Blog

November, 5, 2012

Solar Mamas

Independent Lens

Jordanian wife and mother Rafea is leaving home for the first time to attend a college in India that is training rural women to become solar energy engineers. Once there, she will join women like her from the developing world…
Smiling women in colorful clothing.
October, 1, 2012

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

Independent Lens

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is a four-hour PBS primetime documentary film and national broadcast event inspired by the widely acclaimed book of the same name by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Filmed in 10…
July, 26, 2012

Strong!

Independent Lens

A formidable figure, standing at 5'8" and weighing over 300 pounds, Cheryl Haworth struggles to defend her champion status as her lifetime weightlifting career inches towards its inevitable end. Strong! chronicles her journey and the challenges this unusual elite athlete…
Daisy Bates marches with a crowd of supporters carrying signs of support.
February, 2, 2012

Daisy Bates

Independent Lens

In 1957, Daisy Bates became a household name when she fought for the right of nine black students to attend the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Bates's public support culminated in a constitutional crisis — pitting a…
Benazir Bhutto speaks on the telephone while seated on a couch with a gold curtain in the background.
May, 10, 2011

Bhutto

Independent Lens

Benazir Bhutto was one of the most complex and fascinating characters of our time. Hers is an epic tale of Shakespearean dimensions, of a privileged girl born into Pakistan’s equivalent of the Kennedy family. She would trade her Western lifestyle…
March, 29, 2011

Pushing the Elephant

Independent Lens

In the late 1990s, Rose Mapendo was imprisoned with her family during violence that engulfed the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her harrowing experience included the nighttime arrest of her entire family by government agents, the execution of her husband, the…
Cyntoia Brown gazes out a prison van window.
March, 1, 2011

Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story

Independent Lens

In 2004, Cyntoia Brown was arrested for murder. There was no question that a 43-year-old man is dead and that she killed him. What mystified filmmaker Daniel Birman was just how common violence among youth is, and just how rarely…
Cyntoia Brown calls her adoptive mother, Ellenette Brown, to tell her she "Got Life."
February, 25, 2011

Me Facing Life: Seeking Redemption in Cyntoia’s Story

Independent Lens

Dan Birman spent six years capturing the evolution and nuances of a case that is both depressingly common and refreshingly multifaceted. He met 16-year-old Cyntoia Brown after she murdered a man. Instead of a lost cause, he found a very…
February, 8, 2011

When I Rise

Independent Lens

A gifted black music student at the University of Texas is thrust into a civil-rights storm that changes her life forever. Barbara Smith Conrad is cast in an opera to co-star with a white male classmate, fueling a racist backlash…
May, 4, 2010

Sunshine

Independent Lens

When filmmaker Karen Skloss got pregnant at the age of 23, she decided to have and keep the baby — even when it became clear that her relationship with the baby’s father wouldn’t work out. She had no idea that…
April, 14, 2009

Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai

Independent Lens

Three decades ago, Wangari Maathai suggested to rural women in her native Kenya that they plant trees for firewood and to stop soil erosion — an act that grew into a nationwide movement to safeguard the environment, defend human rights,…
March, 24, 2009

Lakshmi and Me

Independent Lens

In this intimate examination of the relationship between Indian filmmaker Nishtha Jain and her young maid, Lakshmi, Jain holds up a mirror to her own culture and the pervasive caste system that can still determine an individual’s fate in life.