- This program was made possible, in part, by contributions to your PBS station, by viewers like you.

Thank you.

On behalf of the George Foster Peabody Awards, and PBS, welcome to Peabody Presents Best In Documentary.

I'm Tabitha Jackson, director of the Sundance Film Festival.

The theme of African American justice and dignity, a conversation which, although centuries long, has never been more urgent.

Joining me, I would like to welcome three incredible film makers.

dream hampton, the executive producer and show runner of Surviving R. Kelly.

- [Woman] R. Kelly was this fun, laughing, loving guy, but Robert is the devil.

- Trey Ellis, who executive produced True Justice, Bryan Stevenson's Fight For Equality.

- [Bryan] My client had been broken by trauma, broken by bias and discrimination.

- [Man] We are gonna be able to get some people over to safe passage, but there are gonna be other people that that's not gonna happen.

- I think it's important that we understand all the ugly details, because those are the things that actually give rise to what might allow us to one day claim something really beautiful.

- And RaMell Ross who directed Independent Lens' Hale County This Morning, This Evening.

- Cut, cut, it's over.

Get him in.

Get him in.

- My first thing I've gotta do though, I've gotta get in school though.

I've gotta figure out what I can do, I gotta get in school.

Once I get in school, then I take my steps from there.

If I can get into a good school, that I know that want me, that respect me, I'll be all right, because the school I've been in, I mean they're good schools, but they ain't school like.

- RaMell, I want to start with you, and Hale County.

Can you just talk a little about your inspirations?

- Yeah, Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a film that is interested in the visualization of Daniel and Quincy, and the community of Hale County in Alabama, as content for understanding the historical relationship between people of color, and the American constitution, the American visual constitution.

So the film looks at the capacity, or desires to be a Rorschach test for your relationship to the black community through visuals.

You realize the more you look at people of color, the more you look at anyone that you're drawing from an archive of visuals that have been deposited over the course of your life, and imagined through that aesthetic, and through that lens.

And what you have, when you do a deep dive, including myself, is you see that the relationship between people of color and media, and entertainment, and visualization, is one that not only originates in consumption, but as one spectacular sensationalization.

That's a really big problem, right?

When the life that is lived, the life that is, and the life that is really seen is never what is actually seen.

There's this big disconnect.

And so one of the goals of the film, aside from being an experience of looking and participating in the lives of this community, is just to display life as it is, which therefore channels the way that life has been consumed.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I remember when you were, during the process of making the film, you had always said I don't want this to be a niche art house film, I want this to be accessible and mainstream.

The fact that this film, with this aesthetic and this subject matter, made it to the Oscars, is an Oscar nominated film, meant that it reached a much broader audience than it might have done.

And I wonder, if you could reflect on some of the responses you had from people who saw the film.

What kind of questions were they asking you?

Or where was their surprise routed?

- The responses from the black community, from the white community, from the many, many other communities are extremely individually specific to the person's point of view on the world, which I believe was one of the aims, but also I think is the power of offering something that's really idiosyncratic, right?

The more imaginative space that you offer someone, the more that the person has to draw from their own imaginary, which is a reflection of what they've encountered in their life.

I've had people in the Hale County community say wow, I never knew that we looked like this.

And I've had people in the white community say whoa, you really avoided all the white people.

And both speak to centuries of visualization through paintings, through photography, through film making, and yeah, it's an illuminating thing to have a mirror put up to what you've experienced in your life, as it relates to entertainment and what you've consumed.

I've had a couple folks say that the film was voyeuristic, and I love that because how many films, how many times in the history of cinema, and I'm sure it's happened a couple times, but how many times in history of cinema have you sat in the living room of a black family for four minutes and watched a child just run around?

These images don't exist.

The problem with them not existing is that people are allowed to associate all the other things as a totality of people's experience, and when that's the case, of course you'll get stereotypes, of course you'll get police brutality.

This is the equation for bigotry, is distance, right?

What documentary does, and what film making does, and what these modes of making allow you to do, if you can figure out ways to be more conscious of the relationship between time and meaning, allows you to produce a visual relationship to the real world that can equalize the human experience.

- So powerfully put, thanks RaMell.

I'm gonna move next to Trey Ellis.

The first thing that struck me about your film is the very elegant structure of it.

Can you tell me a little, as such a key thing for documentaries, structure.

How did you find it?

How did you think about it?

- Yeah, the structure was tricky.

So many people had tried to make documentaries about, and actually begun documentaries about Bryan, and he was very, his legal work is everything.

A 60 Minutes episode actually kept Walter Miller in jail probably for another year, right?

So they were very shy about this.

So they really wanted to do something more about this narrative of racial difference, and the creation of this amazing, the legacy museum, and the memorial to lynching victims.

We really started from that point of view, how could Bryan tell the narrative of racial difference through these legal cases?

And then talk about, at the same time, about Bryan himself, and how his own personal story informed that, his whole life work, and his own family story really tells the story of this narrative of racial difference.

I wanted to show Bryan as a real person.

When people say he's America's Mandela, he's just a saint, he's perfect, and he's a fantastic guy.

I consider him a friend, I don't think he's perfect.

I think if you show him as perfect, it puts us, it lets us off the hook from doing work.

I think showing him, showing his sacrifice, I think hopefully we're trying to energize people to join his cause, to go to Montgomery, to go to the museum, and take that message, that those literal markers of lynching sites back to their counties, to activate everybody.

You don't have to be as dedicated as Bryan, but he's giving us, as a vessel, for a lens to focus our activism.

- We have a monument for every county in America where a lynching took place.

And we have a replica of each of those monuments at the memorial site.

We're asking communities to organize and come and claim their monument, and bring it back to their community.

There are hundreds of lynchings, where thousands of people were complicit, were involved.

Those lynchings represent a particular need for communities to say more, to do more, to memorialize these spots, to commit to protecting themselves from that legacy perpetuating racial bias for another generation.

- With that activism, are you, I guess you couldn't do it if you weren't a hopeful, but are you hopeful about the justice system in this country?

- Surprisingly yes, I'm actually more hopeful today than ever before, because the murder of George Floyd, and the murders all before that, and the fact that all these things happening, from doing the work with Bryan, and being a black man in America, they're not as surprising as they are to a lot of other people.

Just watching really white people become more educated to our problems we've been seeing for a long, long time is a little bit heartening.

I always think in talking about racial politics that black people were talking in chess, and in many cases, whites are talking checkers.

I think that's a little less true now, especially from younger people of non-black people, but I'm finding more and more people, I'm just surprised at how many middle aged white people are finally, finally getting it.

It's taken a lot of dead bodies to get to this point, but I am hopeful, yes.

- Well that gives me hope too.

If I may turn to Dream Hampton.

Your incredibly powerful series, Surviving R. Kelly.

What resonated from it was this feeling of unprocessed, generational trauma.

- The docu-series, ultimately though is not just about these women being victims of sexual violence, it's also about R. Kelly having been a victim of sexual violence.

My strategy and the goal was absolutely to center the women.

- Our relationship was beautiful in the beginning, but didn't know about the storm on the horizon.

- He would break you down.

He would turn around and say, "I'm the only one that loves you.

"I'm the only one who cares about you."

I was mentally drained.

- Robert feels as if he's invincible, I can't be touched.

And in hindsight, in society, we kind of made him feel that way.

- I, as a practice, I try to do that as often as I can, and whenever I can.

This story demanded that, but there was no way to not acknowledge that this particular predator, and not every person who has been abused, abuses, but almost everyone who abuses has been abused.

So I think about, in this moment as we're rising up, how important it is to terraform transformational justice practices.

And it's okay if that terraforming happens really rapidly, because we're in the 21st century, and this is what it is, you know?

And by that I mean that we almost instantaneously, and we definitely have to be ambidextrous, as we talk about justice in this moment.

And by that I mean that, what would it have looked like say if R. Kelly had apologized?

If he had, instead of that performance he gave on the Gayle King interview, which reminded me of Trapped In The Closet or something.

It was quite the performance.

But what if he had apologized?

What if he had said, "I don't know what healthy sex is.

"I was abused most of my life, and I want "to take this time to actually, for the first "time in my life", in his entire adult life he had resources.

He also had people around him who could have held him accountable in this way.

But if he had said that, even if he were performing it.

Even if he didn't mean it, it would have actually been so deeply healing, as apposed to continuing this fiction around his innocence.

- Thinking out loud, again, is one of the powerful values, I think, of any art.

Trying to make sense of often senseless things.

This is a conversation that should be going on for a week, but we have to draw a line under it for now, in this form.

But I wanted to really thank you for going into hope and hopelessness, and justice, and ethics, and aesthetics, and structures.

You're such articulate and thoughtful people, that I've really benefited it.

So thank you Trey, RaMell, and Dream for spending time with us today.

So now we'll be discussing another theme raised by some of this year's award winning documentaries, and another theme with absolutely timely resonance, and that is the rise in authoritarianism, and threats to democracy.

I'm joined by three film makers.

Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar with The Silence of Others.

(speaking in a foreign language) And Petra Costa, the director of The Edge Of Democracy.

(speaking in a foreign language) - The Edge of Democracy follows the history of Brazilian democracy, because we both have the same age, throughout moments of great optimism, but through the election of Lula, Dilma, Dilma's impeachment, the imprisonment of Lula, who was the most popular president in Brazilian history, and the election of far right Bolsonaro.

- And this is a operatic scale, large canvas, and the way you are expressing this moment is poetic, and personal.

Can you just tell us a little about how you found the approach to the film?

- I was very interested in a phenomenon which initially looked like a Brazilian phenomenon, which is in 2016, I saw Brazilian democracy, which I thought was solid and mature, start to crumble, as hundreds of people started asking for the return of the military dictatorship, others for an impeachment without a clear crime, and others for the imprisonment of Lula.

It was clearly, for me, a fascist demonstration, but the media at the time decided to say that it was normal and patriotic, and very good sign of our democracy.

In that complete disjunction of what I was perceiving, with what the national media was saying, I was like I need to understand this, and I need to make a film about this.

- Great, thanks Petra.

Robert and Almudena, your film, perhaps you could give us the one sentence log line.

- So The Silence of Others tells the story of the first attempt in history to prosecute the crimes of the 40 year Franco dictatorship in Spain.

Franco died when he was still in power, and 40 years later, victors of crimes of his regime embark on an international lawsuit in Argentina, to try to get justice.

- And it's incredibly powerful, and invites us, explicitly, to reflect on what memory is, what forgetting is.

Could you talk a little more about that?

What is the cost of forgetting?

- I think that the issue is that in Spain, in 1977, after 40 years of dictatorship, Spain moved on to democracy, right?

But there was an amnesty law that established both the impunity of perpetrators, but also a complete forgetting.

There was a law, almost like a pact of forgetting, right?

So what that implied is that we didn't study that in school, we could not talk in the street, we could not talk in the families, and so in a way, the film comes to it both through the perspectives and the experiences of this group of people who are incredibly brave, and defy the establishment with this international lawsuit, and at the same time, it is a generational film.

I was born three years after Franco past away, right?

And so it became also a reflection on what happens to us as a society when we really don't remember what happened, right?

Where are the consequences of forgetting our most recent past, right?

- 40 years after that pact of forgetting, the result was that there were still, and there are still about 114,000 bodies in mass graves.

There are victims of torture who live 500 meters, or who live 500 meters from the police officers who tortured them during the dictatorship.

And there are thousands of cases of suspected stolen children in Spain.

All of those crimes and those victims remain invisible as a result of this forgetting.

And the idea was to help the society heal.

When you look at the suffering that continues, you have to ask, did that pact of forgetting lead to healing?

Or did it make the victims invisible, marginalized, and in a sense attempt to erase them?

- Right, so could you trade justice for peace?

What happens when you do that?

- Petra, for me, the making people feel, I think there was something to your poetic, essayistic, personal, while still being rigorously journalistic, to that approach that allowed me to feel something in the incredibly complicated, unfolding of Brazilian politics.

I wonder, through the lens of both of these films which deal with history, and memory, and forgetting, but there are clear lessons in there.

How do you process this current moment from wherever you are, or whatever your perspective is, through the lens of what you've learnt from making these two films?

- This idea of forgetting, this idea of democracy being fragile.

I think the ideas you're running through both of these films, and we love Petra's film by the way.

We love that film.

- And I love yours.

- I think they really reflect this moment that we're in.

If we look at what's happening in the United States right now, this powerful, potent reaction to police violence, to police brutality, to the disenfranchisement of African American communities.

There is a history to all of this, and perhaps there's been an attempt, or a suggestion to try to forget that history.

But I think the whole idea of transitional justice, right, is that if you do not deal with the trauma, if you do not deal with state committed crimes, if you don't go through a process of truth, justice, some kind of reparation, and the process to guarantee non-repetition, that those problems will come back to haunt a society.

The fundamental thing, in the case of Spain, was this question of they didn't even establish truth, right?

They did not seek justice.

There was not reparation.

And there certainly wasn't-- - Any memorializing.

- Memorializing, all of these things you can do as healing measures, right?

So when I look at what's happening around the world, I think there are many places where those questions come to the fore, and when The Silence of Others was shown in the United States.

There are sequences in the film about monuments to Franco's generals, who were involved in massacres in some places.

We broadcast, people made these connections to confederate monuments in the United States.

Why are we witnessing, or why are we seeing memorials that appear to celebrate an oppressor?

And so I think those deep questions reflect this work that has not yet been done, and that is greatly, greatly needed.

- With both of your films, you wished for something to happen after you had made them.

What is it that you wished for?

And now that they have been released, is that happening?

So let's start with The Silence of Others.

- Right.

So we wanted The Silence of Others to help create a conversation, and I say help, because we wanted to do it with the movement.

We wanted to actually reach beyond the choir, we want to reach that percentage of people who really believed that forgetting was the right thing to do, sometimes simply because they didn't know the other narrative, you know?

They didn't know the story of all those who were sacrificed in the name of peace, right?

The film has been seen by a million people in Spain.

It has reached youth, which is absolutely fascinating to see Q&As full of young people, and older people talking to each other about their experiences, or their non-experience.

- I was wondering whether The Edge of Democracy would be seen in Brazil, but Petra, what was your wish for the film?

And how is that going?

- My wish was that the film would be widely seen, and provoke a discussion around what happened, and also put in context, and possibly open some empathy from the other side which was not listening to what my side wanted to say.

(speaking in a foreign language) And the film surpassed my expectations in that way, because it was the second most watched documentary on Netflix in Brazil, after Our Planet.

So millions of people saw it, and tweeted constantly about it.

One tweet per minute in the first month.

And every time there's a new political event, people go back to Twitter and start asking for The Edge of Democracy two.

Many people saying that the film opened their eyes to something that they weren't seeing, and they felt brainwashed in believing the narrative of the impeachment, and the narrative that lead Bolsonaro to power, and start saying "I'm sorry", and after each "I'm sorry" you have 20 other people saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" or "Me too".

It's beautiful how it opened a discussion.

Many people who say as well that they weren't speaking to his or her best friend, or to their fathers or mothers, because of different political views, and through the film, they could find a channel of communication.

- It's so powerful.

I'm vibrating at a high frequency, because this conversation is so resonant.

There's so much to learn.

Thank you for spending the time talking to me, and to each other about your work, and congratulations on your Peabody Award.

- Thank you.

- Thank you so much.

- Thank you so much.

- Next we'll be discussing families in global conflict zones.

I'm joined by four film makers, so let's go around the squares.

Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts, directors of For Sama.

(speaking in a foreign language) (bomb exploding) (woman crying) Hassan Fazili, who directed POV's Midnight Traveler, and with him, his translator Zahir Rashed.

(speaking in a foreign language) (gentle music) Simon Wilmont, from POV's The Distant Barking of Dogs.

(speaking in a foreign language) (tense music) (gunshots firing) Your films are incredible and powerful, and for me, a new way of understanding, being immersed in the context of war, but through the lens of family, which has not always been the case.

I wanted to begin by asking each of you a question, then opening it up for a conversation.

Simon, I'd love to start with you, if you will, just give me a one liner about what the film is, what your film is about.

- My film is about how war is perceived through the eyes of a young kid, who's living near the frontline of the war in Eastern Ukraine.

- It seems that you have foregrounded love and beauty in the context of war, and some of the images that you have made, and the feeling of the film has a very distinct and intentional aesthetic.

I wondered how you came to think about making the film in that way.

- I think actually it was probably already the second day of filming for real, with Oleg and Alexandra.

It was a beautiful summer day, and I was putting the camera up to start filming the kids playing in the apple tree.

Oleg was playing with Jarik, and it was such a beautiful scene that I was struck by it, because it reminded me of the long summers of my youth, and it was really moving.

Once that feeling came about, I think maybe five minutes later, it was completely punctuated by the sound of heavy machine gunfire, and it was the first time I ever heard how close the war was to their house.

And for me, it became like this bubble of peaceful harmony and childhood, safe world was just punctured.

It started dawning on me that this was exactly the way that a child, at least in Oleg's position, would find the war.

To me, it became very important, the more I concentrated on the beauty, the more you understood what war is, because you understand what it might destroy.

(gunshots firing) (fire crackling) (speaking in a foreign language) - Thank you for that, and we'll come back to you Simon.

I want to move to Hassan.

(speaking in a foreign language) - The Midnight Traveler film is about the struggle of a family in a very critical situation, just to stay alive.

- Hassan, given what you and your family were going through, I'm interested in what lay behind your decision to film, and also how you came to the focus on parenting and family, in this story of survival.

(speaking in a foreign language) - In Afghanistan, due to war, we had to be, as a family, we had to be together.

We faced so many discriminations due to the immigration laws in different countries, so therefore we were connected as family members, and me and my wife as parents, we have been very supportive, and we have been connected with the rest, with our kids, as a parent.

(speaking in a foreign language) We decided together to make a film, and every individual, every member of the family were a part of the film idea.

Sometimes we were lost into this reality in the film.

We didn't know which part of our life is a film, which part of our life is the real life.

(speaking in a foreign language) We had a terrible situation, terrible experience in our life, and there were two things that were keeping us alive.

One was the family connections, and the other one was the film.

- What you're saying about, it's life and it's also a film, bring me to our next set of film makers, Waad Al-Kateab and Edward for For Sama.

You're too documentary film maker, but also that strong current affairs background, but with this film, it is very personal and powerful.

When you started filming, did you think you were making a film?

Or were you doing something different?

- When I start filming in 2011, when the Syrian revolution started, which is now like nine years ago, and five years since I started working on For Sama.

I've never thought that making a film, or where I would use this material, I was just trying to document everything that was happening with us, trying to face all the propaganda, and the misinformation that the regime was doing, denying everything that we were trying to do, as Syrian people, seeking for our freedom and dignity.

- There's a film, I think the concept of making a film for Sama, your daughter, and what that might mean, was a way that you and Edward working with you, found a way to make this film, all that material and all those feelings, cohere into something incredibly powerful.

Edward, would you say something about the structure as well, and the notion that this film is for Sama, and then I had a follow up on this.

- Yeah, I mean it's funny because Waad and I worked for two years, shaping her incredible archive into a coherent film, but that for Sama idea, it was a 10 minute moment where the epiphany came to us, when we were sitting in a cafe, and it just suddenly was the key to unlocking everything.

Because I think throughout the whole process, what we were trying to do was show that people living in Syria, who are going through experiences that were so extraordinary to the normal viewer, that people in Syria were just like the audience.

Through For Sama, it was just a way in which we could get our audience to plug directly into the core humanity, which was Waad being a mom, trying to protect her daughter, while also struggling for the best future for her.

I think that narrative technique just allowed us to scoop away all of the barriers, and the preconceptions, and just connect on the most core human level, between Waad's story, and the people watching.

(speaking in a foreign language) (baby babbling) - What started as a conceptual device of course became a letter for Sama, and she's experiencing the role out of the film, and the response to the film.

I wonder what you think she will take from the film, and the response to it, when she's old enough to understand it.

What do you hope she takes from it?

What might she take from it?

- The message I really hope she can take, and even from today, that she has a huge connection, and she belonged to that place where now we are very far away from that place, unfortunately.

She can speak now pure Arabic, and she doesn't remember what is Aleppo and what that place, but I really hope that this film will keep that link between her and her sister, and also between us as a generation of people who were looking for better future for us, and we've been now displaced out of our country.

I hope the film will keep that connection between us and between the next generation, who was born in that situation.

Hopefully we can be back one day, but until that day, I hope that this film will make a real connection to the Syrian people, to their country, to their future, and to their belief in a better life for us all.

- All of your films made me reflect on how war in cinema, in culture, is often presented as a male activity, with women and children as victims.

I think all of your films show the agency of family, the power of family, the agency of women, and the agency of children, in many cases.

Now I just want to open up to reflect on film, and war, and family, and how since making your films, you have come to think about it.

It's a complex question, but it's what you are doing in your films.

You are bringing all three together.

What are you, as film makers, left with?

(speaking in a foreign language) - Actually in my film, I'm one of the characters, my wife is one of the other characters of the film, and my kids as well.

Although this might not be right to be part of the film.

- This is not my choice.

(speaking in a foreign language) - This is not my choice, and it might not be right, but this is what it is, this is the reality that we played, as characters of this film.

(speaking in a foreign language) I belong from a war torn country, a country in conflict, but the conflict itself, and the war was not the focus of my film.

I, as a family, care of the household of the family, I was focusing on hopes, on ambitions, and I used the cinema to show this to the world.

But as I say, I belong to a conflict, a country with so many conflicts, but I was not trying to focus on the conflicts, but rather on hope.

- For me, I think one of the most important things is we're very used, by now, to the images of war from the newsfeed, and it becomes, in some way, abstract if you haven't experienced it up close end.

But what we can all relate to is every death in the trenches, or wherever in the battle ground is like rains in the water, which spreads back to not only the community, but to families.

And in that regard, I think that we're able to, those of us who haven't experienced war first hand, all of a sudden we can relate on a deeper level, and we can understand on a different and deeper level also.

- In answer to your point, it's a really interesting question, and I think my reflection from that question was that cinema, in a sense for me, is like following the truth, and one of the sad things about the world we live in now is that war has become almost like a current in the nature of certain nations, and partly that's the wars that our countries, America and Britain, have perpetrated in places like Iraq, in Afghanistan, the decades of war that have been in Afghanistan, in places like Somalia.

In so many places, there are these conflicts that are continuing, and they're stretching in to the fabric of normal life.

It's no longer just confined to a front line somewhere, and two armies hammering at it.

It's back to a world in which whole populations are perceived as targets, whole peoples are perceived as targets.

I think that's what cinema is beginning to reflect, the fact that war is becoming as much a part and substrata of human existence in this crazy world we're living in.

And that is why we're seeing cinema beginning to capture these stories of ordinary life, and of families being thrust into these terrible, horrific situations.

- I think we may have lost Waad, but she was here in spirit, and the film obviously remains fantastic.

So many of these films were made almost as an act of making what can often be invisible, visible.

Sometimes as an act of survival.

Sometimes as an act of hope for the future.

But now your films have all come out, and have been recognized, and congratulations on your awards.

What has been the impact of your film now that it's out, now that it's made?

Anything notable that springs to mind for you?

Let's stay with Edward.

- Yeah, a couple of things.

Number one is when Waad and I were working on it, let alone before when I've been trying to get Syria, other films about Syria away, we were told by the hierarchies that people don't care about Syria.

Audiences won't engage with the story about Syria.

What Waad and I and our team discovered was that quite the opposite was true, that people were so hungry for this film, across the world.

People wanted to know, people wanted to engage with it.

People finally felt that they had something tangible and human that would help explain this conflict that they'd heard about on the news, that seemed up in the air, and they couldn't understand it.

Now they could connect with it emotionally.

And I think that's just something that really gave us hope in the whole journey, the fact that people do wanna know about what's happening to people who live thousands of miles away.

- It's difficult to say.

I'm saying a lot of what Edward says is the same that I've experienced.

What really made an impression in me is, at least in Europe, in the festivals where we've screened the film, it's been almost like a shock among the audiences, that the war in Ukraine is so close, and they look so much like us, but still it's a war that was at least at that time, very far removed from the public eye.

It's been coming in again, but obviously with the activity of the frontline dying down and simmering at a low point, it's fading out of the news image once again.

I think we need these kind of films to raise awareness.

- So it only remains for me to thank you all for joining this conversation today.

Thank you so much.

I'm delighted to welcome two talented film makers, Laura Nix directed POV's Inventing Tomorrow.

- [Jared] I was always taught by my parents, my grandparents to always respect the aina, the land that we live off.

- [Man] What is your project on?

- [Jared] So there was this factory where they actually put arsenic into the pond.

- That's a mess.

- Todd Douglas Mirror, who directed Apollo 11.

- [Man] 30 seconds.

(radio crackling) (dramatic music) - Your films are both incredible, and Laura, you chose children as your protagonists, young adults.

Can you say why you made that choice, and what you think they bring to it?

- My film is about teenagers from around the world, who are addressing environmental issues where they live.

They all attend a science fair called ISEF, where they all gather together to present their research to judges, and participate in an international science fair.

I'm always on the hunt for what kinds of stories can we tell to actually leave audiences with a sense of agency about these issues.

When we met all these young people at the science fair, we discovered that there was this huge amount of innovation, and hope, and vision that came from observing the world around them.

We chose to focus on students from around the world who were really observing the world that they lived in, and their courage in being able to honestly look at the world around them and say that's a problem.

I'm not gonna live with that problem, I wanna change that problem, was really inspirational, and I think a model for how we can be looking at this issue now.

Because youth have decided that they're not going to accept the ways that what we've given them, and the ways in which we're living.

They are making a very conscious decision to say that we have to make a change.

One of the best ways of looking at that is students who are using a sustainably based value system to drive their scientific research.

- We're in a particular moment where science and evidence based thinking seems to be under some kind of threat.

For both of you, when you think of public based science, or science that is open to be used by and for the public, is that something you were thinking about when you were making your films?

Was that a value that was in there, or are you agnostic about that?

- Yeah, for me personally, constantly see this friction where a lot of the innovation happens for better or for worst, depending on what side of the fence you sit on, is in the private industry.

And what we're seeing today, at least in space travel, the private side is really pushing the innovation, and the government, at least here in the US, is kind of on the sidelines, but they are the vehicle with which to get that done, so it's actually a really great partnership.

(tense music) (whooshing) - [Man] Indication.

- [Man] Cut off the engine.

- Laura, Todd talking about innovation, clearly your film has innovation at the heart of it.

How do you think about that, and what these young people are doing, and where do those ideas go?

Is that turned into intellectual IP?

Is it there for the public good?

Were you thinking about that as you were making your film?

- What I was curious about was students who were really thinking about the long term, and students who were thinking about how do they come up with solutions to problems which happened in the past, and how do they come up with ideas to head something off before it becomes even greater.

Whether that's preserving clean water, or slowing global warming, and air pollution, or just stopping industrial contamination, in a way.

These are all issues that we see the impact of all over the world, especially in the developing world.

We found that in developing countries, 60 to 70% of the students were doing their science projects, their projects were intended to have an environmental impact.

And when we came back to the United States to find students to be in our film, we found that that number dropped to less than 10%.

That was really meaningful to me, because it means, it doesn't mean that students don't care about it very much here, but they're not being taught that.

And so we saw this gap in what needs to happen in the public education system, and the private education system here, where American students need to become more away of the impact that our lifestyle has on other parts of the world.

- I found that data talks so much.

You can say this lake is sick, this lake is terrible, this lake is polluted, everyone ignores you, but when you say look at this chart, I can show you that because this lake got this amount of pollution, the down water actually got this amount of pollution, and this is the relation to the malaria cases in the area.

When you have that kind of data it really makes a difference, and it makes people listen to you, which is why I really got excited by this, because now I'm actually collecting that kind of data that I can use in that way.

I think that's something that really helps me.

- Attention.

Report centers should begin interview period two.

- Thanks for being here.

- Thank you.

- We see that there's this growing youth movement around environmental issues, and it's very interesting to find that there's a corollary within the STEM world, with students who have that same kind of energy, but they're putting that energy into making change using science, and using science for the public good.

If we are able to channel that, and make that have also greater economic value within our culture, we could really see a greater change.

- Todd, we recently saw the launch of American astronauts in an America rocket, going to the International Space Station.

I wonder if you feel there will be a renewal of excitement from younger people around this kind of science.

It happened in very difficult times here on Earth, but there was still this sense of awe.

I wonder whether that may have been your intention, it's something you want the film to instill, or just reflecting on it, whether you think it will happen.

- With Apollo 11, when that event happened, it was a great, unifying thing for the country.

Unfortunately this is my personal opinion, I think these events get politicized.

We saw that happen again this launch.

But from just a wide angle, 20 years from now, nobody's going to remember that.

What they're going to remember is that humans did an amazing thing, and that hundreds of thousands of very smart people from all over the world came together and worked for over a decade to put that Crew Dragon up into orbit, and they docked with the International Space Station.

But I think things like what happened with a launch like that, with the Crew Dragon, with the Demo-2 mission, they're important, they really are, but it also highlights how we need these things.

We need to come together, and if that can serve as a beacon of hope, then I hope it does, but we also, obviously we have to cure some of the things that are going wrong here in our society, in order for those people to get together and do great things.

- Thanks Todd.

Laura, when thinking about the mark that your film might leave, what do you wish for it?

- I hope that the film will encourage young people to see themselves as part of the change, and be able to recognize that even though they've been handed a really horrible situation, environmentally, that actually there's things that they can do to change the world that they're living in.

We really wanted to make sure that we showed the process of science, whether that's coming up with a hypothesis, and testing it, experiencing failure on your way to find a solution, and also the important of collaboration.

And whether or not a young person decides to become a scientist or not, those are all things that we can all learn from, that any student can learn from.

And I think for older folks who are watching the film, I hope that we see the importance of what we need to do to support this next generation, and making the change that they need.

And figure out what we can do to support that activity, and giving them all the tools that they need to come up with solutions to ensure their own survival, as we move forward on this spinning Earth.

I hope that that's the takeaway that people get from watching the film, is that we just need to jump into that process with everything we've got, and be very committed to making change.

- Laura, Todd, your films are inspirational and so are you.

Thank you so much for joining us to talk about scientific frontiers.

It's been a real pleasure learning about the commitment, passion and artistry of the film makers behind this year's 10 Peabody winning documentaries.

(gentle music)