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close up of a nutria's face featuring their orange teeth
Test Your Knowledge
October, 27, 2024

Spooky Halloween Visual Quiz: Name the Independent Lens Film These Eerie Moments Are From

Craig Phillips in Test Your Knowledge

In honor of Halloween—and, hey, who doesn't love being creeped out all year round for that matter?—take this eerie visual quiz. Each of the freeze frames in the quiz captures a moment in time from Independent Lens documentaries. Not all…
Headshot of Producer/Director Alison O'Daniel, a woman with light skin tone and chest-length brown hair. She wears clear-framed, round glasses and a bright orange shirt against a blue background.
Behind the Films
May, 20, 2024

“To Film with Your Ears”: Reinventing Cinematic Language with The Tuba Thieves

Independent Lens in Behind the Films

By Rachel Kolb Alison O’Daniel is a visual artist and filmmaker who works with sound, moving images, sculpture, and large-scale installations. She is the director of The Tuba Thieves, an experimental film that considers how listening can become a form…
A German astronaut aboard a space station looks at the camera while holding CIMON, a robotic companion with a digital smiley face on its monitor.
Beyond the Films
May, 6, 2024

How Science Fiction Confronts the Real Isolation of Space

Independent Lens in Beyond the Films

By Anthony Ha [Note: Some movie spoilers within.] If decades of science fiction have taught me one thing about being an astronaut, it’s that you have to watch out for existential terror and loneliness. Movies like Sunshine and Interstellar are…
German astronaut Alex Gerst looks out of the window of a space station.
Behind the Films
April, 29, 2024

What Extreme Outer Space Isolation Can Teach Humans

Craig Phillips in Behind the Films

Filmmaker Ido Mizrahy was fascinated by space travel isolation from a young age, inspired and awed by science fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and the original Solaris. And he eventually turned that fascination into the documentary Space:…
Filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes, a Mexican-American man with medium-light skin tone and glasses sits next to a man with medium skin tone and dark features at a table in an auditorium, recreating a courtroom scene.
Behind the Films
September, 18, 2023

From Crimmigration Court Interpreter to Lifelong Friends

Craig Phillips in Behind the Films

Mexican American filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes was and still is a court interpreter in rural California. It was in that capacity that he met then 19-year-old Mexican migrant Sansón Noé Andrade, who was sentenced to two life sentences without parole.  Reyes…
Yuji Okumoto as Shu Kai Kim, Robert Downey Jr. and James Woods standing in front of prison cell bars, in True Believer
Beyond the Films
May, 25, 2023

From True Believer to The Help, How the White Gaze Has Shown Hollywood’s Shortsightedness

Independent Lens in Beyond the Films

An Essay by Dana Verde [Sources and further reading listed at the end] They say hindsight is 20/20 and, historically, stories about real BIPOC characters in both mainstream film and television have had an obstructed, blurred, or blinded view—depending on…
Sam Harkness, age 11, screams as a freight train passes by, Color Super-8mm, 1998
Beyond the Films
May, 4, 2023

Home Movies and Heartbreak: Brothers Bond Over Decades of Filmmaking

Independent Lens in Beyond the Films

By Brian Darr Sam Now is filled with the unexpected twists and turns of a family undergoing great upheaval, filmed over the course of a quarter-century by one of its members. Inspired by National Film Board of Canada filmmakers like…
Screengrab from the film "Full Metal Jacket" shows a military leader screaming at a solider played by Vincent D'Onofrio.
Beyond the Films
October, 10, 2022

Wild & Disturbing: 10 Hazing Scenes in Movies and TV

Independent Lens in Beyond the Films

By Ade D. Adeniji The documentary Hazing begs the question: How far will people go just to fit in?  Our need to haze and be hazed has been explored in broader American popular culture for decades, with rituals most commonly…
scene from Griffith's Birth of a Nation wherein the Klan surround a "mulatto man" (played by a white actor in blackface), in the film Birth of a Movement
November, 16, 2021

Birth of a Movement

Independent Lens

A co-presentation with WNET/Thirteen. In 1915, Boston-based African American newspaper editor and activist William M. Trotter waged a battle against D.W. Griffith’s technically groundbreaking but notoriously Ku Klux Klan-friendly The Birth of a Nation, unleashing a fight that still rages…
From the Tacos of Texas docuseries, musicians from Brownsville Texas are seen in rear view mirror
Lists
September, 17, 2021

Road Trippin’, Part II: These Documentaries Will Show You All 50 States

Craig Phillips in Lists

[related-link link="https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/road-trippin-part-1-documentaries-for-every-state/" link_title="Read Part I: Road Trippin' here >>"] [pictured at left, in the side mirror: a scene from Tacos of Texas (Brownsville)] We continue our epic journey across America through documentary film: Montana Sweetgrass: Unsentimental but beautiful film about…
Side mirror with image from Real Dirt on Farmer John in the mirror
Lists
September, 17, 2021

Road Trippin’ Part I: These Documentaries Will Show You All 50 States

Craig Phillips in Lists

Rev up your virtual station wagon and pack your bags for a road trip across America through documentary film. No documentary or double feature will capture an entire state's essence, and not all these films will be featured by the…
Overhead shot of the Statue of Liberty with a fireworks show lighting the sky in the background.
Contests
February, 3, 2021

Enter to Win “A Day in the Life of America” T-Shirt

Independent Lens in Contests

Join us for a good old-fashioned giveaway. Enter by February 9 at 8:59pm PT for a chance to win a limited edition A Day in the Life of America T-shirt! [custom_html] Watch Jared Leto's A Day in the Life of…