“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.

“A big and intriguing documentary”
–TV America

“Sounds like a John le Carré thriller, but is anchored in fact”
–Globe and Mail

A failed coup attempt…a British mercenary in a notorious African prison…a dictator suspicious of Western powers…and beneath it all, a spectacular underwater oil reserve that the world’s major powers would love to get their hands on.

It may sound like the latest John LeCarré bestseller, but in fact it’s the real-life intrigue of Once Upon a Coup, WIDE ANGLE’s penetrating look at the mysterious goings-on in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny West African nation newly rich with oil and infamous for corruption. The story begins in 2004, when a group of mercenaries, including a British ex-special forces officer named Simon Mann, is arrested in Zimbabwe. Equatorial Guinea’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, accuses them of plotting a coup against him. When Mann is sentenced to 34 years in Equatorial Guinea’s notorious Black Beach prison, he claims to be only one piece of an international plot to control the country’s vast oil resources. Once Upon a Coup travels the globe to unravel that plot, which stretches from Africa to the U.K., from a prime minister’s son to Zimbabwean arms dealers, from South Africa to Spain.

But as this all plays out, another actor is bidding for a share of the oil: China. The Chinese government has showered the country with glittering new buildings and a new administrative capital. If President Obiang has grown skeptical of Western intentions, he has welcomed China as a new business partner. Starting with a small West African nation and stretching around the globe, Once Upon a Coup sheds light on the uncomfortable realities of oil politics in the 21st century.

On May 2, 2008, a Category 4 cyclone made landfall on Burma’s southern coast. Winds of 130 miles per hour raged all night, and storm surge drowned much of the Irrawaddy Delta in over 12 feet of water. Whole villages vanished, at least 130,000 people died, and two million were left homeless, making Cyclone Nargis the worst natural disaster in Burma’s history. Among the survivors were thousands of children orphaned or separated from their parents.

Eyes of the Storm tells the struggles of several orphaned children left to fend for themselves and rebuild their shattered lives in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis.  Among others we meet 10-year-old Ye Pyint who is now surrogate father to his younger brother and sister; they live in a makeshift hut in what remains of their village. We follow Min, the 16-year-old who is the sole survivor from his family and is now trying to live as a monk in a Buddhist monastery miles away from his devastated home.

Through the eyes of the Burmese filmmaking team who shot undercover for over 10 months in defiance of the ruling junta’s media blackout, WIDE ANGLE provides a rare window into one of the world’s most secretive countries. The hour-long documentary also features American and British journalists who have reported from Burma and speak of its history and the hopes and fears for its future.

In the past seven Olympic Games, Cuba, an island nation with a population of 11 million people, has dominated the sport of boxing: 63 medals, 32 of them gold. Boxing has held a special place of honor in Cuban society since the revolution, not least because Castro has deployed the nation’s athletes as an unconventional tool of foreign and domestic policy. Sport propels the nation onto the world stage – allowing it to break out of economic and political isolation into a very public and superficially apolitical arena. While the country has never had the military might to challenge the U.S., it has found a way to compete inside the ropes of the boxing ring. Now, as Castro’s faltering health has thrown the future into question, Cuba’s athletes, as well as the rest its citizens will face a crucial time of transition. While the shift of power from Fidel to his brother Raul seems to have gone smoothly, there are some indications that changes in economic policy may lie on the horizon.

About the Film

WIDE ANGLE gains intimate access to the Havana Boxing Academy on the outskirts of Cuba’s capital. There, from the tender age of nine, boys hand-picked as future Olympians are molded into soldiers of the ring. They live and train at the academy with a single purpose: to bring home Olympic gold. Victory Is Your Duty follows the boys’ dramatic path over eight months of training, schooling and boarding as they build up to the biggest event of their lives — the annual National Boxing Championships.

For the summer 2009 re-broadcast, WIDE ANGLE host Aaron Brown travels to Miami, Florida, to tell the story of what happens when graduates of Havana’s boxing academies grow up – and defect to the United States. The boxers tell of the triumphs and obstacles they faced in Cuba and continue to face as they pursue a professional career in the rough-and-tumble world of American boxing.

This episode of Wide Angle is the precursor to the theatrical film Sons of Cuba.

“A heartbreaking doc…. What we see is a profoundly bitter confrontation
between the individual and the community.”
–Globe and Mail

How far can one young woman push a conservative culture? Duah Fares is an Arab-Israeli teenager and member of the Druze minority, a religious sect living predominantly in Israel, Syria and Lebanon. She longs to be an international superstar like Angelina Jolie.

But when she changes her name to Angelina and sets her sights on the Miss Israel pageant, her tight-knit religious community balks. Miss Israel requires a bathing suit competition, but to appear that way in public would disgrace her family and even put her in danger from those who would rather see her dead than see the community dishonored.

Contestant No. 2 follows Fares and her family as they navigate the boundaries of traditional values while she tries to achieve her dream.

This episode of WIDE ANGLE is the U.S. television premiere of the theatrical film Lady Kul el Arab.

“An amazing documentary”
–baristaexchange.com

Eleni Gabre-Madhin is a woman with a dream. The charismatic Ethiopian economist wants to end hunger in her famine-plagued country. But rather than relying on foreign aid or new agricultural technology, she has a truly radical plan. She has designed the nation’s first commodities exchange, which she hopes will revolutionize an ancient market system whose inefficiencies have been partly responsible for the country’s persistent food shortages.

In April 2008 and after more than a decade of planning, the starting bell rang on the trading floor for the first time. Gabre-Madhin has been running frantically ever since. She attempts to maintain the machinery that keeps her country fed while facing powerful special interests, antiquated farming practices, poor infrastructure, and an unpredictable climate. Not to mention a global economic crisis.

WIDE ANGLE travels to East Africa for The Market Maker, hosted by anchor Aaron Brown, to tell the dramatic, intimate story of a woman on a mission – and a world of trouble standing in her way.

“Feel-good programming that makes you think, too”
–Canwest News Service

ABOUT THE ISSUE

Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s deadliest place to give birth. Each year over a quarter of a million women die in childbirth in the region. But Mozambique is combating high maternal death rates by implementing unconventional programs.

After the country declared its independence from 400 years of Portuguese rule in 1975, a civil war raged for 16 years, killing a million people and wrecking the country’s infrastructure. By the time the war ended in 1992, the health care system was devastated and one in ten women were dying in childbirth. There were only 18 obstetricians for a population of 19 million. Since then, Mozambique has cut the maternal death rate in half.

As the figures now stand, the country is one of the few countries on track to achieve the fifth United Nations Millennium Development goal to reduce the maternal death rate by 75 percent by 2015. In 2004, Mozambique introduced a new health care initiative to train midwives in emergency obstetric care in an attempt to guarantee access to quality medical care during pregnancy and childbirth.

ABOUT THE FILM

The film Birth of a Surgeon follows Emilia Cumbane, one of the first midwives-in-training. She performs Cesareans and hysterectomies in makeshift operating rooms in rural Mozambique. We follow Cumbane from her home in the Mozambican capital Maputo, into intensive medical classes, through night shifts in the delivery wards, and watch as she fights for recognition of her surgical competence.

With more than half a million women dying in pregnancy or childbirth worldwide, Mozambique’s surgical training programs are being hailed as a model solution in confronting the maternal health crisis facing developing countries. The film captures one woman’s story on the frontlines of improving maternal mortality but it also demonstrates how low-cost, community-based health initiatives are changing the face of public health in Africa.

“I like to be a midwife,” Cumbane says. “I think it’s a good profession – to produce people.”

The first class of almost 30 surgical midwives trained in delivery techniques and advanced surgery graduate in July 2008. For the 2009 update, WIDE ANGLE host Aaron Brown travels to a rural hospital in Mozambique to meet with Cumbane to see how both she and the program are faring. Cumbane, now the head of the maternal ward, has a two-week-old baby herself, and Brown explores the successes and obstacles she has faced over the last year, as she has tried to juggle her personal and professional commitments, all the while working to help save women’s lives.

“ A moving…documentary”
–Globe and Mail

When a 12-year-old Palestinian boy was killed in the West Bank city of Jenin by Israeli soldiers who mistook his toy gun for the real thing, it could have been just one more blip on the news: one more war, one more child, one more human tragedy that ripped the heart out of a family and a community, but rippled no further into the world’s consciousness.

But something extraordinary happened that turned Ahmed Khatib’s tragic 2005 death into a gift of hope for six Israelis whose lives were on the line: while overwhelmed with grief, Ahmed’s parents consented to donating their son’s organs. Suddenly, amid the violence and entrenched hatred surrounding an intractable conflict, a simple act of humanity rose above the clamor and captured worldwide attention.

Heart of Jenin tells the story of Ahmed’s tragic death and his father Ismael Khatib’s journey to visit three of the organ recipients two years later. One of Ahmed’s kidneys went to an Orthodox Jewish girl and his other kidney went to a Bedouin boy. While his parents hesitated to donate Ahmed’s heart, it now beats in the chest of a Druze girl.

“I see my son in these children,” Khatib says.

Crossing from northern Israel to the Negev desert and ending up in Jerusalem, Khatib encounters every complexity of the conflict: deep-seated animosity, hardened judgments, and heartfelt generosity. While laying bare the deep divisions between Israelis and Palestinians, Heart of Jenin offers a rare vision of common humanity and hope.

“Recounts the harrowing, heartbreaking stories of North Korean refugees
who escape – or try to – across the border into China”
–Miami Herald

“The kind of suspense Hollywood cannot manufacture”
– Wall Street Journal

About the Film

In the past decade, up to 100,000 defectors have crossed the waters of the Tumen and Yalu Rivers into northeast China to escape from North Korea, the world’s last closed Communist state. In Crossing Heaven’s Border, WIDE ANGLE tells the moving and dramatic stories of a few of them.

Crossing Heaven’s Border reveals the plight of North Korean defectors from the point of view of intrepid South Korean journalists who risk their lives filming undercover for ten months to capture the haunting stories first-hand. The reporters introduce us to a mother working in China as a tour guide to support her six-year-old son who is sick with cerebral palsy and in dire need of medical attention. And we follow the grueling ten-day journey of a teenage girl and a little boy smuggled overland across China and Laos into Thailand, where North Korean defectors can request asylum at the South Korean embassy.

About the Issue

The exodus began in the mid-90s when North Korea was plagued by a famine that killed up to a million people. Most defectors flee from North Korea’s poor border regions into northeast China, where they live in hiding, work illegally and have no access to education or medical care. More than three quarters of the defectors are women, many of whom work in the sex industry. If caught by Chinese authorities, they are repatriated to North Korea, where they face severe punishment: persecution, torture, even execution in prison camps. Only a lucky few reach their ultimate goal: asylum in South Korea.

WIDE ANGLE anchor Aaron Brown further explores the plight of defectors from North Korea in a post-film interview with Debra Liang-Fenton, a human rights expert with the United States Institute of Peace, and the former Executive Director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

FOCAL POINT’s Raise the Last Glass follows two Waterford workers as they fight to save both their jobs and a bit of Irish heritage.

WIDE ANGLE multimedia producer Renee Feltz speaks about the loss of GM jobs in Pontiac with 36-year GM veteran worker, Brian Larkin. Larkin is Vice President of the United Auto Workers Union Local 594. He discusses how GM has employed his family for generations, the end of production of the iconic Pontiac brand of cars, and what the loss of GM jobs will mean for workers in Pontiac and the town itself.

Click here to listen to the interview:

I’m Irish, but I’ve lived away from the country for almost ten years. This has helped me recognize what is special about the people there.

The thing that struck me most about the workers at Waterford Crystal was their good humor at a time when they were under immense financial and emotional pressure. Even when things were at their worst the workers, who were not far from retirement, would joke about things like retraining as a pilot or an astronaut. There was constant storytelling and banter as well as endless cups of tea.

We spent most of our time with three men who had worked at the crystal factory since they were teenagers: Tom Power, Ian Paul and Liam O’Rorke. After forty years of hard but rewarding work, they were looking forward to a comfortable retirement for themselves and their families. But all of this has changed.

Such tragedy is now a common global problem, but meeting tragedy with humor is something quintessentially Irish. It may be a small thing, but I think it’s another piece of our cultural heritage worth holding on to.

Lauren Kesner

One of the first people I met when I arrived at the Waterford Crystal Visitor’s Center was Tom Power, a master glass cutter who had spent four decades with the company. He had also helped to lead an eight-week long sit-in to protest the factory’s closing. Power brought me to see his cutting station, switched on the engine, and demonstrated how he carved perfectly symmetrical patterns into glass.

Later that day, he brought us into the empty gallery store, lined with shelves of delicate vases, bowls and glasses and showed us a table where master craftsmen like himself had formerly autographed the crystal pieces for tourists. It turned out that Power was not only a skillful class cutter but also an ambassador of the historic Waterford Crystal brand. For years, he has traveled throughout America setting up tables at department stores where he would explain the crystal making process.

Sitting in the empty store, at an empty desk, it was clear Power wanted to tell the story of Waterford Crystal before it was too late. Fewer workers were showing up at the sit-in, and maybe he sensed the end was near. Like somebody recording a family history, he relived the glory days of learning and perfecting his craft, of cutting Super Bowl trophies, and of the friendships he made traveling across America.

Power’s pride was palatable. It made me want to buy my first piece of crystal, but the gallery store was closed. After the factory tour and glass cutting demonstration Power thanked me for having recorded his last and final cut.

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