and families, through 2015, the year they should graduate — and, not coincidentally, the U.N.’s target date for achieving universal education, a Millennium Development goal endorsed by all 191 members of the United Nations.

While each child in Time for School 3 has a unique story, taken together their lives tell an epic tale, shedding light on one of the most urgent and under-reported stories of our time.

ABOUT THE SERIES
WIDE ANGLE is planning a bold new mini-series Women, War & Peace to challenge the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain and to place women at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security. Women, War & Peace will focus on women’s strategic role in the post-Cold War era, where globalization, arms trafficking, and illicit trade have intersected to create a whole new type of war.

Women, War & Peace will present its groundbreaking message across the globe using all forms of media, including U.S. and international primetime television, radio, print, and web. PBS and WIDE ANGLE are proud to be the first to bring this conversation to primetime national television. Planned for broadcast in 2010, Women, War & Peace will be the most comprehensive global media initiative ever mounted on the roles of women in war and peace.

Women, War & Peace is spearheaded by producers Gini Reticker and Abigail Disney. The 4-part series will launch with the U.S. television premiere of their previous collaboration, the acclaimed Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about the role women played in bringing peace to Liberia after 14 years of civil war. The film won Best Documentary Prize at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, the Silverdocs Witness Award, the Jackson Hole Audience Award, and has been short-listed for the Academy Award for best documentary.

This two-hour WIDE ANGLE special explores the current worldwide boom in illicit migration. Every year, an estimated two to four million people are shipped in containers, shepherded through sewage pipes, secreted in car chassis, and ferried across frigid waters. Others travel on legitimate carriers but with forged documents. An alarming number of these migrants end up in bondage, forced to work as prostitutes, thieves, or as laborers in sweatshops. By listening to the voices of those who pulled up their roots, who risked all, the film will put a human face on what might otherwise be seen as statistical, overwhelming and remote. Focusing on five major stories whose journeys traverse 16 countries from Colombia to China, from Mexico to Moldova this documentary will look into the circumstances that drove these migrants from their homes, describe the difficulties involved in their epic journeys and reveal what awaits them in their new world.

Ten years ago, filmmaker Bruno Sorrentino began recording the lives of eight newborn babies from around the world. In 1992, world leaders met in Brazil for the Earth Summit on sustainable development. There they made plans and promises to conquer the global problems of overpopulation, over-consumption and poverty. In the ten years since, Sorrentino has revisited the children repeatedly and recorded how their lives have been affected by the issues discussed at Rio. Now, as world leaders prepare to journey to Johannesburg this August for the Rio+10 follow-up summit, Sorrentino returns to film these children and to see whether the promises of Rio have been kept. His camera captures his subjects, now ten years old, coping with the problems of racism, poverty, child labor, political violence, environmental degradation and access to education. Shot on location in South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, Latvia, the UK, the U.S., India and China, this film is a touching and timely portrait of children growing up in the world of the 21st century.