By Lennlee Keep We Believe in Dinosaurs is an exploration of the scientific and historical veracity of the Bible and the construction of an authentic likeness of Noah’s Ark in Williamstown, Kentucky. Known as “The Ark Encounter,” this theme park explores the Judeo-Christian story of the wrath of God, a great flood, and the repopulation …
How “Cooked” Evolved into an Investigation of the Disaster Underlying a Disaster
Documentary filmmaker Judith Helfand is best known for her ability to take the dark worlds of chemical exposure, heedless corporate behavior and environmental injustice and make them personal, highly-charged and entertaining. Her films include The Uprising of ‘34, the Sundance award-winning and 2x Emmy-nominated Blue Vinyl (about the health hazards of vinyl), its Peabody Award-winning prequel A Healthy …
“A Scene I’ll Never Forget.” Filmmaker Intimately Captures Surrogacy Journey in Boise
Emmy and Peabody-winning producer/director Beth Aala has gone from a Pool Party (her first film as director) filled with amazing music, the story of how a swimming pool became the center of a music scene in Brooklyn, to co-directing (with actor Mike Myers) Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, a portrayal of a legendary talent agent, to tracking an …
Surrogacy Facts and Myths: How Much Do You Know?
By Lennlee Keep In 2018, over 100 children were born in Boise, Idaho, through surrogacy. The story behind this unique baby boom is explored in the Independent Lens documentary Made in Boise, an intimate look at how surrogates and parents are coming together to create new bonds and unique families. Surrogacy is widely misunderstood and …
Harvest Season’s Historical Roots: Latinos in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys
Harvest Season serves as a reminder that agriculture is notoriously sensitive to the ebb and flow of external forces — natural disasters, economic movements, and political change. Filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz artfully depicts the Sonoma and Napa wine industry as a modern microcosm for this ever-changing delicate balance. But the small-scale cycles presented in Harvest Season naturally beg a historical question. What past iterations of turmoil brought the winemaking industry in Sonoma and Napa to where it is today?
Bernardo Ruiz Tells Story of the Central Role Latinos Play in California Wine Industry
Two-time Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz, who was born in Guanajuato, Mexico and grew up in Brooklyn, made his directorial feature debut with the PBS film Reportero, about attacks on the press in Mexico, which New York Magazine called “a powerful reminder of how journalism often requires immense amounts of physical and psychological bravery.” He’s followed that up with …
Stepping Up for Homeless Black People in Oakland
By Pendarvis Harshaw The Independent Lens documentary Charm City brings to mind the long list of urban American cities that fall into the same category as the Baltimore seen in that film: Detroit, Newark, Compton, and Oakland, to name a few. They’re all post-industrial towns, where the closure of factories, underfunding of public education and …
New Efforts to Improve Rural Healthcare Crisis
By Suzanne Gordon The three caregivers we meet in The Providers face daunting challenges as they try to deliver medical and mental healthcare to patients in rural New Mexico. Sadly, their struggles are reproduced all over America because for decades the nation has failed to address the problem of delivering healthcare outside of urban and …
A Day in the Life of a Rural Doctor, When No Day is the Same
Leslie Hayes knew she wanted to become a doctor from a very young age. She was raised in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a community that hosts a national nuclear laboratory and that boasts the highest rate of PhDs per capita in the nation. She came to El Centro, the rural health care network in New …
How a Lifelong Fascination with Medicine Turned into a Film About the Rural Healthcare Crisis
[UPDATED April 6, 2019: We reached out to filmmakers Laura Green and Anna Moot-Levin to gather their thoughts on why they titled their film The Providers.] The filmmaking team behind the Independent Lens documentary The Providers live on opposite coasts from each other — Laura Green in San Francisco, Anna Moot-Levin in Brooklyn — but they came …
Director Explores Live Streaming Revolution and How Technology Affects Human Happiness
Technology executive-turned-filmmaker Hao Wu takes a raw and human approach to storytelling in an era when culture evolves online, and for his very first feature film, People’s Republic of Desire Wu won a SXSW Film Festival Grand Jury Prize–pretty impressive for a self-taught filmmaker. He expertly tells a real-life Black Mirror-esque tale that is, wrote …
11 Questions for 3 Filmmakers About a Million Swamp Rats
The trio of filmmakers behind the Independent Lens film Rodents of Unusual Size — Jeff Springer, Chris Metzler and Quinn Costello — have previously captured unique environmental stories with a very human element to them, as Jeff and Chris made the award-winning cult favorite Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea (since Jeff was born in …